Here's John Wayne the racist propagandist for you:

http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jwasia/reviews/seebeesRW.html

Desensitization and Dehumanization in The Fighting Seabees

by

Rob Wilsey

In the wartime film The Fighting SeaBees (1944) the final scene of
combat on the island the SeaBees are securing ends with the fiery self
sacrifice of John Wayne. Wayne is shot by a sniper while driving a
bulldozer into an oil tank, the oil is intended to fill a small valley
with flame, forcing the Japanese out. The plan works, and as the oil
burns and the Japanese flee the valley they are machine gunned by the
waiting SeaBees who fire from ambush. The Japanese offer no resistance
as they flee and are gunned down, this is not a fire fight -- it is a
slaughter. (see film clip)

"We're not fighting men now, we're fighting animals." Lt. Yarrow says
this to Wayne after he returns with Wayne's men at the beginning of the
movie, and the treatment of the Japanese throughout the film reinforces
this. During combat on the island a seabee picks up a Japanese soldier
in a crane barrel and shoots him as he dangles helplessly. One Seabee
asks him why he shot the solider and the reply comes "I was afraid the
fall might kill him." Why was this kind of treatment acceptable to
American audiences in 1944?

Pulitzer Prize winner Ira Wolfert, an American journalist of
Guadalcanal, filed this report; "tanks are used to flush the Japanese
out of the grass, and when they are flushed, they are shot down like
running quail."[1] By 1944 the American people had seen the Japanese
fight relentlessly on the islands of the Pacific, they had also been
inculcated by skilled propaganda playing on existing racial prejudices
and fueled by the exterminationist rhetoric of the war. "The Nation,"
today a stridently liberal publication ran a story in 1945 describing a
Japanese soldiers death on Iwo Jima as "a rat's death, defiant in a
corner until all else fails."[2] A popular poster in storefronts on the
West Coast was 'this restaurant poisons both rats and Japs."[3]

The dehumanization of the Japanese fighting man, and the Japanese
people as a whole, was so effective that a portrayal of combat such as
the one in The Fighting SeaBees, a film not solely concerned with
combat, would have been run of the mill. John Wayne sacrifices himself
to start the fire that drives the Japanese into the waiting guns of the
Americans, like running quail. This was a portrayal of war without
mercy. What makes it more striking is that the film did not depend
solely upon combat scenes for its popularity. It had John Wayne and
Susan Hayward, popularizing a branch of the Navy that had been
mythologized in the wartime press; the combat scenes were de riguer,
but not the sole purpose of the film. By portraying such, to our eyes,
brutal combat almost as an afterthought is a demonstration of how
normal this combat would have seemed to an audience in 1944. Like how
sex scenes in the films of today hardly raise eyebrows, images of
Japanese being driven by flames to slaughter would have seemed not only
normal, but also desireable and satisfying, to American audiences in
1944.

Face it Joe. The Japs beat China, the Japs had the best bolt action
rifles, planes, tanks, torpedos, fighting spirit. The took over the
entire Pacific. All this from one small island country. Never did Japs
surrender in the numbers that the American and British did. Japs fought
to the death. It took the power of two atom bombs to finally stop them.
You will never attain the Bushido spirit because you are weak. The Japs
are superior.

Banzai!