From Victor Davis Hanson:
Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today.
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers. All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus.
Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous.
Indeed, it is ludicrous. Hanson goes on to explain in detail why Hanks’ view is entirely wrong. But why would someone like Hanks – who has done really good work for our veterans – get it so wrong?
Mostly its because hardly anyone knows about the war with Japan. Outside of scholars and the vanishing veterans of that war (my father was one of the younger Pacific War vets – and he died last year at 82), there just isn’t much public knowledge about this war. This is sad on a lot of levels, not least of which is that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines defeated enemies who would have crushed anyone else (the rule of thumb is that once a unit suffers about 30% casualties, it’s done as a fighting unit until replenished – the 29th Marines on Okinawa suffered 81% casualties…and won).
The war had MacArthur’s brilliant campaign against the Japanese culminating in the liberation of the Philippines. The largest sea battles in history which including stunning, against-all-odds victories at Midway and Leyte Gulf. Campaigns which surged across thousands of miles of ocean and land. And most Americans have heard almost none of it – perhaps a bit about Pearl Harbor and then the bad, mean Americans drop atomic bombs on Japan. And someone like Hanks opines that we fought because we hated their race.
It is stupid. But it is also frustrating. Its like America’s glories have been shoved down the Memory Hole – our past is gutted so that fools can pretend the world is a certain way, when its actually entirely different from that.
One of our tasks over the next few decades will be to instruct the rising generation in the truth about their nation. We must eventually have a time when the glories of our ancestors are known, and honored – when we know the truth, not the fashionable theories of modern sophisticates imposed on the past.
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