Former Axis anti-war movies

Fires on the Plain I guess was anti-war. The focus was entirely on Japanese suffering. I suppose that makes sense if you're trying to convince the Japanese that war is bad. It actually made the war look pretty good from the American side. The Japanese watched American troops drive by in trucks. Some were wasting ammunition shooting randomly. They marveled at how well-fed the Americans looked and how they must have had boundless supplies. A couple of Filipino villagers were dressed like middle class people and looked healthy and happy.

It might put some of the American anti-war movies into a new light. Millions died in Vietnam but these movies present American soldiers as the REAL victims. If you're pro-war, you obviously have a depraved indifference to the suffering of people in other countries, so if the purpose of the film was to make you turn anti-war, I guess it would make sense. But I doubt many Vietnam War fans went to see Coming Home.

There was that German movie, The Bridge, which was West Germany's first supposedly anti-war movie. It was made in 1959. It took the "former" Nazis fourteen years to decide that World War Two might have been a bad thing. It even made basic training look pretty good. Everyone was pleasant, the Nazis wanted to keep the new recruits out of danger and gave them a nice easy job, guarding a bridge. In a way it was more like Red Dawn than anything else, where the untrained teenagers defeat experienced soldiers. The only thing anti-war about it was that some of the teenage Nazis blubbed during the battle because it wasn't as fun as they thought it would be.