Debating Iwo Jima

By Alex Altman

Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted the Stars and Stripes atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are sparring over the accuracy of Eastwood's two films about the clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling the role of African Americans in the battle, Eastwood has whitewashed history.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said last month at the Cannes Film Festival. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist."

Eastwood bristled at the charge. "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn't raise the flag," he countered in an interview with the British newspaper the Guardian. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.'" Eastwood also suggested Lee should "shut his face." That didn't go down so well. Eastwood "is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either," Lee fumed. "I'm not making this up. I know history."

History, as it turns out, is on both their sides. Lee is correct that African Americans played a key role in World War II, in which more than 1 million black servicemen helped topple the Axis powers. He is correct too in pointing out that African-American forces made significant contributions to the fight for Iwo Jima. An estimated 700 to 900 African Americans, trained in segregated boot camps, participated in the landmark battle, which claimed the lives of about 6,800 servicemen, nearly all Marines.

Racial prejudice shunted blacks into supply roles on Iwo Jima, but that didn't mean they were safe. Under enemy fire, they braved perilous beach landings, unloaded and shuttled ammunition to the front lines and weathered Japanese onslaughts on their positions. "Shells, mortar and hand grenades don't know the difference of color," says Thomas McPhatter, an African-American Marine who hauled ammo during the battle. "Everybody out there was trying to cover their butts to survive."

But Eastwood's portrayal of the battle is also essentially accurate. Flags of Our Fathers zeroes in on the soldiers who hoisted the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi. None of the six servicemen seen in Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph--the iconic image depicts the second flag-raising attempt; the first wasn't visible to other U.S. troops on Iwo Jima--were black. (Eastwood's other film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is told largely from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.) Eastwood is also correct that black soldiers represented only a small fraction of the total force deployed on the island.

That may be true, but it is not enough to placate Yvonne Latty, the author of a book about African-American veterans. Given the hazards of their mission and the virulent racism they endured--McPhatter says he had to execute his mission without giving orders to white troops, even if they were needed--Latty argues that black soldiers warrant more than fleeting inclusion in the film. Christopher Paul Moore, author of a book about black soldiers in World War II, praises Eastwood's rendering of the battle but laments the limited role it accords African Americans. "Without black labor," he says, "we would've seen a much different ending to the war." Adds Latty: "The way America learns history, unfortunately, is through movies." Eastwood poignantly memorialized a heroic chapter in American warfare. But using a wider-angle lens might have brought into sharper focus a group often elbowed to history's fringes.