Most people leaving the film Pearl Harbor with me last weekend were either damp-eyed at the outcome of the
two-buddies-in-love-with-one-girl romance, tittering at the all-American soupiness of the finale, or marvelling at the pretty pyrotechnics as thousands of American sailors were burned or blasted to death. The last thing on anyone's mind seemed to be the monstrous behaviour of the Japanese in the Pacific. Out of deference to its Japanese audience, the film played down any question
of guilt to the point of invisibility.

Instead of the familiar malevolently grinning faces in the cockpits of swooping planes, there were deftly placed excuses for the Japanese carrying out this most infamous
attack. Even as he launched his sneak assault without going through the formality of declaring war, the Japanese admiral was shown lamenting the need to resort to armed conflict. Historical inaccuracy is the least of it. This film is that nauseous thing, political correctness (mustn't be beastly to the modern-day Japanese) in the service of naked commercial greed.

But the Japanese forces did behave like beasts, and anyone with the stomach for a little reality about their record in the war should give Pearl Harbor a miss and watch a new series coming up on Channel 4, Hell in the Pacific. It doesn't come laced with redeeming love stories, it is laced with hate: cool, dignified, unforgiving detestation of the Japanese voiced by American, British,
Australian, Burmese, and Filipino survivors who saw their comrades or relatives tortured, skinned alive, bayoneted in the throat for a laugh, or, in the case of a group of captured Red Cross nurses, driven into the sea and shot in the back. All this is coolly and objectively portrayed, in the best broadcasting traditions, which of course doubles its force. There is no lack of horrifying pictures, but the words of the well-groomed old gentlemen reminiscing in neat living rooms in Sydney, Maine or Scotland and their occasional lapse into tears as they try to describe some petrifying piece of Japanese bestiality are infinitely more affecting than any amount of high-tech visual tricks. Sometimes there was a strange incredulity in their voices, as if they could still not really believe the atrocities they had personally experienced or seen.

And of course atrocities are contagious.  Faced with an enemy whose troops had been taught that they must die rather than fall into captivity, and that prisoners of war in their hands were dishonourable men who could be treated as non-humans, the allies too often abandoned the inconvenience of taking prisoners.

There were American troops who thought nothing of finishing off wounded men before picking gold teeth from their corpses, and western public broadcasts encouraged civilized nations to exult in Japanese deaths   in terms of pure revenge ("Remember Nanking, Pearl Island, Manila!") The Japanese, who treated those in their power worse than animals, had become animals in    their turn.

There is no room here for our slimy old friend, moral equivalence, the tendency that seeks to persuade us that, Coventry or Dresden, communism or capitalism, in the    end we were just as bad as them. The excesses of allied troops and officers were not a spontaneous out-burst of racial hatred, though race was undeniably a factor, they showed a deadening of human feeling in response to the far greater savageries directed at them.

The Japanese were seen as an evil race because that was how they behaved. When the choice came between risking massive sacrifices of American infantry by the invasion of a fanatically resisting Japan, whose "honour" did not allow for surrender, and the first use of nuclear weapons, the moral aspect seemed less of a problem to    the Americans than it seems to us, and any judgment that does not take account of the circumstances and emotions of the time is mere retrospective sanctimoniousness, of which Hell in the Pacific is mercifully short.

The appearance of this documentary is part of a welcome trend that runs counter to the combination of schmaltz and high-tech visual acrobatics that is in danger of passing for history. We have had an excellent BBC2    series on the Gulag, while the film Thirteen Days, about the Cuban missile crisis, was remarkably faithful to fact. The folk who decide these things have evidently under-stood that, along with the sugary blockbusters, there is a market for the truth about war which, God knows, is not lacking in drama, or in visual and emotional appeal.

The readiness of some Japanese officers to admit their country's war crimes, and to explain how they were committed in the name of a perverted code of "honour", was a mild relief. But I wouldn't bet on Hell in the    Pacific becoming a hit in Japan. On the other hand, I predict that Pearl Harbor will be a huge box office success in the Japanese market, which Hollywood counts on for a third of its takings, because of the spectacle of Japanese military supremacy, as well as the ravishing stars and their triangular romance. "A human-interest story", film folk call it. The Japanese market for the story of their countrymen's inhumanity one must assume to be somewhat smaller. Already I can hear its makers mouthing satisfaction that Pearl Harbor should have done so much to pour balm on the conflicts of the past, in which guilt was not confined to one party and in which both sides suffered.

The idea that peace can be promoted by soft-pedalling a reign of savagery sustained by an entire national culture  from the politicians and military who gave the orders    to the individuals who so enthusiastically carried them out - is profoundly mistaken. Pearl Harbor promotes ignorance and illusion, for which Hell in the Pacific is the perfect antidote. To understand is to forgive, they say, but costume history leaves a minimal residue of knowledge, and if we do not understand the full horror of what happened we are in no position even to think    about forgiving. To encourage forgiveness towards a country whose leaders still jib at expressing unreserved regret is to ask us to turn a blind eye to some of the most disgusting atrocities of the 20th century.

Associated Newspapers Ltd., 05 June 2001
 
 

"Hell in the Pacific" is a documentary produced by Carlton Television.  Two of the four parts of "Hell in the Pacific" will be aired in the United States, on the Discovery Channel.  The Battling Bastards of Bataan urges you to call, or write, the Discovery Channel to learn when it will be aired in your area.  Also, insist that they show all four parts of the documentary in the US, as it will be aired in England.     

This is a documentary courageous enough to tell you the truth.  We salute the people from Carlton Television.