HBO miniseries - The Pacific"

Are you Kidding? This is it? The long-awaited series on the Pacific War that was supposed to be a bookend to "A Band of Brothers"? It looks as though Mr. Murphy was right after all: "If anything can go wrong, it will." For just about everything that could went wrong with this series.

First of all "The Pacific" isn't a true historical series. More like a soap opera production with some interesting, and gratuitously gory, battle scenes thrown in. (You'd think every Marine was issued with a pair of pliers to extract the gold dental work of dead Japanese soldiers.) There's a definite anti-war spin to the series, and the suggestion that American soldiers were as brutal as those of the Japanese Imperial Army. There was, for example, a scene in which a Marine is using a dead Japanese soldier as a pin cushion with his bayonet, as if this was the moral equivalent to the Nanking atrocities.

(The Nanking massacre was was not an isolated incident. One statistic tells us all we need to know about Japanese savagery and the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere": approximately 30 million Chinese (and Asian) civilians died as a result of Japan's 15-year campaign of rapine, pillage and murder in Manchuria and on the Chinese mainland.)

Unlike "A Band of Brothers," the producers decided to make this series a statement about the personal lives of three soldiers, derived from their books, letters and diaries (like there's not enough third-rate melodrama already available on TV?). So, Guadalcanal is viewed from the perspective the "Battle of Henderson Field" and Chesty Puller rather than the "Battle of Edson's Ridge," a patch of real estate defended by Colonel Edson and his Raider Battalion, considered by both American and Japanese strategists to have been the most decisive battle of the Guadalcanal campaign and possibly of the entire Pacific War.

Battles in which Marine battalions defeated regimental strength Japanese forces were typical of the Guadalcanal campaign, revealed in the final casualty toll of 5 to 1. This lopsided tally was due to superior fire power and tactics: Japanese mass banzai attacks, frontal assaults and infiltration with rifle companies, which were effective against the Chinese army, amounted to pure suicide against seasoned Marines with automatic weapons. But the true enemies of the Japanese Imperial Army were the malarial jungles of the Solomons and the deadly accuracy of the Dauntless SBD dive bombers that sank nine Japanese troop ships.

In addition to a cynical emphasis on gore, sexual sleaze and melodrama, the series is shot through with the gross historical inaccuracies. The following is a quote from Wikipedia's article on the Battle of Tenaru:

• "The Battle of the Tenaru [was] the climax of Episode One of Steven Spielberg's and Tom Hanks' miniseries, The Pacific. In this episode, the battle was not depicted as it occurred. HBO's dramatized depiction of the Tenaru/Ilu/Alligator Creek Action has Marine machine gunner Leckie and his loader moving their 1917 Browning water-cooled machine gun shoring holes in the Marine line. Leckie's position was static and to the far right of the heavy fighting. The brunt of the Japanese assault was borne by Marines Cpl. Lee Diamond, PFC. John Rivers and Pvt. Albert Schmid. The three were credited with 200 Japanese kia. Awarded the Navy Cross (America's second highest decoration) for their actions, the trio paid dearly. Rivers lost his life, while Schmid and Diamond suffered horendous wounds. Schmid lost sight in one eye and was left with very little in the other. Shot in his arm early in the fight; Cpl. Diamond's arms and hands were also ripped by the same grenade which blinded Schmid."

Such distortions of the historical record and misattributions of merit and battlefield courage are inexcusable and reveal the producers' contempt for American military prowess. The worst of it is that it would have been just as easy to base the series on actual historical events, such as the Battle of Edson's Ridge, which were dramatic enough to sustain the series without sensational embroidery. This was especially so of Guadalcanal 'where uncommon valor was a common virtue.'

The inevitable comparison with BoB is not favorable to "The Pacific." BoB was a reasonably accurate dramatization of historical events. In contrast, "The Pacific" is dominated by a subtext: a surfeit of gore, an atmosphere of moral ambiguity and moral equivalence (e.g. repeated scenes of American brutality and the noble dedication of the Japanese soldier), a breathtaking indifference to historical fact and the strategic picture. There are, for example, the obligatory scenes displaying photos a dead Japanese soldier's family. (Yes, we know these obedient Japanese sons came from good families -- just like the Americans! -- the very families that raised them to murder hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Asian civilians in the name of their emperor, a war criminal with a hunger for conquest.) Indeed, the critics of this shoddy, lurid and sensationalized production, who say it is a insult to the military, are not far off the mark.

In short, "The Pacific" is another unsavory exhibit of America's unquenchable appetite for 'slob culture,' and viewers taken in by the sexual sleaze, gore, pseudo-realism, and melodrama of this amateur production need to take stock. That said, the battle scenes are riveting (if not entirely factual). Battlefield vérité, in which you can actually hear the sound of shrapnel hitting a soldier's canteen, is Spielberg's strength; coherent narrative and convincing dialog are not. The problem here is historical authenticity and a fundamental lack of seriousness. Victory in the Pacific was an amazing story of U.S. persistence, bravery and the military genius of men like Colonel Merritt Edson, General Alexander Vandegrift and Admiral Ernest King. Dumbing down the action to the personal level does a disservice not only to the men who fought these battles, but to the intelligence of American viewers. Alas! Who said Hollywood was dead?

William Fankboner

Wm. B. Fankboner's Website