Just watched Flags of our Fathers, the good but not great first half of Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima saga. One thing jumped out at me that I have heard from many sources before, notably Studs Terkel’s The Good War (which I received for my Bar Mitzvah and actually read twenty years later). And it flies in the face of the Right Wing’s nonsense about how our country has become wussified and weak.

Americans were not as massively supportive of World War II as the neocons would have us believe. The Iwo Jima survivors were used to raise war bonds — because the country was about to go broke from the unwillingness of the American people to buy them. Americans were growing very tired of the war and the fierce fight the Japanese put up at Iwo was partly to break our resolve. It came close to succeeding. Had we invaded Japan proper, perhaps our will would have broken.

The film — and especially its Japanese-language counterpart — have been lauded as being “anti-war” or “anti-Iraq” or a commentary on veterans affairs (the Iraqi vets aren’t the first to be abandoned by our government). I didn’t see that. I’ll let you know what I think when I see Letters from Iwo Jima.