HBO's Emmy Award winning miniseries, The Pacific, will be released in a smartly-boxed six DVD set on November 2. Beginning in December of 1941 and going through the end of the war in 1945, the series looks at the struggles in the Pacific theater through the dramatization of the real life experiences of three representative Marines and their comrades. It is not simply the story of the battles, although there is some of the most realistic depiction of the horrors of those famous battles—Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa; it is also the story of the effects of these brutal struggles on the men who fought them.
The three central figures are Medal of Honor winner John Bosilone played by Jon Seda, Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), and Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale). The journeys of these three men provide a convenient point of departure and an excellent source of first person information, since both Sledge and Leckie wrote about their wartime experiences after the war: Leckie in the 1957, Helmet for My Pillow and Sledge in With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. Bosilone, on the other hand, after his heroic actions on Guadalcanal, was ordered back to the United States to take part in the war bond drive and became a well known celebrity whose life was well documented. The series portrays the high, almost naïve, expectations of the men as they leave for the war zone, their reactions to the horrifying deaths and mutilations of their comrades and the fanaticism of the enemy, and the difficult adjustment to ordinary life after they return home.
The Pacific is not a glamorous, romanticized picture of war. There is heroism certainly, but it is the heroism of conquering fear and charging up a beach into the face of machine gun barrages; it is the heroism of trudging through mud in the heat of tropics with little or no water or time to rest; it is the heroism of doing what needs to be done to kill the enemy and to stay alive.
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Article comments
1 - Realist
As brutal and graphic as "The Pacific" and the books which spawned it are, they remain somewhat cleaned up versions of that horrible experience.
One can get a glimpse of how much worse it really was by reading Into The Rising Sun by Patrick K. O'Donnell (ISDN 1439192588, available on AMAZON). In no other book covering the Pacific War have I read veterans' reports of cannibalism of dead Marines by starving Japanese troops, or of the homosexual attacks upon those captured alive as a means of entertainment and torture. One begins to understand why the veterans of the Pacific War were especially reticent to reveal their experiences - they are almost too horrible to contemplate when compared to the lives they left behind to fight.
I can understand why they wanted us to never have to experience those things and the many worse things that remain yet untold. I just wish that their desire to protect us could have been realized.
2 - Jeff Hohman
10/22/2010
Hello,
Because of the interest in HBO’s acclaimed series “The Pacific” and your blog, I thought you might be interested in the following about the award-winning documentary film “Peleliu 1944: Horror in the Pacific” that I produced. Thanks. Jeff Hohman, Producer
Kenwood Productions’ award-winning documentary film, Peleliu 1944: Horror in the Pacific, is available in DVD. Against a backdrop of rare archival film footage and photographs, the story of the Battle of Peleliu is told as never before by E. B. Sledge (author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa and featured in Ken Burns’ film The War, seen on PBS, and the HBO mini-series The Pacific), Bill Leyden, R. V. Burgin, and Jay de l’Eau (who are also characterized in The Pacific.) HBO licensed portions of Kenwoods’ exclusive Eugene Sledge interview to support their production of the The Pacific.
Peleliu 1944: Horror in the Pacific tells the true story of the men of Company K, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment and the ferocious Battle of Peleliu, “an island on fire.” In conditions that tested the sanity of each man, 9,000 Marines attacked 10,000 battle-hardened Japanese soldiers dug into hundreds of fortified and reinforced coral and limestone caves. Twenty-eight days of unrelenting battle with no quarter asked or given.
The Battle of Peleliu is as harrowing as any in the history of modern warfare. A battle of total annihilation fought in inhuman conditions.
To see film clips and get more information on this, and other Kenwood Productions’ films, go to www.americanherofilm.com.
After viewing the clips, we hope you’ll agree with the viewers who said the film “should be required viewing by every veteran or enthusiast” and “hearing the veterans speak and tell their stories was so powerful, it was all woven together with excellent narration and footage. Just hearing Eugene Sledge tell his stories is priceless.” Historian Paul Fussel wrote “One of the cassettes [of Peleliu 1944] I’m donating to the Imperial War Museum here so that the British will have some idea of the costs of the Pacific war. The other I’ll treasure forever, and with thanks always to you and to Gene Sledge.”
If you have questions or would like more information contact us at mail@americanherofilm.com or by phone at (612) 812-9489.
Thank you.
Jeff Hohman
Producer
Kenwood Productions, Inc.