Prigionieri di Satana

Lieutenants Dean E. Hallmark, Robert J. Meder, Chase Nielsen, William G. Farrow, Robert L. Hite, and George Barr; and Corporals Harold A. Spatz and Jacob DeShazer were captured in April 1942. On August 15, 1942, the United States was told by the Swiss Consulate General in Shanghai; that Doolittle Raiders were prisoners of the Japanese at Police Headquarters in Shanghai, China. This movie is based on the real trial August 28, 1942 by the Imperial Japanese Military. The Americans were never told the charges. The Japanese announced the eight men were sentenced to death. The Japanese said a few of them had received commutation of their sentences by the Emperor Hirohito to life imprisonment. October 14, 1942, Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz were told they were to die and allowed to write a final letter to their family. At 5:30 pm on October 15, 1942, the three were executed by a firing squad at Shanghai's Public Cemetery Number 1. The bodies were cremated. The ashes were never sent to the families in the United States.

The other five captured airmen remained in solitary confinement, tortured and starved, these men contracted dysentery and beriberi, their health deteriorating. In 1943, they were moved from Shanghai to Nanking. December 1, 1943, Meder died of the mistreatment. The remaining four men, Nielsen, Hite, Barr and DeShazer survived until they were freed by American troops in August 1945 after the surrender of the Japan.

In February 1946, a War Crimes trial was held in Shanghai. Four Imperial Japanese officers were tried for the mistreatment and executions of the Doolittle Raiders. All were found guilty. Three of them were sentenced to five years at hard labor, the fourth to a nine-year sentence. The light sentences were met with outrage in the United States, that the Japanese soldiers were let off with murder. Hirohito in 1975, during a visit to the United States, refused to answer questions about the executed Doolittle Flyers.

This movie was popular with the American public in 1944.

To borrow a couple of adjectives from its own theatrical trailer, this is one of the most "original" and "gripping" movies about WWII, made by Hollywood's 'Chronicler Of War' par excellence Milestone. It deals with a group of eight American airmen who bail out over China after having bombed Japan; betrayed to the enemy, they find themselves on trial for murder – to which reporters with Communist sympathies from various countries are "invited" to perform jury duty! – since the Japs claim that their targets had been hospitals (which they're ready to corroborate by means of newsreel footage depicting the carnage, even if jury members readily admit amongst themselves to be fake!) rather than munitions factories as the Yanks assert. However, despite the physical and mental torture to which the latter are subjected, all doesn't go smoothly for their accusers: first an opportunistic Chinese Governor, who's a prime witness, is assassinated (by his own upstanding son) in the courtroom and, then, when the Japanese Navy and Military (represented by the wily yet over-confident Richard Loo) themselves lock horns over the means of transportation used by the Americans (which would imply that one or the other was slack in its defense duties!). Being a wartime production, the tone is heavily jingoistic: peppered with homespun recollections of the prisoners' lives back home and displays of camaraderie every time one of them returns from his 'cross-examination', to say nothing of defiance in the face of their impending execution. Milestone's handling never strikes a false note throughout and has selected a sturdy cast besides: led by decent captain Dana Andrews (though the actor preferred to conceal his own operatic background for fear of being typecast, we do get to hear him sing here albeit in unison with his fellow soldiers), Italo-American Richard Conte, youngster Farley Granger and tough-but-compassionate Sam Levene. That said, the film is equally notable for its moody lighting (by top Fox cinematographer Arthur Miller) and inspired art direction (with proceedings mostly confined to the courtroom, prison cell and interrogation room).

The Purple Heart is one of those movies that stays with you. Yes, there is some sentimental and patriotic themese and stereotypes in it. But, considering that it was made during wartime when, while the war may have no longer been in doubt by 1944, it was far from over. The performances by Dana Andrews, and others as the basically doomed American flyers was very good. They managed to not only evoke sympathy and sorrow for their predicament, but strength, bravery and loyalty. If anybody thinks the Japanese portrayals were over the top or unrealistic, then go read the Rape of Nanking and about the Bataan Death March and the real building of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Putting it bluntly, I know a number of veterans who wished we dropped at least six more atomic bombs on the Japanese to pay them back for their cruelties and war crimes. For its time, the movie was pretty accurate and dead on historically. The performances are riveting.All in all it is a pretty good portrayal of how the Japanese actually were. As for the knucklehead who said that we started the war, go read a book meathead. The Japanese actually attacked us before Pearl Harbor near Nanking and the U.S.S. Panay incident where they bombed our gunboat that was a neutral country. This led to the boycotting of materials to the Japanese mainland.

The story of the fate of a captured American bomber crew from the first air raid on Tokyo. Dana Andrews final speech (taken from a Portugese reporter's news story) to the court is the most moving ever made in a motion picture. Purple Heart produced such a strong emotional response that it was banned in many American cities as detrimental to the war effort.

It's hard to see this as much more than an effective piece of flag-waving propaganda. A handfull of American fliers are brought to trial in Shanghai after being captured and having participated in Doolittle's raid on Japan. The outcome of the trial is predetermined. The whole thing is revealed as a farce from the beginning, like the trial of the sherrif and his deputies in Mississippi back in the 1960s. Potentially objective journalists are excluded from the courtroom. The judge is clearly bent on hanging the defendants. Their court-appointed counsel does nothing. One by one the defendants are tortured, yet they never confess their guilt in bombing hospitals and spraying children's playgrounds with lead, which in fact they didn't do anyway in real life. When the surrender of the American and Philippino forces at Corregidor is announced, the Japanese military observers jump up screaming and do a demonic dance featuring flashing swords, all improvised. For about one minute the courtroom resembles a lunatic asylum before the discovery of phenothiazines.

Towards the end they are offered a normal prisoner of war status by Richard Loo, the army officer who has been arguing that they flew off a carrier, if only they will admit that they did, in fact, fly off a carrier. That way he won't be proved wrong. Led by the thin-lipped, grimly determined Captain Dana Andrews they agree to plop their aviator's wings into a vase in a secret ballot. If even one pair of wings is broken they will accept Loo's offer. Is there finally a pair of broken wings in the vase? Well -- consider the context.

Here's a movie from the mid-war years. The Doolittle raid was real. It had no significance except as a morale booster, but it DID boos morale. All of the airplanes were lost, because the fleet carrying the B-25s was seen by a Japanese trawler (sunk as soon as possible) which was presumed to have radioed its contact back to its homeland. If, in fact, the trawler HAD alerted Japan, there was no evidence of it. When the bombers crossed the coast, one Japanese observer reported seeing "curious brown planes." So the target was caught unaware.

It was an act of war. Nevertheless, some of the captured crews were executed, a violation of the Geneva Accords, which the Japanese had never signed anyway. (Read Ted Lawson's long out-of-print book, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," for a good first-hand account.)

It has its moments of humor. Their defense council announces that he is a graduate of Princeton. Sam Levene introduces himself as "Greenbaum, City College of New York." This is a kind of joke because at the time, and afterward, CCNY was thought to be a hotbed of radicalism. There are also moments of sentimentality but they're mawkish and by the numbers.

There is an attempt to reflect the contemporary world situation. The Russians are ambivalent. The Germans are enthusiastic trial attendees. The Argentinians are puzzled and wax wroth. (The Argentine government was later to prove more accomodating.) The Swiss Red Cross does its best but is helpless. The Chinese are divided, some of them duplicitous, although I doubt that any young man could bring himself in China to murder his own father.

It's a serious movie. Not, like "Gung Ho," a simple exercise in demonstrating our superiority over the enemy. "Gung Ho" is funny. "The Purple Heart" isn't. It will probably make some viewers uncomfortable because it may prompt them to think of things like rigged trials, manufactured evidence, the assumption of guilt, and judicial corruption. On the other hand, of course, we must also take into account the timbre of the times. It's all to easy for us, sitting back in our sybaritic recliners and sipping Starbuck's, to look back at what tribulations an entire generation was going through in 1943 and judging them on our own terms. Of course, nothing is easier, and more wrong. Let's cut the movie makers a bit of slack. These were contentious times.