[BretLudwig]

Diversity On Iwo Jima
[James Fulford]

"Spike Lee is complaining that Clint Eastwood, in his Iwo Jima movie
Flags of Our Fathers, doesnt feature enough €œNegro soldiers.€�
(Lees phrase)

€œMany veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset
at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not
exist. Simple as that. I have a different version.€�[Iwo Jima films
slammed for overlooking blacks The Associated Press May 23, 2008 ]

I would have guessed that this was because there werent any, or hardly
any, because the brunt of the Iwo Jima effort came from the Naval Service,
both Navy and Marines, neither of which had much in the way of integration
at the time.

Former intelligence officer €œGeorge Smiley€� at the In From The Cold
Blog has the actual figures, which say that there were 700
African-Americans on Iwo, total, out of 80,000 troops, and most of them
were in support roles, loading and unloading ammunition, for example. (Not
that thats any picnic under combat conditions.)They only engaged in
actual combat when the Japanese succeeded in penetrating to a rear area.

As for €œNegro soldiers,€� the term €œsoldiers€� is not used to refer
to Marines, and the Army didnt take over Iwo Jima until after it was
declared secure, when the 147th Infantry Regiment relieved the Marines.

The main ethnic groups engaged in frontline combat on Iwo Jima were white
Americans and Japanese, (the least multicultural people on Earth) with
some valued contributions from American Indians€“including Ira Hayes, a
Pima Indian, who was one of the men who raised the flag on Mount Suribach,
and the Navajo Code Talkers.

If you are a recent graduate of a public school, your teachers may have
given you the impression that the fighting was done by a coalition of the
Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers, black Navy stewards, and the
442nd Regimental Combat Team, while white troops sat at home guarding
Manzanar, but this is not the case. Partly because America was 90 percent
white, and partly because of segregation, World War II was fought almost
entirely by white troops.

Eastwood knows this, of course,and told the Guardian

As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small
detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company,
€œbut they didnt raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers,
the famous flag-raising picture, and they didnt do that. If I go ahead
and put an African-American actor in there, peopled go, €˜This guys
lost his mind. I mean, its not accurate.€�

Of course, theres been a lot of mind-losing going on in Hollywood over
the past twenty years. Jonah Goldberg, who is reliable on the subject of
bad movies, described the phenomenon of the

Anachronistic Black Man. This is the African-American character who is
wildly out of place in the time the film depicts. Slaves who talk like
Harvard grads and black cowboys whose ethnicity seems trivial can be found
in a host of films. Perhaps the best recent example was in the film U-571,
in which a black galley cook on a (segregated) World War II submarine not
only bellows orders to the white crewmen and hobnobs with the officers,
but is also an expert submariner himself. He even knows how to drive a
German U-boat without instruction.

See Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves, with Morgan Freeman as €œAzeem€�, or
Wild Wild West, with Will Smith in the role played by Robert Conrad in
the Sixties television show. Spike Lee could claim that theres now a
tradition of inserting black characters in historical contexts where they
dont fit, but he cant claim that hes serving historical
truth."

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/...y-on-iwo-jima/

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