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A
SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION EMERGES IN TO END ALL WARS
The early comment in To End All Wars
by a Scottish soldier characterizing World War II as the second
"war to end all wars" somehow tells us that we are
to view a film that will make us think. Based on the book
The Miracle on the River Kwai (1962) by Ernest Gordon,
the film is part-biopic and part-docudrama, with some fabricated
details to tell the story more dramatically. Yet, one can
hardly imagine a more dramatic plot. The story is about members
of the 69th Scottish Regiment, the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders,
who served in the Pacific theater but were captured by the
Japanese with the fall of Singapore in early 1942 and placed
in the Chungkai camp in Thailand; some 61,000 POWs were interned
at various camps in Thailand during the war. Lt. Jim Reardon
(played by Kiefer Sutherland), an American attached to the
69th, is also a POW. Although there is a lot of brutality
and harsh treatment, even scenes of torture of the prisoners,
the plot principally deals with the clash of cultures between
the British and the Japanese, more specifically between Christian
values and the Bushido code. In the first part of the film,
Japanese inflict punishment on prisoners who violate the Bushido
code before they know what that is, so we see the Scottish
overreacting to their mistreatment and then being disciplined.
For example, when the Scottish regimental commander, Lt. Col.
Stuart McLean (played by James Cosmo), is summoned to the
office of the Japanese POW commandant, he erupts with such
intemperate anger about Geneva Convention violations that
he is summarily executed for failure to show respect. The
principal officer in charge of camp discipline, Ito (played
by Sakae Kimura), uses a stick, a shovel, and a pistol as
means to enforce the requirement that everyone must show respect
to the Japanese, especially the Emperor, though later he is
excluded from a session with the "comfort women,"
local women forced to service the Japanese sexually. From
a Japanese point of view, the very existence of POWs is a
violation of the Bushido code, as any captured Japanese soldier
would be expected to commit suicide. Nevertheless, the camps
exist, so a purpose has to be found. Accordingly, a decision
is made at a higher level to have the prisoners build a railroad
through the Burmese jungle so that Japanese troops will have
a supply route for attacking India. Work commences on October
28, 1942, and is completed on October 16, 1943, six months
ahead of the time originally allotted for construction. Why,
one might ask, are underfed, demoralized POWs so helpful to
the Japanese? The answer is a spiritual transformation among
the prisoners, similar to the story in The Bridge
on the River Kwai (1957), but far more profound.
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Captain Gordon (played by Ciarán McMenamin) decides
to launch a Jungle University and "church without walls,"
using books that were among the personal effects of the POWs,
including the Bible. Gordon realizes that the early angry
British response to savage treatment is not working. Instead,
the prisoners should utilize Christian principles to order
their conduct. The result is to show respect to one another
as well as forgiveness toward their captors. Major Ian Campbell
(played by Robert Carlyle), the ranking officer when McLean
dies, dissents from Gordon's approach, but he eventually finds
redemption. The film's tagline is "In a jungle war of
survival, they learned sacrifice. In a prison of brutal confinement,
they found true freedom." The heart of the film is the
transformation while construction of the Railway of Death
of more than 400 kilometers is underway and afterward, when
there might otherwise have been no use for the POWs. The high
point comes in 1945, when Gordon insists on showing compassion
toward wounded Japanese soldiers whom Ito at first refuses
to accept into the camp after an Allied bombing raid; indeed,
tears run down Ito's cheeks as he sees the moral leadership
of the British in wanting to care for humans, regardless of
race, when they are in distress. Most notable in the transformation
is the friendship between Gordon and Takashi Nagase (played
by Yugo Saso), a young Cambridge-educated Japanese soldier
who serves as translator and admits that he is in the POW
camp because he was considered physically unfit. He admits
as well that all the Japanese in the camp are, in effect,
being punished for misdeeds, thus perhaps explaining that
their brutality serves to sublimate their sense of unworthiness.
When the film ends, a title indicates that Gordon and Takashi
met fifty-five years after the end of the war, and a video
of their meeting flashes across the screen as they visit the
war memorial and graves for those who died in the POW camp.
Both ended up in religious roles after the war, Gordon as
Chaplain at Princeton, Takashi as a Shinto priest. Another
closing video shows the regiment's survivors march in a recent
parade. Cinema patrons at a Hollywood screening stayed glued
to their seats as credits rolled; the emotional power of the
film was so intense that the credits and the music were needed
for filmviewers to decelerate emotionally so that they could
leave the theater without breaking out into tears. Directed
by David L. Cunningham, To End All Wars
has been nominated by the Political Film Society for three
awards--as an exposé on how the Burma Railroad was
built and how prisoners survived transformed, as an eloquent
plea to have human rights respected in wartime, and as a peace
editorial to remember World War II as the war to end all world
wars. MH
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