That sentiment, which came at the tacked-on ending of this strange movie, didn't turn out to be true.
This film is notable mainly for the presence of Tom Neal, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1965.
Neal plays Steve Ross, a soldier who had lived in Tokyo and spoke Japanese like a native. He agrees to undergo plastic surgery to look Japanese and goes undercover in a concentration camp to rescue Lewis Jardine, a scientist with valuable secrets about the atomic bomb. It's a doubly dangerous mission because Ross' old roommate, Hideko Okanura (Richard Loo) heads the camp.
The real story here is the love story between Ross and the camp nurse, Abby Drake (Barbara Hale), whom Ross had presumed dead after they left one another back in the states. She doesn't recognize him but feels sympathetic towards him.
This is a real Hollywood/World War II artifact. The set is unbelievably cheap and obvious, the concentration camp is more like a low-budget Holiday Inn, and the Japanese are Chinese and American.
There has been criticism levied at the way the Japanese are portrayed, and I like the analogy one of the reviewers here made -- would you like to see a film with a sympathetic Al Qaeda character? It's important to watch a film and see it in the context of the times. Grant you, it's a contrived plot and not particularly good.
Barbara Hale would go on to fame as Della Street in the Perry Mason series. She's still alive and the mother of actor William Katt. Tom Neal's private life was far more impressive than his professional one. He's okay here. These films were always made very quickly, so it's hard to criticize the finer points of his performance.
The atom bomb was dropped before the release of the film, so the studio went back and threw on another ending.
Lots of films in those days did not portray the grittiness and atrocity of the war. Most of these propaganda movies were made for general audiences and soft-pedaled some of the more horrible aspects. It was a different time and the world was different. Today we can go to the movies or watch the news and see all the atrocity, violence, and horror we want. Whoopee.
