Pacific

[FiLtH]

    I got a little worried when the guy found the doll in the enemy's things. Hope it doesnt get too touchy feely. Really hoping they have some of the ridge fighting in the next one. Trouble is so much of it was night fighting...hard to see alot of the cool stuff.

[Saurdaukar]

Hope it doesnt get too touchy feely.

Based on what I have read, that's pretty much what you should expect; mortars and (e)motions.

For whatever reason, Hollywood seems hell-bent on using the ETO to tell war stories and the PTO to tell anti-war stories.

As a venue within which to question humanity, I'm not really sure why it worked out that way.

[SIK1]

I believe that the reason it comes off that way is that the pacific theater was so brutal, the enemy looked different than us, worshiped a different god than us and neither side had any compassion for the other. The PTO is probably the best modern example of mans inhumanity to man. Don't get me wrong ETO was a bad place to be too, just not in the same horrific way as the pacific.

[rpm]

Sik1 is right. For you guys wanting to slam Hollywood, you are waaaay off base here. You might want to read the books The Pacific is based on, "Helmet For My Pillow" by Robert Leckie and "With The Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge. Maybe then you will get the idea that this is not "The Sands of Iwo Jima" with John Wayne or "Gung Ho" with Randolph Scott. This is a historically accurate depiction from the men that were there and how they delt with it.

[Saxman]

In some ways the ETO is much easier for audiences to related to. First because you had such a clearly defined sense of evil in the Nazi regime, but also because the culture of Germany and the Western Allies was so closely related. As SIK pointed out, the fighting in the Pacific was different. The Germans were tenacious fighters and groups like the Waffen-SS could be pretty scary, but the Japanese mindset during the war was and IS completely alien to us. Western culture doesn't understand the concept of a wounded Japanese soldier waiting for an American medic to come tend to him and then pulling a grenade to blow them both apart.

Many Americans at the time saw it as a war to the death--Halsey himself said he intended to see to it that the Japanese language would only be spoken in hell. The Pacific War was war at its most savage.

[Nefarious]

Chesty Puller made his cameo. 

I enjoyed it, The Naval engagement at Night was pretty neat. It feels like it will take a long time to develop the characters. I honestly can't remember any of the characters names, except for J.P Morgan and Manny Rodriguez.

[FiLtH]

   For me, personally, I think my own experience of watching this was tainted by 2 things.

 1. I tried to compare it to Band of Brothers. That cast was unreal..and so far this one has come up short.

 2. Years of being desensitized of seeing asians get bombed,shot,strafed etc. Seems everyone from John Wayne to Rambo and beyond has been doing it in movies for 60+ years. Part of what made BoB so interesting was seeing white man vs white man. Not trying to sound racist, its just that I guess Im burnt out on seeing Asians getting killed in war movies.

    My great Uncle was in WW2 in the Pac. He had the personality of someone who had seen hell.

    Hopefully the show gets better.

[Saurdaukar]

I believe that the reason it comes off that way is that the pacific theater was so brutal, the enemy looked different than us, worshiped a different god than us and neither side had any compassion for the other. The PTO is probably the best modern example of mans inhumanity to man. Don't get me wrong ETO was a bad place to be too, just not in the same horrific way as the pacific.

I considered most of that when I was thinking about it last night.

At the end of the day; I think you are correct that, no matter how politically incorrect, the fact that the Japanese "looked different" than us and because their values were different (religion, government, etc) than ours, the PTO is the obvious choice.

My next thought was that any discussion of humanity or brutality in the face of a lack of the former begins and ends with the Holocaust so that dog doesn't hunt.

Perhaps its more our perception of the IJA being populated by fanatically loyal, death > capture types in comparison to the majority of the German soldiers who were "people."  I dont think we ever viewed the Japanese as human beings, frankly.  

Dunno.  It was an interesting question to ponder.  Whatever the combination of catalysts, Vietnam fits the same  mold and serves as a backdrop for the same basic message: "War = bad... mmmkay?"

The description of the Eastern cultures as "alien" is probably more spot on than we realize.  

Even the fallschirmjager in BoB were depicted as fearful.  I dont recall any movie/series/show about the PTO wherein any single Japanese soldier, airman or seaman was ever perceived as anything less than a machine.

The scene last night where the Marines were taking pot shots at the guy in the creek?  Did you feel an ounce of compassion for him?  I didn't.  More importantly; no matter how twittleed up that is; I think the point of that scene was to show that they didnt have much compassion for their own lives either.  Read: inhuman.

[Rino]

DVR locked and loaded.

+1   

[SIK1]

If you want to compare holocausts you might want to look at what the Japanese did to the Chinese, and all the other races that they thought were inferior. They were not as organized as the Nazis but they were without a doubt every bit as lethal, so that dog does indeed hunt.

[1pLUs44]

  For me, personally, I think my own experience of watching this was tainted by 2 things.

 1. I tried to compare it to Band of Brothers. That cast was unreal..and so far this one has come up short.

 2. Years of being desensitized of seeing asians get bombed,shot,strafed etc. Seems everyone from John Wayne to Rambo and beyond has been doing it in movies for 60+ years. Part of what made BoB so interesting was seeing white man vs white man. Not trying to sound racist, its just that I guess Im burnt out on seeing Asians getting killed in war movies.

    My great Uncle was in WW2 in the Pac. He had the personality of someone who had seen hell.

    Hopefully the show gets better.

I actually liked it, reminds me of whenever I read "Edson's Raiders." Especially with the part of the ships being blown apart and what not. THAT was really cool special effects.

[Saurdaukar]

If you want to compare holocausts you might want to look at what the Japanese did to the Chinese, and all the other races that they thought were inferior. They were not as organized as the Nazis but they were without a doubt every bit as lethal, so that dog does indeed hunt.

I am familiar with the actions of the IJA in China and throughout SE Asia.  I do not dispute that the actions were the very definition of 'inhuman.'  How you can use live civilians for bayonet practice is beyond me.

However, I also don't understand how one can throw another human being in an oven.

Qualitatively, its a matter of opinion, I suppose.  Although we might as well be chasing our tail discussing who was the "better man;" Hirohito or Hitler.

Given that, I did some brief searches on Google for quantitative comparisons and estimates are all over the place...

Found this on Wikipedia; directly relevant to our discussion:

   It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%. -The Looting of Asia, Chalmers Johnson

Guess youre right.  The Japanese appear to have had a greater quantitative impact, too.

Its amazing what human beings can do to each other if given the appropriate motivation... such an interesting creature we are.  Civilized as can be until that motivation comes along and we revert back to being animals.

[MORAY37]

Wow, they really got going right off the bat. No basic training, just right into Guadalcanal.

Yup. 

Probably because they only spend three or so episodes with one soldier's unit, then move to another story line. (at least that's what I've read about the series) If they developed it like BoB, there'd only be a single episode of in-theater action.

[EskimoJoe]

Does anyone know where I can stream the first episode online? My Step-dad doesn't have HBO here on the East Coast, I
didn't get to watch it  

[Maniac]

Anyone seen a torrent for this one anywere.