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How others will see it. You've seen this war propaganda film many times over, if you've seen enough Hollywood movies. The courageous soldier engages in battle, risks his life, saves his men, loses his life, carries on, and makes sarcastic remarks about Army rations and the absence of showgirls. Numerous faceless Japanese soldiers are taken out, but there's always more of them around the next tree.
How I felt about it. While our brave soldiers would never kill an innocent, or torture an enemy soldier, the Japanese are a different form of life. When not killing a U.S. soldier through treachery, they are disparaged as Japs, slopeheads, monkeys, and worse.
These sorts of films are enjoyed by many red-blooded Americans who find them affirming. The best war films should make you feel uncomfortable, however. Even when war is necessary (rarely the case) it is never something to be proud of. Its aim is the destruction of lives and property.
Objective, Burma! was released in 1945. That same year, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, in addition to devastating fire bombings of Tokyo and other major cities, killed millions of "enemy" women, children, and elderly. Hollywood wouldn't make a movie about this ("our mission today, men, is to roast women and children"), because no one would go to see it, or perhaps anything else from the studio. People don't want to know that their soldier heroes are also war criminals.
So, the movie is propaganda, and a relic of cultural history. The U.S. did make heavy sacrifices to win World War II, although their losses were light compared to the Russians, who lost twenty million people. And the Japanese did have to be stopped. They were indeed ruthless, even vicious, although their principal victims were the Chinese rather than Americans. A film can be propaganda without necessarily being wrong in tone. Liberal films about the plight of coal miners, for example, are inevitably propaganda, even though the themes ring true.
I was never trapped behind enemy lines in a hostile jungle without food or water, while bugs invaded my private spaces. Thus, I can't compare my comfortable life with the deprivations of those soldiers who had to kill, die, and suffer to stop those world powers that (possibly) would not have allowed me to live a comfortable life. And the soldiers did this for less than the minimum wage of 1945. To judge behavior, you must understand the environment that caused it. If the war was necessary, then so was the propaganda effort behind the war. If propaganda is required, then racism is a necessary evil. The Japanese must be hated to be stopped, and they must be stopped to restore peace. The logic is ugly but effective.
I am grateful to those American soldiers who fought, in effect, for my freedom. But this doesn't give Objective, Burma! a free pass. Its problems extend beyond the extension of an adversary into an evil subhuman species. The characters aren't interesting. The class clown (George Tobias) is an Army stereotype, while the other soldiers are interchangeable aside from Mr. Perfect (Errol Flynn) and the old goat newspaperman (Henry Hull).
The latter is added principally so that he can lose it, and condemn the Japanese as a race for the torture of American prisoners for information (none of the them talked, by the way). Certainly, no American has ever tortured an enemy soldier, and there's no need to consider the Trail of Tears, or count the tens of thousands of Japanese civilians that died slowly from nuclear fallout from the two atom bombs dropped by the U.S. in 1945. But I digress.
One facet not explored: how important was Burma? The critical front was against Germany. The secondary fight against Japan was waged by air, by the Navy, and by the Marines taking island after island. Was the Burmese campaign essential, after all? Perhaps that's what I would be wondering if I had been left stranded in the Burmese jungle.