The Great Raid

In 2003, a friend of my wife's gave me a book for my birthday called Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides. The book chronicled a rescue mission that even I, a history nut and history teacher, had never heard of. In January of 1945, the American military had landed on the Phillippines and were in the process of taking them back from the Japanese. As the Americans moved inland, the Japanese began liquidating its Allied prisoners of war being held in the Phillippines. A good number of these POWs had been part of the Bataan Death March and had been in brutal captivity for three years. Ghost Soldiers begins with an account of a true incident where Japanese soldiers killed 139 American POWs from the camp at Palawan by shoving them into small air raid shelters, then burning them to death by trapping them in there then setting off barrels of gasoline. Any prisoner who managed to get out was machine gunned. Incredibly, 11 prisoners survived to spread the word of what happened. There was another POW camp at Cabanatuan, and it quickly became apparent to the Americans that the 500 POWs held there would have to be rescued or they would meet the same fate as the prisoners from Palawan. So a rescue mission was drawn up and executed by Rangers and Phillippine guerillas. Soon after I was given Ghost Soldiers, my wife and I went on a month-long vacation to Europe, and the book became one of my beach reads. I will be more candid than I should be here. The description of the rescue and the reaction of the prisoners and their sudden knowledge that they were going home made me cry as I read it. What a moving tale it was, and it was all true; it really happened!

Imagine my joy when I found out that a film was coming out about this rescue mission at Cabanatuan Prison Camp. This past Wednesday, I went to the theater after work and watched The Great Raid. The movie was everything I hoped it would be. What really struck me about it was that it was in the vein of all the rah rah patriotic World War II movies that came out during or right after the war itself. The good part was that at the same time, the film wasn't heavy handed and corny like those John Wayne movies of the 1940s with all the horrible overacting and unrealistic verbosity that took place in the heat of battle. The great thing about war movies nowadays is that they are so much more realistic and historically accurate than before, and fewer punches are pulled in the violence department. I hate watching the old b/w war movies where when a guy is shot, he squints his face, grabs his bloodless chest, and falls in grand and dramatic fashion. Compare that to Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers where a guy who gets shot jerks slightly then collapses like a rag doll. That is what really happens when someone is shot. The Great Raid enjoyed the same level of authenticity. What was also wonderful about this movie was that, while it wasn't pro-war, it was pro-American. It showed us as the good guys we truly were, and it showed how wantonly brutal and sadistic the Japanese really were. The brutality of the Japanese in the Pacific War is one of the truly overlooked crimes in history. Yes, there is plenty of knowledge about it, but it is not in the forefront of peoples minds like the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Try to think of a movie that focuses on the atrocities of the Japanese like Schindler's List chronicled the crimes of the Nazis. The Great Raid did a respectable effort, even though there were a lot of other stories going on in the movie. If you compare the mortality rates of Allied POWs in Japanese camps compared to Nazi camps, you will see quite a disparity. In Japanese camps, 27% of Allied POWs died. In Nazi camps, the death rate was only 4%. Geography did play a role, since the jungle, with its unique diseases and harsh environments, is more unforgiving a place than Europe, but the Japanese purposely withheld treatment, medicine, food, and supplies from sick prisoners that could have saved untold numbers of them. Much of this disparity has to do with the difference between attitudes of the Germans and the Japanese toward the concept of surrender. The Germans soldiers were just as likely to surrender as anyone else they were fighting. The Japanese, with their code of Bushido, looked at surrender as being worse than death, and they fought as such. When they took prisoners, you can imagine how they felt toward these men who had surrendered. The Japanese essentially had little motivation to treat prisoners humanely since the Japanese believed these prisoners should have fought to the death to begin with. The atrocities didn't stop with POWs. If you ever get the time, read about what the Japanese did to Chinese civilians at Nanking and other cities, or what the Japanese did to the Filipinos. It will make you literally nauseous.

I am not going to break down all the elements of The Great Raid. I have said enough already. My advice is to see the movie because it refreshingly paints our soldiers in a good light as they should be, and it unambiguously points out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys in the Pacific Theater of World War II. It made me proud to be an American.

Good Day to You, Sir