Dangerous Missions Assault on Iwo Jima (1999–2002) Online

Jackie Kennedy was often described as wearing a "pillbox hat." And one of the several participants that provide personal stories about the Iwo Jim landings was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for taking out a row of pillboxes with his flame thrower. I only mention this because the word "pillbox" seems to have faded from our common lexicon. Iwo Jima -- World War Two in general -- appears to be disappearing into the black hole of history. Polls show an increasing number of high school students don't know much about our history. A substantial number believe that the USA and Germany fought the Russians in World War II. They didn't know which "side" Japan fought on.

That loss of our shared historical data base is one of the reasons I'm glad that documentaries like this are produced. (Now, if the kids would only watch it!) A good deal of combat footage was shot on Iwo Jima, much of it familiar. But a surprising amount of what we see in this program is fresh. And the same is true of the narratives provided by the talking heads -- all participants, no experts or historians.

I suppose one of the good things about the fading of the war from our collective memory is that we are able to treat the enemy's strengths and our own weaknesses with greater candor. No pep talks, no chauvinism, nobody leaps from the Higgins boat spoiling for a fight. The commander of the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima realized that the post was a death sentence and constructed what amounted to an extensive ant farm underneath the ground and inside Mount Suribachi.

The Marines won medals but the best-known of them, Basilone, was killed almost at random by a mortar shell. Doctors, corpsmen, war correspondents, photographers, all were killed almost at random by shelling. And in the first five days, more than five hundred Marines were evacuated because of what was at that time called "battle fatigue." I wish the interviewers had asked the survivors what they thought of their comrades who suffered from battle fatigue. (We know what General Patton thought of it; it was a scam to get out from under.) Fortunately, we're a bit more enlightened now, at least about that issue.

An observation: Just from skimming through some of these documentaries that feature Marines and their reminiscences of the war, I'm beginning to get the impression that eighty percent of them were from the South or from Appalachia. The other twenty percent were from Brooklyn.