Disney’s false history

Dec. 7, 1941 was so long ago that most folks who will be seeing the new motion picture “Pearl Harbor” were not even born then. Many of them will learn about the facts of the Japanese attack from the Disney version, and that’s a shame. The “facts” are mostly incorrect, misleading and outright lies. For example:

. World War II started with Japan’s sneak attack. Disney doesn’t tell us that Germany had already invaded Poland, Belgium and France and that German submarines were already sinking American ships supplying the beleaguered British.

. A peace-loving Japan was forced to go to war because American sanctions had cut off its oil supply. Don’t look to the movie to explain that the sanctions were a response to Japan’s brutal invasion of China and expansion into the rest of East Asia.

. The heroic American soldiers and pilots and nurses were so busy with their steamy love affairs that they barely gave a thought to the inconvenience when “all this happened” – that is, the Japanese attack.

. A wooden delivery by a stand-in of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “a date which will live in infamy” address made the speech sound like dull boilerplate instead of the rousing call to action to save the world from a rampaging imperialist German-Japanese partnership.

. Finally, when Lt. Col. James Doolittle takes off to lead a retaliatory air raid on Tokyo, the film eliminates his stirring statement that if his plane goes down he will take a lot of Japanese with him.

The trouble is partly that Disney wanted the picture to be a box office success in Japan and didn’t want to offend the Japanese by telling the truth about the American embargo and quoting the Doolittle remark. More seriously, the picture is primarily entertainment. The director has said it is not a history lesson. And the producer has quoted the famous studio boss Samuel Goldwyn as saying, “If I wanted to send a message I’d use Western Union.” (That was back in the days when Western Union sent messages instead of mostly money orders.)

Too bad that Disney jumped the gun and scheduled the film for Memorial Day weekend instead of in December on the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. If school were in session, history teachers could have picked the movie to pieces and used it as a peg to teach the real facts about the start of World War II.