Word: iwo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Earlier this year, Spike Lee picked a fight with Clint Eastwood over the lack of black soldiers in Eastwood's Iwo Jima films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Clint opined that "a guy like that should shut his face"; Spike replied, "The man is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either." No doubt that Lee was voicing a social grievance, but he was also tub-thumping some early publicity for his own WW II film - the one with the John Wayne clip and the typically smoldering Spike Lee quip...
...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...
...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...
...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...