The Pacific

[Sp!der]

Has someone watched the first episodes which were released yesterday? how was it? as good as "Band of Brothers?".... please discuss!

[magictrick]

Has someone watched the first episodes which were released yesterday? how was it? as good as "Band of Brothers?".... please discuss!

I PVR'ed it but haven't watched yet. Will see in the next few days.

But just as my opinion, Band of Brothers will be TOUGH to top; it was one heck of a great mini series.

[s09119]

I PVR'ed it but haven't watched yet. Will see in the next few days.

But just as my opinion, Band of Brothers will be TOUGH to top; it was one heck of a great mini series.

Also haven't watched it, but I agree with the second part. I remember we watched that senior year in AP US History, and even the kids who normally think history is a joke were silent with their jaws halfway to the floor.

[Skydiver]

still too early to tell. the best part of BOB was that you got to know the guys, and you haven't gotten to know these guys yet

there's also no 'in training together' stuff, it's the guys on the boat and blammo, you're in the thick of things.

[Col.Foley]

Not as good, has promise. The thingy with the:

Spoiler:

one Japanese officer was very disturbing and I question its validity.

[Skydiver]

you know, about

Spoiler:

the 'taunting' for lack of a better word of the Japanese...i can believe it. Just like i could believe the looting by American soldiers in BOB. Mailing home scavenged (looted) belongings. It was really no different than the guy in BOB that murdered the German prisoners in the early part. and it, as far as they showed, was never reported, never disciplined, the people that witnessed it just turned around and walked the other direction.

we want to think that our soldiers were honorable, and I'm not saying that they necessarily weren't, but you have to remember the mindset of the time. There was a LOT of anti-Japanese sentiment. many people hated them on sheer principal for attacking pearl harbor. propaganda painted them as sub-human. There were posters and even comic books where Japanese were written as little more than animals.

And i can believe the cruelty, because humans are just as cruel today.

these men had also spent all night repelling repeated attacks, where the japs threw body after body after body into a futile attack.

they also had yet to fully understand the mindset of the Japanese. the whole 'death before dishonor' thing. it's an alien concept, even to us today.

post 911, there were people 'how can they kill themselves flying a plane into a building?', and didn't understand that, to the mindset of those jihadists, they weren't killing themselves, they were guaranteeing themselves a 1 way express trip to heaven.

[Col.Foley]

That really is not the issue,or at least my issue. I can see it, I can believe that it might have happened in every one of any circumstance. It is something that I could expect, just the whole thing with the:

Spoiler:

grenade and then we have to do something WORSE

Just strikes me as having an agenda, which is what is REALLY beginning to annoy me these days. everyone has to have an agenda, now I do not know for sure if it is but Hanks specifically came out and said that we were a bunch of rascist hate mongers who was hell bent on wiping out the Japanese. And when he made those statements he missed the point on why we had to attept to wipe out the Japanese. True there is rascism, there is violence, and there is evil in war, some of the examples that you gave from BoB indicate that, but it would have been much better had Hanks never opened his mouth, or waited until after the show was over so we could judge it for its own merits. I just hate the feeling that everything has to have an agenda,and ontop of it it is usually the agenda that is contrary to my perception of the world.

As for BoB

Spoiler:

To the best of my knowledge and to the best of the research I have done they did not ever find out who had done it. It was certainly never confirmed in the mini series that it was Spears, and if it was later on this was the story about Easy Company. If it had been someone else, or if it had come out that Spears had in fact killed those prisoners then it would not have been important to the story at hand. Innocent till proven guilty, and Spears proved to have extreme courage under fire later on in the war.

[Skydiver]

see (about part one)

Spoiler:

I never saw the deliberate winging as payback for the grenade, although now that you mention it, it likely had some effect on them. What I saw were people that were mentally and physically exhausted after repelling an attack all night, to then be confronted with what i saw was a desperately suicidal Japanese, and they didn't know how to handle it.

I think the Americans had yet to learn about the Japanese 'death before dishonor' attitude. Those that had come from Europe were used to the Germans surrendering when it was clear they were losing. The Germans were willing to surrender to survive, the Japanese, just the opposite. they would die before surrendering. And the Americans had yet to totally figure that out. They probably thought that jap just standing there was nuts and had broken from combat fatigue instead of recognizing what he wanted, begging for death to preserve his honor.

There was a lot of stuff that happened in WWII, stuff that never got written about or got deliberately spun in a more positive light. It took our govt years to admit (and they haven't totally) that the only real difference between our concentration camps and the Germans is that we didn't go about it with a deliberate desire to murder and exterminate.

the Japanese were an enemy like none we'd ever encountered before, with a sense of resolve and also brutality that we just weren't familiar with. I think there will be more brutality in this series than there was in BOB, simply because it was a different war.

Just look at the distances, the environment, how many times American troops were basically dropped off on an enemy occupied island and told 'ok, take it. be back later' and then left on their own to take on an entrenched enemy, with no real air support or artillery. There were no back lines to retreat to, little to no reinforcements, and there was only so much the military could do given the massive distances involved.

[LoneStar1836]

I don't have HBO, but I do have DirectTV and to my surprise the 101 channel showed Part One last night.

BOB is a tough act to follow. The first ep of the Pacific is not as good as the first one for BOB. So far you hardly know any of these guys and just get thrown into the mix. Not that I need to see boot camp again, but this series seems it will be more focused on these 3 individuals rather than focus on a particular company.

Not as good, has promise. The thingy with the:

Spoiler:

one Japanese officer was very disturbing and I question its validity.

Spoiler:

After what Hanks said (since like you I don't agree with the way he said it) I kind of question its placement in this episode, but I can imagine things like that did happen during that war. Our guys got drug down into the brutality of the way the Japanese fought. Should they have used the guy for target practice? No, but I certainly don't question the mindset of having to kill them all since Japaneses troops were not going to be taken alive. Since the Japanese used tricks like that guy with the grenade, it forced our guys to have to go along and shoot all the wounded to avoid being killed themselves. Though earlier in the ep when they were walking through the jungle and came upon those dead American soldiers tied to trees implying that the Japs had used them as bayonet practice. How anyone who survived the war in the Pacific came out of that sane is beyond me.

I agree with Sky that this series will be much more brutal than BOB in what it shows just because of the particular ugliness of the war in that theater. We had to clear every island to practically the last Japanese soldier, and then when they get to the islands near Japan where the civilians would rather kill themselves and their children than be taken alive.

[Skydiver]

also, as to prisoners

Spoiler:

presuming they coulda caught them...where were they gonna keep them? they had no secure facilities, and the japanese were showing that there was no such thing as 'yep, i give up, i'll go over there now' like the germans did.

any japanese captured alive would try to kill as many americans as he could before he killed himself. (as evidenced by the grenade guy)

that whole theater was 'kill or be killed', very literally. and, at least in this point in the war, there was no such thing as 'my i address my troops' (like with the surrendered german officer)

we, as americans, were under suppied, under equipped and under trained (from the tropic survival standpoint). there was no such thing as a front line, just which island was under whose control. retreat to safety was often a multi day boat ride away, and our air planes had what? 500 mile range? maybe 1000?

we didn't 'get' the japanese mindset, so it was easier to see them as animals than to understand their overriding sense of honor. and they likely saw us as the same, dishonorable dogs. we were lesser forms of life to them

it's my understanding as well that this miniseries follows three main characters, rather than a revolving group of men. so it will be intrinsically different

[magictrick]

Got around to watching the first episode and it was pretty good. Not as good as Band of Brothers' first episode but I see the promise in this series. What I really liked about BoB was the fact that it followed an entire company instead of just a few main characters. That concept was what made BoB unique and I'm not sure if this will be the same since its only focusing on three main characters. But we'll see

Not as good, has promise. The thingy with the:

Spoiler:

one Japanese officer was very disturbing and I question its validity.

Spoiler:

They had just spent the entire night fighting Japanese soldiers and as their reward in the morning one Japanese soldiers blows himself up with two Americans. I don't have a hard time believing that such a similar thing did happen. Remember, in war, unimaginable things happen all the time.

[s09119]

I think we need to remember that there's a difference between how we want our soldiers to act and how, oftentimes, they do act. Most soldiers obey the laws of war, but sometimes things like that happen. It's better to acknowledge it than try and rewrite history.

[Skydiver]

'John Wayne' wasn't always out there

these men got tired and frustrated and ticked off and angry and fed up...and i'm sure plenty of them did things they're not proud of. And a lot of those actions were things that were never spoken of again. because while a person's fellow soldiers might have witnessed something 'he who lives in a glass house should throw the first stone'....can't go taking them to task for doing something you yourself have done.

so the stories just never got told.

I'm sure the looting of abandoned homes in europe was something the military officially denied every existed...but there were too many soldiers who have those stolen (found) possessions for it not to have happened.

Not to mention the fact that hasn't the US govt returned lots of stuff they officially confiscated and 'found'? Especially once it became known that some of the german possessions they found and took were really things that had already been stolen from the Jews or the occupied civilians.

Just like they said in BOB, the guy that found and took Hitler's photo album denied it, yet they said at the end that he had it.

with the guy on part one

Spoiler:

I think it likely started out as an honest and simple bad shot. someone was trying to kill him, but just winged him, which gave others the idea to do it too. To them it had to seem like he was asking for it...i mean who under fire, just stands there, TRYING to get shot?

[Dr. Michael Benjamin]

I haven't seen it yet and I don't know if I will get the chance for a while. When does it begin? Pearl Harbor? Guadalcanal? I suppose it's best the series doesn't begin as Band of Brothers did because it might come across as a bit too formatted. I spent a fascinating afternoon in the National WWII Museum downtown about a month ago. If you ever find yourself in New Orleans I recommend stopping by for a few hours you will greatly enjoy it. I have developed even greater respect for the troops after going.

[Skydiver]

guadalcanal