Letters from Iwo Jima is the 2006 companion film to Flags of Our Fathers. Also directed by Clint Eastwood, this film depicts the battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese.
The following weapons were used in the movie Letters from Iwo Jima:
General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) had an original Colt M1911 pistol offered by an American Officer when he was in the United States. By the end of the movie, he killed himself with this weapon. Then, a U.S. Marine found the pistol and took it. On a side note, the 1911 model in this movie had an ivory grip (possibly to differentiate it from the other 1911A1's with wooden grips that the Marines used).
The Type 98 Antiaircraft Gun is used by a Japanese soldier to defend the island from an Air Raid.
United States Marine Corps Weapons
The following guns were used by the United States Marine Corps:
M1 Garand
Many Marines were equipped with this weapons (some of them were used with M1 bayonets). When Shimizu (Ryo Kase) surrender, a marine, using his M1 Garand rifle, executed him and an another Japanese POW. In the final scene, when Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) was surrounded by Marines, most of them used M1 Garand rifles.
Near the end of the movie, when Lieutenant Fujita was going to cut General Kuribayashi's (Ken Watanabe) head (Kuribayashi asked him to), he was suddenly shot. Then, far away, we see a Marine sniper operating a bolt. We cannot see the rifle, but it is pretty sure that it is a M1903A1 Springfield since it was the mainly used bolt action sniper rifle by the Marines (and other US forces) during World War II.
A source from ISS (which supplied the weapons for the film) has confirmed that the rifle was indeed an M1903A1 Springfield fitted with a 7.8x (8x) Unertl scope, and that the Marine sniper using the weapon was one of the film's technical advisors, Master Sergeant Tom Minder.
Error creating thumbnail: File missingA pair of M1903A1 Springfield sniper rifles (.30-06) with 7.8x Unertl scopes. The guns pictured here were the actual rifles used in Letters from Iwo Jima (one is primary, the other is a back-up), and the rifle was fired by Master Sergeant Tom Minder, one of the technical advisors, in the film.Error creating thumbnail: File missingA distant shot of the Marine sniper operating a bolt on his Springfield. The rifle was fired by Master Sergeant Tom Minder, one of the technical advisers on the film.Error creating thumbnail: File missingA close-up of the 7.8x scopes on the rifles from the film.Error creating thumbnail: File missingA close-up of the butts of the rifles used in the film.
