Seventy-five years ago last week, the world was torn apart by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack brought the U.S. into WWII fighting on two fronts — in Europe against Nazi Germany and its allies, and in the Pacific against Japan. Ironically, a current popular movie is a bookend to Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific. “Hacksaw Ridge” is a Mel Gibson directed epic about the real-life fighting on Okinawa, which was the last major battle in the Pacific and in WWII.
The focus of Gibson’s film revolves around one man, Desmond Doss, an army medic who is a conscientious objector to killing, but who believes strongly in the rightness of the U.S. Doss refuses to handle a gun during training and was harassed by both fellow soldiers and his superior officers. Eventually, however, Doss was granted permission to be an army medic and was shipped to the Pacific.
Much of the movie focuses on Doss in his small hometown in Virginia before the war and on the complex family relationships that surrounded him. And the film goes into a lot of detail about how Doss was treated during basic training before being sent off to war.
The crux of the film, however, revolves around what Doss did on Okinawa. After his unit was devastated in battle, Doss single-handedly evacuated some 75 wounded soldiers from the battlefield (off an escarpment that came to be known as Hacksaw Ridge) while at the same time putting his own life in danger. For that, Doss was the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
The movie is violent, as are many other of Gibson’s epics. Some of the violent scenes are necessary to show just how bad the fighting was on Okinawa with its pillbox caves from which Japanese soldiers fought over every inch of ground.
In contrast to the violence, the movie also has a heavy religious theme that is no less subtle than the violence. Doss grew up in a religious family and it was his religious beliefs that kept him from carrying a gun into battle. And in the rescue of those wounded soldiers, Doss invokes a religious mantra as he calls on God to give him strength to save “just one more” life.
Doss is eventually wounded and the scene of him being lifted off Hacksaw Ridge invokes a strong religious iconography, just in case viewers didn’t get the message Gibson is trying to tell in the movie.
Beyond the great moviemaking, I have another, more personal interest in this film.
My father, Herman Buffington, was in combat on Okinawa, too. His unit, the 96th Infantry Division, fought at Hacksaw Ridge in the days before Doss’ unit, the 77th Infantry Division, came to relieve them. There’s a scene in the movie that depicts the ragged survivors of the 96th leaving the battle as the 77th arrives to take their place in the front lines.
By the time Doss had done his lifesaving actions, the 96th Division was back on the front lines just south of Hacksaw Ridge. Dad didn’t witness Doss’ heroics, but later did meet Doss at an Army event in Rome, Ga.
After the war, Doss relocated to a farm in Northwest Georgia. He was disabled from his wounds and reportedly lived a very simple life there. He later moved to Alabama where he died in 2006.
It somehow seems appropriate that this movie overlaps both the memory of the Pearl Harbor attack and the Christmas season. It is a weaving of both gruesome violence and religious faith.
Hacksaw Ridge is a movie well worth your time.
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