JABQ04 said:

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New research has Basilone being killed by small arms fire and not a mortar as initially thought. So the death in the show is probably accurate. I think you said yourself that you've seen it once. You really need to watch it again. Read the companion book "The Pacific" by Hugh Ambrose as well.

I thought the bonds between the Marines was great. More
focused on a squad to fire team size element as opposed to a whole Company like BoB. I liked how the whole mood of the series shifted as the war progressed. At the start the characters were blissfully unaware of what lay ahead, but by Okinawa they treated the enemy like eradicating vermin. Their humanity against their enemy was gone. He wasn't human. Sledges scene were he gets yelled at for firing his pistol is great. Him returning home to register for classes was great too. The evolution of weapons and equipment was good to see too. Landing on Guadalcanal with Springfield '03s and water jacketed .30s, and OD green uniforms to M1 Garlands and Carbines to camo utilities. A lot darker of a series than BoB.

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So this is from memory from my initial viewing, so it may be wrong:

So that episode where Sledge had a bladder infection and spent much of it on that boat was boring as hell. I assume that was in his book, but if you are going to have only 8 or so episodes, why waste one on that?

Also it seemed to be 2-3 disjointed stories stuck together in one miniseries. This is obviously due to the fact that they got stories from several different books. But still, it hurt the cohesion of the show and hurt in the "brotherhood" aspect that was so great in BoB.

Another thing that annoyed me was how much effort they put into showing the worst side of Americans (like cutting teeth out of people, tossing rocks into open skulls, etc.). I know it's war, and that those sort of things happened here and there, but it seemed like they made it far more prevalent or concentrated than reality. I sure as hell hope that Rami Malek's character wasn't based on a real guy. And if he was, then I hope they had legit documentation that the real person did those things they had the character doing, otherwise I consider that libelous.

Furthermore, I think they gave the Japanese less blame then they deserved. Sure they showed a few things, but the Japanese were way worse than the show let on. They freaking cannibalized people, for crying out loud. And I'm not talking about eating the dead out of hunger, but keeping enemy troops alive for days so they could eat "fresh" limbs off them. Unit 731 was worse than even Mengele, yet the Pacific never had a "why we fight" episode that I can remember.

It seemed to me, that the producers sorta wanted to present war as hell and that things were "even". The fact that Tom Hanks claimed something about our motivation being racism added more fuel to that fire. No, we didn't hate them because they were "slant-eyed dogs" or because they were "different" or whatever, it's because of their actions. They attacked us, marched us to death, and were otherwise a despicable enemy. Especially the Army. Their Navy was not as bad.

Anyway.. .sorry about the rant.

JABQ04 said:

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aTmAg said:

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I think Private Ryan is vastly overrated. The D-Day scene was incredible. The rest of the movie was blah.

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Your opinion on SPR is blasphemy. Just thought you should know that.

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Sorry, but I just do not think it's very good. The battles themselves were good, especially the D-Day one. But the dialog, characters, etc. were not. The whole childish bickering and near mutiny part in the middle was eye roll enducing. And, like I said already, the P-51 coming to save the day just at the nick of time was typical Spielberg lame ending.

When it's on TV, I might record it and watch the battles, but will fast forward all the rest.

Incredible advances for war films, a great tribute to vets and their courage on d-day, and a plot that was completely unrealistic at times. I won't go back on that rant.
But, with a choice of a thousand untold stories to truly honor individuals, battalions, companies etc, they chose to make one up for emotionally manipulative value. Heck, even the final battle was a made up one in a made up town. You go to all the trouble to depict war accurately and can't even find a real battle for the climax in a war with thousands of them? And imagine being Captain Ralph Goranson, who actually commanded that group on the beach and earned the distinguished service cross, seeing someone else being the hero and not you? He was alive when the movie came out, but I never saw how he felt about it.

/rant.

By the way, not the fault of the film and glad they included it, but Mrs Bixby didn't lose five sons in the war. She was less than honest with officials in Massachusetts. The letter is still as close to a perfect condolence letter as can be written though, even it was possibly written by Hay and not Lincoln. She also hated Lincoln.

Sorry for the length, but as a history major I can get going on this stuff .

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So that episode where Sledge had a bladder infection and spent much of it on that boat was boring as hell. I assume that was in his book, but if you are going to have only 8 or so episodes, why waste one on that?

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I believe you are thinking of Leckie, not Sledge. It wasn't a bladder infection: he couldn't control his bladder because of the stress of combat. He kept soiling himself at night.

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I sure as hell hope that Rami Malek's character wasn't based on a real guy. And if he was, then I hope they had legit documentation that the real person did those things they had the character doing, otherwise I consider that libelous.

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Malek's character was definitely a real guy. I've read Sledge's book several times, but it's been a number of years since I did. My memory is that it was not SNAFU who was cutting teeth out. Maybe the show changed that to make it someone the audience was already familiar with, and also to show that SNAFU was concerned that Sledge did not degenerate to the level of others. I actually had the same feeling when I first saw The Pacific about the way SNAFU was portrayed, that it seemed libelous.

Two other things about The Pacific were not true: The three did not go home on the same train. Sledge, for instance, wound up spending another year overseas in China. I didn't mind the more "poetic" ending that the writers came up with.

The other change was something more significant. There is a scene in which the Marines march by a Jap POW and insult him and provoke him to fight. That did not happen like that in the book. The Marines were walking past a POW and the POW started provoking the Marines. Maybe he was embarrassed because he had surrendered and wanted them to kill him, but in the book, the Jap started the problem.

I had a long reply typed out but not going to derail any further. I will say you need to absolutely watch The Pacific again. You can email me at username at gmail if you would care to discuss further (I'm a huge history nerd and can go on for days) or if your in Houston area a discussion over beers.

ETA your still wrong about SPR.

Interesting, maybe morbid tid bit, to the brutality of the Pacific war. My GF fought the Japanese as an Army Infantryman. He saw action on Iwo Jima in Co E 2nd BN 147 Inf. Regiment. I have every letter he sent my grandmother during the war. Anyways, when I was younger and my grandma was alive she showed me some of his stuff from
The war. Included in the box was a small envelope with Japanese teeth. I came into possession of this box two years ago, have all the letters, magazines, pamphlets, etc but no teeth. I started a thread on the history board two years ago about his stuff. Wish I met him but he died when my dad was 8 years old.

https://texags.com/forums/49/topics/2863058

OldArmy71 said:

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Quote:

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So that episode where Sledge had a bladder infection and spent much of it on that boat was boring as hell. I assume that was in his book, but if you are going to have only 8 or so episodes, why waste one on that?

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I believe you are thinking of Leckie, not Sledge. It wasn't a bladder infection: he couldn't control his bladder because of the stress of combat. He kept soiling himself at night.

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Yes. You are right. The guy's face is in my mind, but I thought he was Sledge. Now I think I remember Sledge being the guy with the dark hair who's dad warned him about the mental anguish of going to war.

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Malek's character was definitely a real guy. I've read Sledge's book several times, but it's been a number of years since I did. My memory is that it was not SNAFU who was cutting teeth out. Maybe the show changed that to make it someone the audience was already familiar with, and also to show that SNAFU was concerned that Sledge did not degenerate to the level of others. I actually had the same feeling when I first saw The Pacific about the way SNAFU was portrayed, that it seemed libelous.

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If I remember right, they did not show SNAFU doing the tooth thing. He was shown tossing rocks into a dead Japanese soldiers head (did he do that in the book?). In general, I feel they made him come off as a degenerate himself who had the sole redeeming quality of not wanting Sledge to be as degenerate as him.

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The other change was something more significant. There is a scene in which the Marines march by a Jap POW and insult him and provoke him to fight. That did not happen like that in the book. The Marines were walking past a POW and the POW started provoking the Marines. Maybe he was embarrassed because he had surrendered and wanted them to kill him, but in the book, the Jap started the problem.

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I do not remember this scene. If I had read the book then this would have pissed me off. Why would they reverse the roles like that? To make the Marines look bad? I cannot think of a legitimate reason.

JABQ04 said:

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I had a long reply typed out but not going to derail any further. I will say you need to absolutely watch The Pacific again. You can email me at username at gmail if you would care to discuss further (I'm a huge history nerd and can go on for days) or if your in Houston area a discussion over beers.

ETA your still wrong about SPR.

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I agree on not derailing the thread. I'll tell you what. I will go watch it again. I'll report back at some point.

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Now I think I remember Sledge being the guy with the dark hair who's dad warned him about the mental anguish of going to war.

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Yes, his father was a doctor who remembered mental cases from WWI and was afraid his son would wind up the same way.

The guy who played Sledge, by the way, was the kid from the original Jurassic Park.

I'm sorry to say that I don't remember if SNAFU was tossing pebbles into the skull in the book. All I can say is that I remember feeling that the TV show was unfair to SNAFU as he was described in the book.

aTmAg said:

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JABQ04 said:

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New research has Basilone being killed by small arms fire and not a mortar as initially thought. So the death in the show is probably accurate. I think you said yourself that you've seen it once. You really need to watch it again. Read the companion book "The Pacific" by Hugh Ambrose as well.

I thought the bonds between the Marines was great. More
focused on a squad to fire team size element as opposed to a whole Company like BoB. I liked how the whole mood of the series shifted as the war progressed. At the start the characters were blissfully unaware of what lay ahead, but by Okinawa they treated the enemy like eradicating vermin. Their humanity against their enemy was gone. He wasn't human. Sledges scene were he gets yelled at for firing his pistol is great. Him returning home to register for classes was great too. The evolution of weapons and equipment was good to see too. Landing on Guadalcanal with Springfield '03s and water jacketed .30s, and OD green uniforms to M1 Garlands and Carbines to camo utilities. A lot darker of a series than BoB.

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So this is from memory from my initial viewing, so it may be wrong:

So that episode where Sledge had a bladder infection and spent much of it on that boat was boring as hell. I assume that was in his book, but if you are going to have only 8 or so episodes, why waste one on that?

Also it seemed to be 2-3 disjointed stories stuck together in one miniseries. This is obviously due to the fact that they got stories from several different books. But still, it hurt the cohesion of the show and hurt in the "brotherhood" aspect that was so great in BoB.

Another thing that annoyed me was how much effort they put into showing the worst side of Americans (like cutting teeth out of people, tossing rocks into open skulls, etc.). I know it's war, and that those sort of things happened here and there, but it seemed like they made it far more prevalent or concentrated than reality. I sure as hell hope that Rami Malek's character wasn't based on a real guy. And if he was, then I hope they had legit documentation that the real person did those things they had the character doing, otherwise I consider that libelous.

Furthermore, I think they gave the Japanese less blame then they deserved. Sure they showed a few things, but the Japanese were way worse than the show let on. They freaking cannibalized people, for crying out loud. And I'm not talking about eating the dead out of hunger, but keeping enemy troops alive for days so they could eat "fresh" limbs off them. Unit 731 was worse than even Mengele, yet the Pacific never had a "why we fight" episode that I can remember.

It seemed to me, that the producers sorta wanted to present war as hell and that things were "even". The fact that Tom Hanks claimed something about our motivation being racism added more fuel to that fire. No, we didn't hate them because they were "slant-eyed dogs" or because they were "different" or whatever, it's because of their actions. They attacked us, marched us to death, and were otherwise a despicable enemy. Especially the Army. Their Navy was not as bad.

Anyway.. .sorry about the rant.

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This is a good post.

While I do really enjoy The Pacific, more even than Band of Brothers, I also see that the series could have been done even better than it was. They did attempt to "take it easy" on the Japs while at the same time painting some of the American characters as monsters (i.e., the Malek character, who did in fact exist but from what I recall of reading Sledge's book, was not what the series portrayed him to be). I think I glossed over that stuff and just took the show for what they made it to be, and didn't let the inaccuracies and outright falsehoods color my enjoyment of the show.

I did, however, lose all respect for Tom Hanks after the absolute hogwash that guy said. I don't even recall now what it was that he said, but at the time I knew it was so completely full of bullcrap that it removed any doubt that the guy was just another America-hating liberal. I'll still enjoy watching him in movies like Saving Private Ryan or Apollo 13, but going forward, he's just another actor who knows so much that is not true.

I typed a long response then deleted it. The short of it is that Hanks based the motivation for the war in the Pacific on racism. He then doubled down and said it was the same motivation for the war against terror. It wasn't an off the cusp remark at an event after too many chardonnays. He said it in multiple interviews. I don't think he's a bad guy, but he clearly doesn't have a clue as to what he is talking about which is really kind of pathetic considering his exposure to WWII veterans and historians. And like you, it also kind of zapped any interest I had in him for future works.

I never heard the Hanks comments comparing the PTO to GWOT. However I will agree that we looked at the Japanese as sub-human unlike how we view the Germans or Italians. Then Germans/Italians were our ancestors (for many). They were the bad guys but predominantly Christians. Same ideas, morals, traditions etc.... the Japanese were foreign. The Pearl Harbor sneak attack, kamikazes, Bataan. They weren't like us. They were a plague that we had to wipe off the face of the earth like insects. There's a reason many returning GIs refused to come to grips with Japanese imports, yet no issue with German. We hated them and their foreign-ness made them easy to hate, dehumanize, and for us to want to destroy.

Pearl Harbor. Sneak attack without a declaration of war. Quick way to end up on our **** list.

NM.

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If the Germans had done that stuff to us instead, we would have hated them the same

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One of the last lucid conversations I had with my maternal grandfather, Charles J Noblitt of Lake Jackson, TX, came as a result of my having parked my brand new Toyota in his driveway right after I graduated from A&M. Early 90s, prior to the onset of Alzeheimer's that ultimately claimed his life about a decade later.

He explained that he had harbored a deep-rooted hatred of all things Japanese since the early 1940s. One of the stories I'd heard was that in 1944, after a shore leave here in the States, he was returning to duty aboard one of those ships that is essentially a floating dry dock to effect repairs while at sea, I forget the designation of this type of ship. He received notification about that time of the birth of his second daughter, my aunt. So I understand why he harbored all that hate for all those years, being denied a pivotal moment in any man's life as he was. I never made the mistake of parking my Toyota in his driveway again; always in the street from then on.

Any way, much of my family's heritage stems from Germany. I asked him that day that if he had been sent to Europe to fight against the Germans rather than the Pacific and the Japs, if he would have had so much hatred toward his people of his own ancestral heritage, and had I parked a BMW in his driveway ... he shrugged and said that yeah, he probably would have.

Check out "Know Your Enemy" by Frank Capra an American propaganda film produced in 1945 for men headed to the Pacific and then let me know what you think. "Defeating this nation is as necessary as shooting down a mad dog in your neighborhood" is one of the last lines of the film.

Film was finished on Aug 9 1945 and ended up not being needed since that was the day of the 2nd Atomic Bomb.

Urban Ag said:

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I typed a long response then deleted it. The short of it is that Hanks based the motivation for the war in the Pacific on racism. He then doubled down and said it was the same motivation for the war against terror. It wasn't an off the cusp remark at an event after too many chardonnays. He said it in multiple interviews. I don't think he's a bad guy, but he clearly doesn't have a clue as to what he is talking about which is really kind of pathetic considering his exposure to WWII veterans and historians. And like you, it also kind of zapped any interest I had in him for future works.

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Post the links to these interviews. Don't just say you remember reading.

Do you own Texags?

Tough to pick only 5. Downfall is by far my favorite.

1. Downfall
2. Enemy at the Gates
3. Stalingrad
4. Memphis Belle
5. Das Boot

Honorable mentions: Patton, Battle of Britain, Midway, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare, Saving Private Ryan

I haven't watched Dunkirk yet.

JABQ04 said:

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Check out "Know Your Enemy" by Frank Capra an American propaganda film produced in 1945 for men headed to the Pacific and then let me know what you think. "Defeating this nation is as necessary as shooting down a mad dog in your neighborhood" is one of the last lines of the film.

Film was finished on Aug 9 1945 and ended up not being needed since that was the day of the 2nd Atomic Bomb.

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That quote sounds true. It was absolutely necessary to defeat the Japanese. As would be shooting down a mad dog in your neighborhood. Mad dogs bite and maim people, the Japanese were having beheading contests. People who set out to shoot a mad dog in a neighborhood don't do so because they were "mad dogists" just like those who set out to stop the Japanese did not do so because they were "racists".

Lot of great movies and I'll try to make my list later although nearly all of them are mentioned by someone.

But I have not seen one mentioned at all - likely because it is not a battle movie in any way - but "Conspiracy" which which was an HBO movie is the story of the Wannsee Conference and the decision to implement the Final Solution to the Jewish question. Stars Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich (won the Emmy) and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann (won a GG for supporting actor) among others like Colin Firth.

Zombie Jon Snow said:

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Lot of great movies and I'll try to make my list later although nearly all of them are mentioned by someone.

But I have not seen one mentioned at all - likely because it is not a battle movie in any way - but "Conspiracy" which which was an HBO movie is the story of the Wannsee Conference and the decision to implement the Final Solution to the Jewish question. Stars Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich (won the Emmy) and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann (won a GG for supporting actor) among others like Colin Firth.

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Very intense film.

From my understanding much of the table discussion was taken directly from the transcripts. "Evacuations"

I'd add in:

Fury
The Big Red One