LAST FRIDAY The Great Raid opened in theaters. The notices that greeted the film weren’t mixed; they were almost uniformly negative, as exhibited by the collection of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. But these reviews are utterly misguided.
The movie begins with an abbreviated account of the Bataan Death March. It then tells three intertwined stories: the imprisonment of the American soldiers who survived the march and were incarcerated at the Japanese POW hellhole of Cabanatuan, the tale of the Filipino underground, and the rescue mission of the film’s title. It is a good movie with cinematic flaws. For instance, The Great Raid would have been improved by dropping one of the plot strands in order to focus the story and by having a script doctor scrub the dialogue. Nevertheless, the film tells an important story well. This story, as Henry Kissinger might say, has the additional advantage of being true. And moreover, this story is patriotic, inspirational, moving, and remarkably free of political correctness. The Great Raid is a movie out of joint with the times; perhaps this accounts for the critics’ blinkered reviews.
Take, for example, Stephen Holden’s review in the New York Times. Holden writes:
On the other hand, Holden dismisses one of the film’s great strengths in a single sentence:
One might think that this alone would be enough to warrant commendation, but apparently not. Another sentence in Holden’s review sticks out:
Contrary to Holden’s implication, however, the brutalization of American soldiers by the Japanese has never been faithfully depicted in a big-budget Hollywood film. In fact this faithful depiction of the Japanese treatment of American POWs in the Pacific shows that the “uncomfortable stereotype” of Hollywood has failed to do justice to the depths of Japanese military depravity during World War II. That The Great Raid earns Holden’s criticism on this ground itself suggests that it is a notable and worthy film.
ACCORDING TO HISTORIAN RONALD SPECTOR, 40 percent of the 20,000-odd American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines captured by the Japanese at the surrender of the Philippines died in captivity. (Spector adds: “Nine years later a survey found that of the men who had fought in the Bataan campaign, only one out of seven was still alive in 1954.”) American soldiers held by the Japanese met with simply incomprehensible cruelty and mistreatment. David Gelernter has succinctly described “the bestiality of the Japanese”:
In The Other Nuremberg, Arnold Brackman describes the atrocities committed by the Japanese in the Philippines, including the case of Lucas Doctolero, who was “crucified, nails driven through hands, feet and skull”; “the case of a blind woman who was dragged from her home November 17, 1943, stripped naked, and hanged”; “five Filipinos thrown into a latrine and buried alive.” In the Japanese-occupied Philippines alone, at least 131,028 civilians and Allied prisoners of war were murdered. The Japanese committed crimes against Allied POWs and Asians that would be hard for a respectable newspaper to describe even today.
Holden’s discomfort with Japanese stereotypes avoids any mention of the underlying reality, perhaps in deference to multicultural dogma. In the acknowledgments to Ghost Soldiers, one of the two books on which The Great Raid is based, Hampton Sides writes:
By the time the survivors of Bataan were rescued in January 1945, more than 2,500 Americans had died at Cabanatuan.
THE GREAT RAID juxtaposes the story of these survivors with the heroism of their rescuers–the charismatic Lt. Col. Henry Mucci, the impossibly young and handsome Capt. Robert Prince, and the band of 120 Rangers they led on a mission behind enemy lines. The impetus for the mission was the certain knowledge that the Japanese would butcher their prisoners before the advancing Americans could liberate them.
The film accurately portrays the difficulties of the mission and the heroics of the Rangers. Prince, to whom Mucci delegated the design of the assault operation, concealed a crippling case of jungle rot that made mere walking painful. The rescue could have been a suicide mission. Yet it succeeded in liberating every one of the American POWs while losing only two members of the rescue team. Audiences inspired by the film to learn more about the men and the mission will not be disappointed by the reality on which it is based.
In the case of The Great Raid, meticulous reenactment merits congratulations and thanks.
Scott Johnson is a contributing writer to THE DAILY STANDARD and a contributor to the blog Power Line.
