Suggestions for good war movies

[seabolt]

Other factors were also in play. It wasn't uncommon for Germans to commit suicide when faced with the prospect of becoming a Soviet POW. The Imperial propaganda had instilled similar fears in the Japanese soldiers. Torture and death supposedly awaited them in Allied hands.

Oh, most certainly. The Bushido guys were extremists; you have to be an extremist (ala the Roman Stoic fringe or the Zealots at Masada) to advocate suicide psy ops. Most Japanese were not, of course. So the militants resorted to all sorts of cheap tricks to persuade average, rational citizens to follow their game plan, propaganda being foremost among them.

Still, Bushido was at the core of the decision process, even for the Saipan mothers who dropped their babies off cliffs. The moms of Warsaw didn't do that when the Germans arrived; the moms of Berlin didn't do it when the Soviets arrived. Propaganda only gilded the extremist Bushido lily.

I don't know, and I still don't see it that way. If I am charging a soldier he is going to plug me, not capture me. If wounded you can always use the grenade to kill yourself and the enemy coming to capture/aid you. If you are so wounded you cannot use the grenade then you are probably mortally wounded anyway.

I don't think you're considering the dreadful condition that the Japanese soldiers were in at the time of their decisions portrayed in "Letters" and "Thin Red Line." Guadalcanal was the Japanese Stalingrad and Iwo was Götterdämmerung: privation and disease had transformed soldiers into ragged wretches. Charge? They could barely muster a stagger, and probably would pass out if they tried to go too far in one go. They couldn't know that they'd be conscious to pull a grenade pin. What they did know was that they were going to look pathetic if they tried to act like soldiers.

It was their foremost duty to *never* make Nippon look pathetic.

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