Battle of the Pacific

This is a Japanese movie.

June 15, 1944, American troops attack Saipan.

The progression of the attack.

Title

The movie starts at the point where the remaining Japanese survivors have fled to a mountain in the middle of the island.

It's soon obvious that the effects of the movie will be done quite well. The movie does an excellent job of covering the events from the Japanese viewpoint, although the American viewpoint is also covered well. They are getting the hell pounded out of them by American planes and ships, both.

The Japanese forces don't know their Navy has suffered a bad defeat and there won't be any reinforcements. They are abandoned by their own government.

Many people are fleeing the battle area which is interfering with the movement of American troops.

The American Captain that arrives speaks Japanese and his superior officer asks him for help. He doesn't understand the concept of bushido and why the Japanese soldiers will kill themselves rather than surrender.

Something I've never seen any other movie both with and that is the failure of the Japanese Army and Navy to cooperate. In this case the Army badly needs food for an assault they plan. The Navy says they won't join the assault and will wait for their ships to return.

Their assault begins.

They stage a banzai charge. 4000 Japanese soldiers die although they do kill 2000 American soldiers. Later we see that the Japanese captain cares about the civilians and splits the group into three camps, and then has to abandon one camp because Americans have found it. He sends the civilians into the other two remaining camps.

The Japanese set a lot of booby-traps and this soldier is caught by one. The commander of the base is chewed out by his superiors who think Saipan has been free of enemy activity for four months. He orders his soldiers to hunt down all the Japanese soldiers and neutralize them in one week.

The American soldiers appear to be rather sloppy in the movie, though. The leader of the Japanese resistance is able to sneak into the American camp. There is no excuse for that at all. Just one guard with known hostile Japanese around?

Oba not only is able to get into the camp but he has time to meet with some Japanese prisoners and even see the baby he saved.

More Japanese including one guy who has already killed 31 Americans get into the camp. Is nobody bothering to heavily patrol such a known hot spot? Not a single hostile should have been able to get into the camp. The guy ends up starting a firefight and this totally blows any ideas the Captain had for a peaceful solution to the problem.

The leader makes a decision to send the civilians to he Americans. He has little food and almost no medicine. The soldiers will stay and continue the fight.

This is part of the ending of the war speech from the Emperor.

There's a major problem with the logic here. The guy says that the Americans have brainwashed the Japanese civilians to believe the war is over, yet at the same time he accepts the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as being real. Why believe one thing and not another? If the war isn't really over, then the bombings probably never took place either. He also says the Emperor has said the war was over, but why couldn't that be part of some American plot also?

The meeting between Oba and the Captain doesn't go well since one of the soldiers kills the Japanese guy that was helping the Americans. Oba says he will never surrender but, if he and the others are given the order to surrender by a Japanese higher in command, then he and his men would have to obey the order. That was they save face yet still give up fighting. In the end this is what is done except for one Japanese holdout.

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