Interesting to compare and contrast this Tay Garnett film to Ford's "They Were Expendable", made two years later. Both concern themselves with the American defeat in the Phillipines in WW2 and the attitude in both toward the enemy is viscerally hostile. There the comparison ends.
The big difference between the two is that Ford's film is mostly commenting on the horrors of war from the vantage point of expected victory while Garnett's work, shot while the outcome of the war was still in doubt, is a product of such horror with its main, driving element being a corrosive and bitter racism toward the Japanese, an emotion which produced both Nagasaki and Manzanar.
I leave it to you to decide which is the better movie.
PS...Ironically, this film could not be shown in the American South because it was deemed insufficiently racist (i.e. A black soldier speaks over a white soldier's grave)
The big difference between the two is that Ford's film is mostly commenting on the horrors of war from the vantage point of expected victory while Garnett's work, shot while the outcome of the war was still in doubt, is a product of such horror with its main, driving element being a corrosive and bitter racism toward the Japanese, an emotion which produced both Nagasaki and Manzanar.
I leave it to you to decide which is the better movie.
PS...Ironically, this film could not be shown in the American South because it was deemed insufficiently racist (i.e. A black soldier speaks over a white soldier's grave)