Ahira's Hangar

Just finished watching HBO's The Pacific miniseries, recently out on DVD.

Not as good as it's companion miniseries Band of Brothers (in my opinion at any rate) - still better than at least 98% of the stuff on television.

In Band of Brothers you followed one group of paratroopers through their WW2 campaign, from training camp to England to D-Day in Normandy, to Marketgarden in Holland to the battle of the Bulge in Belgium to Germany to MP duty in occupied Austria. They stayed as a fairly cohesive unit, and you got to see bits of the officers' briefings so you always knew something of what was going on and why.

In addition, there was always Lt./Capt./Major Dick Winters in either the foreground or the background. One of my friends, who retired as a Col. in the army reserves, told me that he learned about Winters in his officers training - and that Winters is to this day held up to Army officers as the ideal they should strive to emulate. Winters is the beating heart of Band of Brothers - showing that no matter how barbaric and terrible and violent human beings can be there are always others who remain decent and kind (though no less a warrior or leader) no matter how mad the world around them becomes. As long as the Earth contains human beings like Winters, it is worth fighting and dying for.

In The Pacific you do not get those things. Instead you follow three US Marines through the bloody WW2 Pacific campaign. They belong to different units, though on occasion they do participate in the same battles. So you do not get that cohesive storyline coming from following one unit as in Band of Brothers.

Nor do you get the officers' briefings. Instead you get thrown from one speck of land in the Pacific to the next, with no context of strategy or the greater overall campaign - though I believe that was intentional on the part of the film makers, as that would have been what your average Marine Devil Dog would have probably gone through at the time.

And you do not have that great heart of kindness as in Winters. Yes - the potential was there in Eugene Sledge's Skipper - but he is killed in action - with the result of his death nearly breaking all of his men psychologically.

The Pacific is much more raw and violent than Band of Brothers. The gore reaches horror slasher flick levels at times, but is much more realistic, making it very disturbing. It is amazing any of the men came through the campaign alive, much less sane...and that any civilians remained alive on Okinawa (what a horror show).

In fact, one place where The Pacific outshines Band of Brothers is showing the long term affects of the war upon the men - and how difficult is was for them to come home.

High recommend if you have a stomach for the gore.

After watching it through a second time I now think it is the equal to BOB. It is just that they focus on a different aspect of war - rather than showing the bonds that forge warriors together on the battlefield, they focus on the brutalization and emotional/mental/moral breakdowns that can happen in the face of the unrelenting violence and brutality of total war. And on the after affects of the returning veterans. Needless to say, this makes this series a lot darker than BOB.

If you watch this on DVD, be sure to watch each episode with the historical background. That not only adds some needed context to the battles, but you also get the interviews with the survivors, and the families of Marines who were there. Hearing the adult children tell of how throughout their childhoods their veteran fathers would wake up screaming in the aftermath of the war really brings it home.

Also watch the tenth disc, with the bonus materials. It has more in depth biographies of the Marines followed in the show.