I e-mailed the following to Michael Getler, the ombudsman of the Public Broadcasting System:
Michael:
I cannot believe that PBS allowed to Niall Ferguson to broadcast the clear historical error in "A Tainted Victory" that aired here Wednesday night that suggested that the Japanese fought the way they did because Americans executed prisoners. That's not just a point-of-view issue. That's just plain incorrect.
Was there some brutality on the part of Americans in World War II? No doubt. However, the Japanese let it be known from the beginning how they would conduct the war, and when we started our offensives at Guadalcanal and Tarawa, it was clear they were going to fight to the last man. By the time the Marines got to Peleliu, they had worries from experience that wounded Japanese would clutch hand grenades and detonate them as Americans neared. They had to shoot wounded Japanese to make sure they were dead. I'm sure many of those cases were unjustified, but the brutal nature of the war was determined earlier by the Japanese, not the Americans.
To suggest that the Japanese on Saipan and Okinawa all killed themselves because of Marine brutality on Peleliu is totally wrong. Saipan happened before Peleliu for one. Second, my father was a Marine at Saipan and Okinawa, and he said his fellow Leathernecks were absolutely stupefied by what took place at the end of the Saipan battle and would have stopped it if they could.
I have no problem with a program on the brutality it took on our part to win the war, but to have such an obvious factual error to smear the Marines is very poor on the part of Niall Ferguson and should have been caught by PBS before the program aired. Again, no censoring of opinion, but factual errors like this should be below the standards of our Public Broadcasting System.
Thank you very much,
James R. Riffel
This program was so far below the standards of PBS it's not even funny. Agree with their points of view or not, their documentaries often break some new ground. The history presented by Ferguson, a professor of history at HARVARD, for goodness sakes, was so basic that I actually changed the channel for a while to see what else was on. It was only that I found nothing else on that I went back to it in time for the controversial point that I mentioned in my e-mail. Taking that one piece of film and mis-stating history to slam the Marines really makes the guy look bad.
