Tom Hanks is a brilliant actor, director, and a jackass

Note: I dashed this off in about 20 minutes in white hot anger after the last post got spiked as my weekend op-ed. This is the one that got published. I’ve expanded it slightly to include some more of that great old flick.

Damn I’m good.

Tom Hanks is causing a bit of a stir among veterans and historians with his assessment of America in World War II.

In an interview with MSNBC about his new miniseries, ‘The Pacific,’ Hanks told MSNBC World War II in the Pacific was a war of “racism and terror.”

Well yes it was – but he meant U.S. racism and terror.

Hanks said, “The Pacific’ now is coming out where it really represents a war that was of racism and terror and it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles on these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to– I’m sorry– kill them all.”

He went on at length in that vein, philosophizing about how long it’s taking us to get over racism and how history is repeating itself in our current actions, etc.

Historians, and I mean people who study, you know, what really happened, are aghast.

Those of us who loved ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ and ‘Band of Brothers,’ are disappointed. Hanks has gone and drunk the moral equivalence kool-aid.

A dose of reality here please. During the Pacific war the reason American forces had to “kill them all” in so many cases, was the Japanese would not surrender, they preferred to die.

At the Battle of Guadalcanal early in the war, some Marines attempted to rescue and deliver medical aid to a small band of wounded Japanese soldiers under a white flag. When the Marines approached, the Japanese cut them to pieces with swords. The Marines never underestimated Japanese soldiers again.

Near the end of the war at the Battle of Okinawa, hundreds of local civilians committed suicide, on orders from the Japanese military. Some killed their children rather than let them fall into American hands, because they were told the Americans would commit terrible atrocities.

Instead the Americans fed them.

Hanks will no doubt point to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What he won’t point out, and probably doesn’t know, is the Imperial Japanese Army killed more civilians in the ‘Rape of Nanking’ than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And they did it up close and personal with bullets, swords, rifle butts, and ways I can’t mention here.

But what I thought of when I read Hanks remarks, was another movie about the Pacific war I first saw when I was a kid, and again many years later as an adult.

‘Destination Tokyo’ was a war movie made during World War II, as entertainment and quite frankly as war propaganda.

It starred Cary Grant as a submarine captain on a mission to land a Japanese-speaking Navy meteorologist ashore in Japan to take weather observations for the upcoming Doolittle Tokyo Raid. It manages to be a first-rate action movie, a thinking man’s movie, and yes, propaganda.

As the sub is traveling by the Aleutian Islands they shoot down a Japanese plane. While they’re attempting to pull the pilot out of the freezing water, the pilot kills a sailor with a knife, and is killed in turn.

In the sub’s wardroom the men talk about their comrade and what they’re doing.

One sailor tells how his uncle in Greece taught philosophy, and how you have to be really good to teach it in the country where they invented it. But the Nazis killed him, “because they got no use for anybody that doesn’t think like them.”

Another tells about how his dad was no good, a bum and a lush, who died in bed screaming from the DTs. But in America even a bum gets a chance to die in bed.

The captain compares the lives of the two dead men, and how their friend’s dad gave him a pair of roller skates when he was a kid. The pilot’s dad gave him the knife in a samurai-era ceremony.

The Captain says, “That’s what we’re fighting this war for, more roller skates. We’re not doing this just for us, we’re doing this for the next generation of Japanese kids. There’s lots of Mikes dying right now. And a lot more Mikes will die. Until we wipe out a system that puts daggers in the hands of five-year-old children.”

When I saw this as an adult, I was astounded. What a genuinely noble and high-minded thing this was to say about the enemy – in a movie made during that terrible war.

Yes of course there were racist caricatures, I’ve seen them too. But there was also a lot of this kind of thing too.

Tom Hanks makes great movies, but he ought to see more of the great old movies.

Afterthought: This comes hard, Hanks has made great movies about Americans at war. Movies that showed a great appreciation of courage. What the hell happened to him?

Cowardice is what I think. Hollywood doesn’t like America, doesn’t like real heroes, and doesn’t like depictions of courage that show up the phony courage they like to pat themselves on the back for.

Hanks lives with these people. I think he caved in. Sucks to be him, because those movies he’s made show he knows better. I think he had to say these things to be accepted by the people around him – and my guess is that it’s going to eat him up inside.

UPDATE: Go over to PJTV and see Poliwood where Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwind take apart Hank’s comment.

And, they point out that Hanks once came out against Clinton a while back, got leaned on, and caved.

They’ve got the same basic analysis I do. Nice guy, no cojones.

And be sure and read Victor Davis Hanson’s point-by-point rebuttal of Hank’s remarks.