WWII Pacific Theater Films

[TexPx 2323]

I dunno, they say Honiara is the Paris of the South Pacific.  
Also-cool idea for a WWII movie because you mentioned fighting in caves...  Allies are clearing Paris, but the Nazis take to the famed underground catacombs of Paris to fight as guerillas.  The Nazis are successful at repelling the Allies.  Until the 6 million Frenchmen buried down there come to life as zombies and eat the Nazis.  It's a real thinkpiece.  
Watched 'Up Periscope' on y'all's recommendation.  pos rep

Actually Manilla was pretty fierce urban combat. The Luzon liberation was one of the largest bloodiest battles of the war. Yamashita actually sent most of his troops to Northern Luzon where they spent months rooting them out.

It did have some good Hollywood storylines.
McArthur returns and his opposing General, Yamashita was executed for war crimes in an historic case. It is also rumored he left a treasure in gold hidden in caves in Northern Luzon.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Guest Lobo]

Always mean to read up more on the island campaigns.  After my dad died (he knew more about the European Theater than anyone I've ever known and I've known some experts...he wanted to be stationed in Europe but the closest the Navy ever put him to Europe was Rabat, Morocco), I made it a point to finally get some information from my paternal grandfather about his service in the Pacific (U.S. Navy, 1941-1945) and about my wife's paternal grandfather (7th I.D., 1942-1946) who was in everything from the Aleutian Islands down to Okinawa and every shitshow in between.  I got pretty caught up from Saipan to Okinawa, but still am embarrassed at how little I know about the whole theater from the surface warfare to the island campaigns.  

But as my dad pointed out when we'd watch the occasional Pacific Theater documentary (I'm paraphrasing, he died 16 years ago this week)..."Amphibious landing, assault, casualties, assault, defense, counter-assault, casualties, build a runway.  And they did this son, over and over again, for 3 and a half years in some of the most beautiful places on Earth in the most miserable conditions you could ever imagine.  Over.  And Over.  Sure there was Naval artillery and aircraft bombing, but it was the most tedious warfare ever conceived to clear those islands.  Humans weren't built to fight like that.  Desert warfare, urban warfare, Afghan foothills to the Khyber Pass, but there's a reason nobody fought on islands like that in six decades .  3 and a half years just trying to establish air and port superiority, 3 and a half years just to have a chance at a properly supplied Mainland invasion.  One island after the other.  And once you've seen the footage on one campaign, you've seen footage on 'em all.  Only nobody has ever really seen any of it because nobody will believe what really happened out there.  Not even the people that were there."  /paraphrase....and god bless everyone who was there and the millions more who kept them there well equipped and well fed which was of a bitch of a task in and of itself  

 

[Chad Fuck 17743]

Always mean to read up more on the island campaigns.  After my dad died (he knew more about the European Theater than anyone I've ever known and I've known some experts...he wanted to be stationed in Europe but the closest the Navy ever put him to Europe was Rabat, Morocco), I made it a point to finally get some information from my paternal grandfather about his service in the Pacific (U.S. Navy, 1941-1945) and about my wife's paternal grandfather (7th I.D., 1942-1946) who was in everything from the Aleutian Islands down to Okinawa and every shitshow in between.  I got pretty caught up from Saipan to Okinawa, but still am embarrassed at how little I know about the whole theater from the surface warfare to the island campaigns.  
But as my dad pointed out when we'd watch the occasional Pacific Theater documentary (I'm paraphrasing, he died 16 years ago this week)..."Amphibious landing, assault, casualties, assault, defense, counter-assault, casualties, build a runway.  And they did this son, over and over again, for 3 and a half years in some of the most beautiful places on Earth in the most miserable conditions you could ever imagine.  Over.  And Over.  Sure there was Naval artillery and aircraft bombing, but it was the most tedious warfare ever conceived to clear those islands.  Humans weren't built to fight like that.  Desert warfare, urban warfare, Afghan foothills to the Khyber Pass, but there's a reason nobody fought on islands like that in six decades .  3 and a half years just trying to establish air and port superiority, 3 and a half years just to have a chance at a properly supplied Mainland invasion.  One island after the other.  And once you've seen the footage on one campaign, you've seen footage on 'em all.  Only nobody has ever really seen any of it because nobody will believe what really happened out there.  Not even the people that were there."  /paraphrase....and god bless everyone who was there and the millions more who kept them there well equipped and well fed which was of a bitch of a task in and of itself  
 

On top of that they were ever farther out on the logistical supply chain. And to think they did it with half of the world’s greatest power’s industrial might and STILL had massive surpluses. It reminds me of the scene in BoB “what were you thinking? We have trucks and you have wagons?!” Hitler thought his staff were idiots or mistake. At best, when they brought him the data on the US industrial output. I’ve not read a lot of the higher internal communications among the Japanese on the subject (discounting the likely apocryphal “sleeping giant” quote), but they knew their time was short just based on the existing fuel oil supplies at hand.

Bottom line, whichever side says “We will win with our fighting spirit!” is going to lose. The French made this mistake in WWI and they’d have lost had it not been for Britain and America. Logistics wins the war.

[BabaYaga 15305]

Back to Dan - re-listening to Supernova in the East.  JFC, it's amazing.  From how Bushido came to "be", to the rise of Imperial Japan, the impact of the Mongols, and how a very large majority of Japanese soldiers lived and breathed the adage that they would see 100 million of their countrymen perish before a "foreigner" set foot on motherland Japan.

Then cross into episode #59 - The Destroyer of Worlds, and listen to what Truman was dealing with at the end of the war, or how he was at one point, the most powerful man in the history of the world.  The same man who cried with FDR died because the role was "too much for him".

Dan is simply fantastic.  

[BabaYaga 15305]

On 2/15/2021 at 2:55 PM, Lobo said:

But as my dad pointed out when we'd watch the occasional Pacific Theater documentary (I'm paraphrasing, he died 16 years ago this week)..."Amphibious landing, assault, casualties, assault, defense, counter-assault, casualties, build a runway.  And they did this son, over and over again, for 3 and a half years in some of the most beautiful places on Earth in the most miserable conditions you could ever imagine.  Over.  And Over.  Sure there was Naval artillery and aircraft bombing, but it was the most tedious warfare ever conceived to clear those islands.  Humans weren't built to fight like that.  Desert warfare, urban warfare, Afghan foothills to the Khyber Pass, but there's a reason nobody fought on islands like that in six decades .  3 and a half years just trying to establish air and port superiority, 3 and a half years just to have a chance at a properly supplied Mainland invasion.  One island after the other.  And once you've seen the footage on one campaign, you've seen footage on 'em all.  Only nobody has ever really seen any of it because nobody will believe what really happened out there.  Not even the people that were there."  /paraphrase....and god bless everyone who was there and the millions more who kept them there well equipped and well fed which was of a bitch of a task in and of itself  

 

Sledge touches on this in his book.  Often mentioned are the rats and the crabs.  Everywhere.  

And back to the famous line from Ike, were it not for an upstart slat-bottomed boat manufacturer by the name of "Higgins" from the swamps of New Orleans, none of that would have been possible as no boats could clear the coral reefs and atolls.  There's a reason THE national WWII museum is at his old factory.  One of those pivotal players at the right time in history.

[Guest Lobo]

^

Yeah, that's a great story in and of itself.  When I think about the fleet we had to build for everything from trans-oceanic troop transports, to long-range surface warfare in the vast Pacific, to shore-landing craft for Normandy, to shore-landing craft in the atolls, never mind the aircraft carriers for an ever evolving fixed-wing arsenal and fresh-water inland patrol craft all in just a few years.  The engineering feats alone could fill an airport-sized museum.  

[trza-hawk 269]

I had been watching ww2 documentaries on youtube and TUBI to the point where I have these weird pet peeves about things like the audio almost never being live or the same footage being used over again or the staged newsreel scenes. Anyway, I watched a 25 episode nonfiction tv series about the ANZACS in WW2 that were originally made in 1961 and later rebroadcast and repackaged on different channels. Australia and NZ had around 500 war correspondents and many had cameras or video cameras and the sum of their work had some footage that hadn't been replayed over and over in the endless docs over the years.

 

The most notable of the footage was of the locals enlisted in PNG, Timor, The Solomon Islands and others. For the indigenous peoples the war was like aliens invading in a sci-fi movie. They had little exposure to airplanes, modern weaponry, communications, and so much more. Just seeing the armies clear fields and build and airstrip and then planes arrive with supplies would blow them away.

 

Anyway, the New Guineans who were pressed into service for Australia were known as the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, but the Australians pronounce it like Fozzy Wozzy

 

 

[Mortimer 88]

Supernova in the East VI dropped today, for those interested...

[trza-hawk 269]

I had a long binge of ww2 docs over the past few months. These included one good documentary, and a few other bad nonfiction television programs on the Battle of Singapore/Fall of Singapore, and the Malaya campaign that led up to the battle. The English were always proud of their rich and prosperous colony on the island, and the valuable resources from the Malayan peninsula were integrated into the British economy, the rubber and tin were extracted and sent straight to England. They had maintained their control by projecting a facade of invincibility and superiority. The Japanese came in with incredible preparation, intelligence gathering, tactics like moving by bicycles across the jungle backroads. They were consistently beating the English at every encounter moving down the peninsula towards Singapore. The English and their Imperial forces believed their own propaganda about the Japanese being weak, short, near sighted, and other stuff. The final battle at Singapore could be described as total disorganized bedlam for the British, but that may be too kind. The veil of British superiority had been pierced, and it couldn't be put back up again after the Japanese left.

 

Anyway, here is the first part of the one good doc on Singapore in WW2, I think it is a co-production between Malayan/Singapore/Australian tv channels:

 

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

Watch the documentary WWII In HD. The part about the Pacific theater is a lot better than The Pacific, the money grab sequel to Band of Brothers. 

[RPM 26341]

7 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

The Pacific, the money grab sequel to Band of Brothers. 

You shut your whore mouth.

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

22 minutes ago, RPM said:

You shut your whore mouth.

Says the guy who thinks Naked and Afraid is a documentary and not a scripted reality tv show. Seriously, watch WWII In HD. The Pacific was a lesser production than BoB with a lesser cast and lesser budget and never would’ve been made if it hadn’t been for the success of BoB. Island hopping isn’t really a compelling story. It’s the same story over and over again. The hyper-realism of the effects in BoB were missing in The Pacific. The actual film in WWII In HD was superior to what we saw in The Pacific. That show sucked. It’s okay to admit it. (And it’s not disrespectful to the brave Americans who fought and died during the campaign to do so.)

Edited June 9, 2021 by WhatTheBuck

[RPM 26341]

I stand by my statement.

[Captainant 27727]

2 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Says the guy who thinks Naked and Afraid is a documentary and not a scripted reality tv show. Seriously, watch WWII In HD. The Pacific was a lesser production than BoB with a lesser cast and lesser budget and never would’ve been made if it hadn’t been for the success of BoB. Island hopping isn’t really a compelling story. It’s the same story over and over again. The hyper-realism of the effects in BoB were missing in The Pacific. The actual film in WWII In HD was superior to what we saw in The Pacific. That show sucked. It’s okay to admit it. (And it’s not disrespectful to the brave Americans who fought and died during the campaign to do so.)

To be fair, I think the trudging slog of the show's pacing is really sort of the point - the war in the pacific was a meatgrinder for nearly three full years, with nothing to show for it but small patches of island that we used to just take another small island. It was a brutal war in that so much sacrifice was demanded of the people on the front line for such a marginal, but incremental strategic advancement. Documenting and respecting that brutal and inhuman process at the fidelity of the front lines (to steal a line from Mr. Carlin) isn't pretty - but it is an honest representation of what those men went through.

That said, I'm with ya - BoB is a farrrrr superior show, but The Pacific is absolutely worth watching at least once.

Edited June 9, 2021 by Captainant

[RPM 26341]

They're apples and oranges. But, The Pacific wasn't a money grab any more than BoB or From The Earth to The Moon.

[kevwun 15856]

There was a big problem with the Pacific from the get go and it was the simple fact that Marine infantry divisions leapfrogged each other throughout the war.  They traded off taking the islands.   A major part of why BoB is so good is that the 101st airborne went all the way from Normandy to Germany.  Ambrose could effectively tell the story of Americans fighting in Europe through the experiences of one infantry company.  There's just no way to do that in the Pacific War so it was never going to be able to live up to BoB.  The closest thing would have been following a carrier like the Enterprise throughout the war, but that is a very different show and probably too expensive to make.

Edited June 9, 2021 by kevwun

[RPM 26341]

The upcoming Masters of the Air miniseries based on the actions of the Eighth Air Force is a pure money grab off BoB. Nobody should watch it because it will suck. /WhatTheBuck

[Chad Fuck 17743]

The upcoming Masters of the Air miniseries based on the actions of the Eighth Air Force is a pure money grab off BoB. Nobody should watch it because it will suck. /WhatTheBuck

The book is pretty good so far though. About half way through it. PSA

*Yes, I got the sarcasm. Just wanted to talk about Masters of the Air.

[TwiceHorn 31530]

I wish there were more realistic naval warfare movies like Greyhound.

I'm reading more about early WWII naval battles (Savo, Solomons, etc.), before it all turned into carrier air warfare.  Seems like some compelling films could be made from it.

The carrier stuff is pretty good, too, but some of the night battles around Guadalcanal sound pretty "cool."

Edited June 9, 2021 by TwiceHorn

[tantric superman 4667]

It's a chore, although it looks like there is a Criterion edition, but "The Human Condition" for one Japanese perspective as to the war's effect on an individual.  I mean, what are you going to do with 9 and a half hours, anyway, watch two college baseball games? 

The British film critic David Shipman described the trilogy in his 1983 book, The Story of Cinema, as "unequivocally the greatest film ever made."^[12] In his review for The New York Times in 2008, A. O. Scott declared, "Kobayashi's monumental film can clarify and enrich your understanding of what it is to be alive."^[13] Critic Philip Kemp, in his essay written for The Criterion Collection's release of the trilogy, argues that while "the film suffers from its sheer magnitude [and] from the almost unrelieved somberness of its prevailing mood ... The Human Condition stands as an achievement of extraordinary power and emotional resonance: at once a celebration of the resilience of the individual conscience and a purging of forced complicity in guilt (of a nation and, as the title implies, of the whole human race)."^[6]

 

 

[tantric superman 4667]

8 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

I wish there were more realistic naval warfare movies like Greyhound.

I'm reading more about early WWII naval battles (Savo, Solomons, etc.), before it all turned into carrier air warfare.  Seems like some compelling films could be made from it.

The carrier stuff is pretty good, too, but some of the night battles around Guadalcanal sound pretty "cool."

The PT boat attack in "They Were Expendable" is pretty damned awesome.

[Druggist 303]

On 2/11/2021 at 8:24 PM, Biff Tannen said:

On another note, my last grandfather passed last week. 96 years old. Was at Tinian and Okinawa. Was walking around either Nagasaki or Hiroshima (not sure which) a week after the bomb with no radiation protection. 
 

Came back to the Panhandle and worked on the railroad until he was 55 and retired. Got paid on his railroad pension for the rest of his life. Well done sir. Very proud of him and his service. 

Just saw this.  My grandfather passed away 24 years ago and was a Sea Bee on Okinawa and Tinian.  Worked as a surveyor and claimed to have helped with building the runway the Enola Gay took off from (but who knows)

he was on Okinawa when a typhoon blew thru just prior to game 7 of the Cubs Tigers World Series.  He was a Cubs fan and it took them a week to find out the result.

sorry about your Granddad.  I am sure he was a bad ass. 

[TwiceHorn 31530]

33 minutes ago, Druggist said:

Just saw this.  My grandfather passed away 24 years ago and was a Sea Bee on Okinawa and Tinian.  Worked as a surveyor and claimed to have helped with building the runway the Enola Gay took off from (but who knows)

he was on Okinawa when a typhoon blew thru just prior to game 7 of the Cubs Tigers World Series.  He was a Cubs fan and it took them a week to find out the result.

sorry about your Granddad.  I am sure he was a bad ass. 

If he was on Tinian, I'm sure that's the truth.  The airfield there was pretty much all there was to it.  It's why the Japanese occupied it and why we took it.

Also that wasn't just "a typhoon," it was "The Great Typhoon," but there were several in late 1944 and 1945 in WestPac. The October 1945 one was particularly hard on ships at and around Okinawa.  https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/p/pacific-typhoon-october-1945.html

Correction, the "Great Typhoon" was in December 1944 and hit Task Force 38/58 at sea, doing a lot of damage.

Edited June 9, 2021 by TwiceHorn

[trza-hawk 269]

During my binge I made an attempt at watching a series named Canada At War or something similar, I can't remember. The stock footage was bad, and one episode had a Canadian country music band playing country music with less African influence or rhythm in it because they are from Canada and they didn't have so much African influence in their music. My obsession with WW2 Docs extends to music too, I might get to that later. The narrator always seemed to be making a sarcastic joke, or maybe that's just how Canadians talk, like really awkwardly.

There was a series of documentaries aired on the CBC in the early nineties with the awkward Canadian English title The Valour and the Horror. Each one focused on a battle with Canadians fighting in it. The thing is they didn't just focus on the patriot glory and victory, the docs focused on more ambiguous parts of the war. The Canadian war press basically lying about how the battles were going. Poorly trained Canadian kids sent straight from Canada and into war against the best trained and best armed forces the world had ever seen. How would you like it you had been sent to Hong Kong to defend a racist English colonial regime, because the English didn't want to sent their best forces to a place that was essentially indefensible. Another doc focuses on the Canadian role in Bomber Command in the RAF, just following Bomber Harris and dropping payback and miserable death on the Germans. Then there is the story of the Canadians in Normandy running straight into more Panzer divisions and fanatical German units compared to the other Allies in the front. The documentaries were very controversial in Canada, clearly pointing our the bad leadership in the Canadian war planning and leadership.

 

In the interwar years, Canada had a small army and officer corp. They didn't invest in training and equipping them. There is no great military academy on par with West Point, Sandhurst, or the college the General Staff had to train officers. Their most famous general was more gifted at brown nosing the English officers and politicians. Part of the reason they were wiped out in Dieppe or other encounters in the Battle of Normandy was because of that.

 

Okay, this is the first film, and least controversial, The Battle of Hong Kong: Savage Christmas: The experience here is of a short battle followed by years in prison and work camps. The meetings between the Canadian veterans and the Japanese soldiers and camp workers aren't scripted and set up, they just turn out uncomfortable.

 

[RPM 26341]

10 hours ago, tantric superman said:

The PT boat attack in "They Were Expendable" is pretty damned awesome.

The sea battle at the end of In Harm's Way is pretty good, too.

[PRONG HORN 3151]

 

 

 

[Guest Lobo]

I saw a combat vet ballcap the other day on a WWII Navy man.  like that one above, can't remember where we were but it stood out to me, I wanted to say hello to him ^

It occurred to me one day soon, I'll see one on a living WWII veteran for the last time and I won't know it at the time that that's it.  Not so much the hat, but the man under it.  I saw a lot of them at the Nimitz back when we used to go regularly and were members.  And you see lots of Vietnam, and even some Korea, license plates and hats (for obvious reasons, those guys are younger).  All the vets from WWII in my family are dead except my granduncle who was a submariner at the very end of the war.  But I would still make it a point to nod or smile at anybody I saw wearing one from WWII.  I get that most vets don't wanna be approached by a random stranger in public to be thanked, but very soon each of us will see a WWII veteran for the last time in our lifetime.  If he's wearing the cap, I'm taking it is a sign he doesn't mind being noticed.  I'm gonna shake his hand and say thank you and then get out of his way.  I think my grandfather would approve.  I didn't really think about the guy until just now when I saw that clip.  Anyway, in May between Armed Services Day and Memorial Day, don't miss a chance to thank a WWII veteran in particular---family or stranger.  /rant

Edited April 4, 2022 by Lobo

[Bartles 769]

On 2/15/2021 at 5:55 PM, Lobo said:

Always mean to read up more on the island campaigns. 

 

I read Descent Into Hell last year. Huge collection of first person accounts compiled by the Okinawa newspaper. It gets repetitive, but like your dad described to you, that was what happened...Okinawans forced into the military, forced out of their homes by same military all while being bombarded by US planes and ships for months at a time. They essentially lived in tiny, unsanitary caves every day, only sneaking out at night to scavenge for food and water, or on long hikes in hopes of finding someplace safer. Pointless suffering.

 

[statsman 5475]

I listened to Carlin’s six part podcast and it was terrific. One complaint - he lost me when he proposed that the Holocaust might have saved lives the way the A-Bomb did (by showing how horrible it was). 
 
I think he did a great job of showing what kind of situation makes sane men consider using nukes a solid idea. 
 
 

[Bateshorn 9929]

On 2/11/2021 at 8:40 AM, Chad Fuck said:

If you liked “The Thin Red Line” do yourself a favor and read the book, along with “From Here to Eternity.” The movie is really similar in setting and title only.

Also “The Naked and the Dead.”

You will not be disappointed. I read both in Graham’s “WWII in literature and film” class at UT. Top shelf.

I will stan for The Thin Red Line as the best book about war ever written.

[Bateshorn 9929]

On 4/3/2022 at 8:33 PM, Lobo said:

I saw a combat vet ballcap the other day on a WWII Navy man.  like that one above, can't remember where we were but it stood out to me, I wanted to say hello to him ^

It occurred to me one day soon, I'll see one on a living WWII veteran for the last time and I won't know it at the time that that's it.  Not so much the hat, but the man under it.  I saw a lot of them at the Nimitz back when we used to go regularly and were members.  And you see lots of Vietnam, and even some Korea, license plates and hats (for obvious reasons, those guys are younger).  All the vets from WWII in my family are dead except my granduncle who was a submariner at the very end of the war.  But I would still make it a point to nod or smile at anybody I saw wearing one from WWII.  I get that most vets don't wanna be approached by a random stranger in public to be thanked, but very soon each of us will see a WWII veteran for the last time in our lifetime.  If he's wearing the cap, I'm taking it is a sign he doesn't mind being noticed.  I'm gonna shake his hand and say thank you and then get out of his way.  I think my grandfather would approve.  I didn't really think about the guy until just now when I saw that clip.  Anyway, in May between Armed Services Day and Memorial Day, don't miss a chance to thank a WWII veteran in particular---family or stranger.  /rant

I went to a game at Camden Yards in 88.  They had a craft brew cart out beyond right field that was being manned by WW2 vets pouring beers and telling stories.  The guy pouring my beer was a big wiry old dude.  I asked his service, and he said Marines.  I had just seen Thin Red Line and asked him if he had served at Guadalcanal.  He handed me my beer, from a heavily tatted arm and said “Hell, yay I did. Rained a lot. We killed a lot of J*ps, tho.”  Not PC, even then.  Dude still looked like he could throw hands.  I wouldn’t have wanted a piece of that action. 

Edited April 5, 2022 by Bateshorn

[Biff Tannen 45712]

How do we not have a stand alone thread for The Pacific?

Anyway, with Masters of the Air out, I figured I should finally finish The Pacific before I started into the new one. Just binged it in three nights. 
 

Obviously not as good as BoB, but damn. Rough watch. Malik Rami and the Jurassic Park kid did a great job. As did Basilone and Leckie actors. 
 

Just such a brutal war and they really barely were able to scratch the surface with only 10 episodes. One thing I missed from BoB was the narration (by actual soldiers or even just the actors) over some episodes and also the lack of text explanations at the end of each episode. Hoping Masters of the Air goes back to something like that. 
 

Will watch the first three episodes of that this weekend. 

[RPM 26341]

The Pacific was 3 books merged into one story. Hard to tell the overall story of the Marines in WW2 and have it come out like BoB. I'm liking MotA but it is going to have more of a Pacific feeling than Brothers because of the size of the 8th. 

[Chad Fuck 17743]

The Pacific was 3 books merged into one story. Hard to tell the overall story of the Marines in WW2 and have it come out like BoB. I'm liking MotA but it is going to have more of a Pacific feeling than Brothers because of the size of the 8th. 

This. Bob covered a time period roughly from early 1944 until May 1945 in 10 episodes. Let’s say a year and a half. It covered one unit because Steven Ambrose realized in doing research for the underlying book how unique it was that one unit was at the tip of the spear start to finish. That’s a great basis for storytelling.

Pacific covered 1942- 1945, roughly twice the time period. The action was so varied and geographically widespread there was no way to tell the story of that war through the vehicle of one unit. Really, it should have been twice as long as BoB if we wanted to have proportion. But that’s not real world Hollywood.

Don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed the Pacific and went back and read or reread the underlying books when it came out. It’s just a different animal that BoB. Same family, but different.

[Texzilla58 4743]

I went to a game at Camden Yards in 88.  They had a craft brew cart out beyond right field that was being manned by WW2 vets pouring beers and telling stories.  The guy pouring my beer was a big wiry old dude.  I asked his service, and he said Marines.  I had just seen Thin Red Line and asked him if he had served at Guadalcanal.  He handed me my beer, from a heavily tatted arm and said “Hell, yay I did. Rained a lot. We killed a lot of J*ps, tho.”  Not PC, even then.  Dude still looked like he could throw hands.  I wouldn’t have wanted a piece of that action. 

The dude endured Japanese human wave assaults in horrible conditions and you call him out for his nonPC terminology. We owe guys like this everything.

[Bateshorn 9929]

1 hour ago, Texzilla58 said:

The dude endured Japanese human wave assaults in horrible conditions and you call him out for his nonPC terminology. We owe guys like this everything.

Dude, I’m not calling him out, I was just telling an entertaining story about a time I met a Marine. He was a good dude and a hero, no doubt, and looked like he could fuck shit up.

I was just noting it was not the preferred nomenclature even 25 years ago. Maybe dont take offense at everything you read.
 

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

5 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

This. Bob covered a time period roughly from early 1944 until May 1945 in 10 episodes. Let’s say a year and a half. It covered one unit because Steven Ambrose realized in doing research for the underlying book how unique it was that one unit was at the tip of the spear start to finish. That’s a great basis for storytelling.

Pacific covered 1942- 1945, roughly twice the time period. The action was so varied and geographically widespread there was no way to tell the story of that war through the vehicle of one unit. Really, it should have been twice as long as BoB if we wanted to have proportion. But that’s not real world Hollywood.

Don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed the Pacific and went back and read or reread the underlying books when it came out. It’s just a different animal that BoB. Same family, but different.

Island-hopping in the Pacific just isn’t as compelling as a story. It was a brutal slog but it was basically the same story over and over again. It’s not a knock against the campaign, it’s importance, or the heroism displayed by the soldiers who fought in it. It’s just not as dramatic from a storytelling standpoint. Land on an island where the Japanese are dug in and willing to fight to the bitter end, inflicting as many casualties as possible until they’re all wiped out. Wash, rinse, and repeat. 

[Chad Fuck 17743]

1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Island-hopping in the Pacific just isn’t as compelling as a story. It was a brutal slog but it was basically the same story over and over again. It’s not a knock against the campaign, it’s importance, or the heroism displayed by the soldiers who fought in it. It’s just not as dramatic from a storytelling standpoint. Land on an island where the Japanese are dug in and willing to fight to the bitter end, inflicting as many casualties as possible until they’re all wiped out. Wash, rinse, and repeat. 

That's a great point.  We all knew there was never going to be a scene where they get to drink sake out of the Emperor's goblet.  And that's kind of anticlimactic.