Excerpt from the March 1971 Phyllis Schlafly Report
Have you been to the movies lately? You should have. The past year has given us two of the most excellent films ever produced — and they are educational “musts” for all the young people you know because they provide history lessons not taught in schools or colleges.
Tora! Tora! Tora!
The movie Tora! Tora! Tora! has had poor reviews, perhaps because it doesn’t have any sex in it. But it is a great film and a piece of authentic history which every American should see — especially those who cannot remember back to December 7, 1941.
In Tora! Tora! Tora! you relive the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in all its exciting detail. You are in the cockpits with the Japanese pilots, you are on the ground with the Americans trying to duck machine-gun fire, you are on the ships in the harbor as the bombs are falling. Far more important, you are shown the events leading up to that day of infamy.
When Tora! Tora! Tora! was released, Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century Fox, ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times which stated the importance of this movie. This ad said:
“Why Tora! Tora! Tora!? Tora! Tora! Tora! is an American-Japanese historical film officially approved by the American Department of Defense as well as the Japanese Department of Defense. It is an authentic film. The basic reason for producing the film, which is the second most expensive film in history, was to arouse the American public to the necessity for preparedness in this acute missile age where a sneak attack could occur at any moment. You cannot arouse the public by showing films where Americans always win and where we are invincible. You can only remind the public by revealing to them how we once thought we were invincible but suffered a sneak attack in which practically half our fleet was lost. Because of the lack of mental and physical preparation, it was more than two years before we avenged Pearl Harbor.
“This is the lesson of Tora! Tora! Tora! and the reason for its production. This is not merely a movie but an accurate and dramatic slice of history that should never have occurred but did occur, and the purpose of producing this film is to remind the public of the tragedy that happened to us and to ensure that it will never happen again.”The movie lives up to this advance billing. Here are the other important lessons it teaches.
- The Americans had broken the Japanese codes and had invented a marvelous machine which operated faster than the Japanese could decode their own messages. These decoded messages gave sure knowledge that an attack was imminent. The Army and Navy officers who received the messages off the decoding machine knew that the Japanese attack was coming and were frantic in their efforts to get someone in authority in our Government to act on that information.
- Our Army and Navy commanders at Pearl Harbor were NOT permitted to receive the information which came off the decoding machines, nor were our commanders in the field (such as MacArthur in the Philippines), nor was our Air Force. This vital information was kept in the tight little hands of President Franklin Roosevelt, General George Marshall, Admiral Harold Stark, and a handful of top persons in the Roosevelt Administration such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson who wrote in his diaries this description of the deliberate policy of the Roosevelt Administration: “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japs] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
- The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could so easily have been prevented in any one of several different ways. The attack wholly depended on the element of complete surprise. That surprise could have been removed if President Roosevelt or General Marshall or Admiral Stark had simply picked up the scrambler telephone after receiving the decoded messages, and alerted our Pearl Harbor commanders to the danger of an attack. The movie shows General Marshall taking his famous horseback ride on the morning of December 7. He sent a coded message by commercial telegram which arrived after the attack was over. The movie shows Admiral Stark reaching for his telephone — but pulling his hand away and deciding NOT to alert our commanders in Hawaii
The one defect in the movie is that it covers up for President Roosevelt, who surely must bear prime responsibility for the failure to prepare Pearl Harbor for attack. The movie does tell that the night before the attack, a young officer personally delivered the decoded messages to President Roosevelt. The movie does not tell that Roosevelt looked at the messages, said, “This means war,” but failed to transmit any warning to anyone.
Our college and high school students are persistently indoctrinated into believing that (1) America is in no danger from military attack, and (2) there is no such thing as a conspiracy. Tora! Tora! Tora! rips both these fallacies to shreds with the implacable truth which cannot be disputed. It shows the most careful secret plotting of the Japanese warlords to carry out their attack which cost 3,000 American lives and was our greatest single military disaster. It shows the delight of the Japanese pilots as they achieved complete surprise in their attack on the defenseless and unsuspecting Pearl of the Pacific.
One cannot come away from Tora! Tora! Tora! without realizing that (1) power-hungry men can engage in a clever and deadly conspiracy to destroy America, and (2) our Government leaders — through incompetence, or worse — can be derelict in their duty to warn and prepare for such a disaster.
Every American should see Tora! Tora! Tora! — in order to strengthen our resolve to demand the weapons and the alert systems so that such a sneak attack may never happen again. In this nuclear missile age, instead of the 3,000 killed at Pearl Harbor, Defense Department estimates are that 149,000,000 Americans will be killed in a no-warning attack.
Patton
Patton is both great entertainment and great history, and has been nominated for ten Academy awards. After the way Hollywood sabotaged the Allen Drury novel, Advise and Consent, we might have expected Hollywood to ruin Patton. Hollywood didn’t. It comes through loud and clear that General Patton knew that the Russian Communists were our real enemy, just as evil or worse than Hitler, that if we didn’t stop them in their tracks in the 1940s when we had a priceless opportunity to do so, we would eventually have to face them as a hostile enemy. Patton broke through the German lines shortly after the Normandy landing and would have quickly ended the war and saved Eastern Europe from Communist invasion if his gasoline had not been diverted to General Montgomery. Subsequently, Patton was within sight of Prague and would have saved Czechoslovakia from the Soviets, but for mysterious reasons he was ordered to retreat.
Patton fought in the era when President Roosevelt was calling Stalin “Uncle Joe” and Vice President Henry Wallace was telling us that the Soviet Union was a “peace-loving democracy.” Patton was never deceived by this false propaganda. His position, as graphically expressed in the movie, was, “I’m not going to drink with any SOB Communists.” Franklin Roosevelt, Averell Harriman, and Alger Hiss did drink with the Communists at the drunken brawl known to history as the Yalta Conference — and the results were tragic for the free world.
The other lesson that Patton teaches so clearly is how the General was repeatedly entrapped by the newspaper reporters. Vice President Agnew never made any indictment of the liberal press which is half as effective as the movie Patton. For example, the movie shows Patton speaking to an afternoon social gathering of English women, when he confined his remarks to some gallant words about the beauty of English women and the friendship the English and Americans should have for each other. He never mentioned the Russians. But the liberal press, out to “get” Patton because he was anti-Communist, wrote up the news under screaming headlines which said, “Patton Insults Our Soviet Allies.”
The movie portrays Patton as wholly justified in the famous slapping incident, as victimized and bullied by the liberal press, pounced on by ungrateful politicians, and humiliated by spineless military superiors. The liberal press is shown as cunning and unscrupulous in writing false and slanted news stories which limited the effectiveness of and finally broke our greatest military commander in the European theater of World War II.
