60 years on- Re-enactment of Iwo Jima

[Mulboyne]

[Big Booger]

Largest Iwo Jima re-enactment set for Texas

Odd...

[AssKissinger]

[cstaylor]

What a bunch of losers. If they want to fight a war, sign up for Baghdad. This is war porn at its worst.

[AssKissinger]

Why isn't it a valid way to study the history?

[cstaylor]

Why isn't it a valid way to study the history?

It's about as lame as those weirdos who dress-up as anime characters. It's a different kind of fetish, but a fetish all the same.

[L S]

ya, and none of us have a fetish about Japan or hanging out on a board after midnight to argue about minutia .......c'mon!

[cstaylor]

I've got to do something while I'm waiting for the compiler to finish...

[Charles]

Sometimes I wonder if these people who are so anxious to reenact the war have ever been anywhere near a war. If they had, they would probably not want anything to do with it.
My uncle was in the invasion of Iwo Jima, and he would never ever speak of any of his war experiences. He went to his grave without discussing it with anyone. He lived a short life, dying of the effects of alcoholism. Some things are too difficult to live with.

[cstaylor]

Sometimes I wonder if these people who are so anxious to reenact the war have ever been anywhere near a war.

Exactly. Learning history through study is completely different than playing dress-up and carrying mock rifles through mock combat.

[Charles]

Learning history through study is completely different than playing dress-up and carrying mock rifles through mock combat.

I think everyone should "study" war, as it's the only way to avoid wars. I am a pacifist but I'm also very interested in military history. I met one woman from England who was an antiwar activist, she said she used to be a member of the CND, but she actually got kicked out of the group because she "knew too much" about warlike things and they thought she was a spy. I never could understand that kind of thinking. You have to learn the ways of your enemy in order to defeat them, and in this case, the enemy is war itself.
I grew up playing board games like Panzer Blitz and Squad Leader. I'll never quite forget the notes for one modern nuclear-era game. It said that it was fairly obvious that a board game cannot come close to simulating real combat, nobody would play a game that was realistic enough. It suggested that if you wanted to take the game to a higher level of realism, you should soak the board in lighter fluid and drop a match on it.

[dimwit]

Are they going to re-enact the part where they almost used chemical weapons on the Japanese because there were no civilians on Iwo Jima?

Towards the end of the war against Japan, there are reports of plans to use CW in the attack on Iwo Jima and on Okinawa; after the war the US Chemical Warfare Service suggested that the use of gas would have reduced US casualties very considerably. It is not clear whether these plans were in fact put to the president; in any case, gas was not used.

from http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/research/cbw-continuity.html

[Charles]

Are they going to re-enact the part where they almost used chemical weapons on the Japanese because there were no civilians on Iwo Jima?

Tinfoil Hat Alert!

[cstaylor]

Are they going to re-enact the part where they almost used chemical weapons on the Japanese because there were no civilians on Iwo Jima?

This would be unlike the Japanese military, who used chemical weapons specifically on civilians?

[Captain Japan]

Vet seeks recognition for Iwo flag-raising
Japan Times

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) The old man gazes at the photo of the flag flying over Iwo Jima and sees himself 60 years younger, a marine in uniform with a radio on his back and his head tilted up at the Stars and Stripes.

It's not the photo known the world over of six men struggling to raise Old Glory. No, this is a black-and-white of the smaller American flag first raised by marines atop Mount Suribachi earlier the same day. But because of the iconic later picture, this event is largely lost to history.

And as another anniversary of the flag-raising arrives Wednesday, 79-year-old Raymond Jacobs says he has been similarly overlooked all this time....the rest...

[AssKissinger]

Of course the actual soldiers wouldn't want to do a reenactment but for people interested in and fascinated with what happened I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It is big history. My only beef with this one is even with a flame throwing tank and so on I don't think they can get very realistic about it. Something like 800 ships stormed this little island. The Americans were blasting the JPN with flame throwers and so on. Obviously no battle reenactments can go relive the violence but civil war battles can be reenacted so realistically that I think it's a lot more justifiable. They can go to the actual battle fields and the the troop positioning is a lot easier to copy. For the civil war I do think it helps people understand what happened but with a battle like Iwo Jima it does seem a lot more like a bunch of jerk offs playing war games. I wonder if they'll ever try to reenact Hiroshima...

[dimwit]

There was an excellent program on Discovery Japan a couple of nights ago about Iwo Jima. I can't seem to find any reference to it in their programming schedule however.

[cstaylor]

For the civil war I do think it helps people understand what happened but with a battle like Iwo Jima it does seem a lot more like a bunch of jerk offs playing war games.

Civil War cosplay is the same thing, except the event is far enough removed that it's not as tacky.

I wonder if they'll ever try to reenact Hiroshima...

Well, they certainly obsess over it enough in Japan. Millions of Japanese young men perished overseas during that war...

[Marvin Feltcher]

79-year-old Raymond Jacobs says he has been similarly overlooked all this time....

Perhaps he was lucky...from memory, many of those involved in the iconic photo died in unfortunate circumstances. I might be wrong and can't remember any precise details, but I'm pretty sure that was the case and that one of the unfortunates was a Native American.

[AssKissinger]

79-year-old Raymond Jacobs says he has been similarly overlooked all this time....

Perhaps he was lucky...from memory, many of those involved in the iconic photo died in unfortunate circumstances. I might be wrong and can't remember any precise details, but I'm pretty sure that was the case and that one of the unfortunates was a Native American.

Of course, Johnny Cash wrote a song about that

The Ballad Of Ira Hayes by Johnny Cash

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer any more
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the Marine that went to war

Gather around me, people (note 1)
There's a story I would tell
About a brave young Indian
You should remember well

From the land of the Pima Indians
A proud and noble band (note 2)
Who farmed the Phoenix Valley
In Arizona land

Down the ditches for a thousand years
The waters grew Ira's people's crops
Till the white man stole their water rights
And the sparkling water stopped

Now, Ira's folks were hungry
And their land grew crops of weeds
When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man's greed

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer any more
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the Marine that went to war

There they battled up Iwo Jima hill (note 1)
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived
To walk back down again

And when the fight was over (note 1)
And Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer any more
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the Marine that went to war

Ira Hayes returned a hero (note 3)
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored
Everybody shook his hand

But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no home, no chance
At home, nobody cared what Ira'd done
And when did the Indians dance?

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer any more
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the Marine that went to war

Then Ira started drinking hard
Jail was often his home
They let him raise the flag and lower it
Like you'd throw a dog a bone

He died drunk, early one morning
Alone in the land he'd fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer any more
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the Marine that went to war

http://www.artnatam.com/utaylor/n-ut008.html

[Captain Japan]

FEATURE-Iwo Jima: Japan's forgotten step on path to defeat
Reuters

TOKYO, March 3 (Reuters) - An iconic photo ensures that Iwo Jima lives on in America's collective memory, but for many Japanese the bloody island battle is a little remembered step on the path to defeat.

American survivors have often recounted tales of the 36-day epic in early 1945 in which nearly 7,000 U.S. Marines and about 21,000 Japanese defenders died.

For Kiyoshi Endo, one of just 1,083 Japanese defenders to escape death, the memories of 60 years ago are hard to express.

"War is something you can't understand unless you experience it," Endo, who was a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy and now heads the Association of Iwo Jima, told Reuters....the rest...