troops take Mount Suribachi – the famous raising of the flag is seen, strikingly, from a great distance – while other soldiers commit ritual suicide with grenades rather than retreat. Ito (Shido Nakamura), who leads a mutiny after U.S. Kuribayashi’s unconventional strategy is derided, especially by the fanatical Lt. He orders his men to excavate miles of tunnels connecting the island’s caves instead of relying on machine-gun bunkers on the beaches to stop the enemy.
and knows better than to believe Japanese military propaganda that American soldiers were weak-willed. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (the terrific Ken Watanabe of “The Last Samurai”) who spent time as a military attaché in the U.S. This Alamo-like last stand is masterminded by the newly arrived Lt. Ammunition and medicine was in short supply, dysentery was raging, morale was low, and the Japanese troops were subsisting on a diet of worms, weed soup and foul water.īut the battle rages on for a remarkable six weeks, at a cost of 20,000 Japanese troops only 136 surrendered to the Allies. The Japanese were badly outnumbered, their fleet was destroyed and fighter planes had been redeployed to defend the Mainland. The American commanders figured it would take five days to capture Iwo Jima, a barren volcanic island, and make it a beachhead for their final attack on Japan. LETTERS From Iwo Jima,” Clint Eastwood’s spare, poetic and remarkable companion piece to “Flags of Our Fathers,” is an engrossing and revealing look at that same World War II battle from the Japanese side.
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