Men's Journal

A new miniseries bears down on the brutal, sometimes barbaric fighting in the Pacific theater.

By Wook Kim

There’s a scene in the first episode of HBO’s World War II miniseries, The Pacific, in which a group of young Marines begin their assault on Guadalcanal. As they storm the beach, the troops encounter none of the expected resistance; except for a recently deserted camp, in fact, there’s no sign at all of the enemy. Advancing inland slowly and silently, the enlistees silently pause in a sun-filled clearing before entering a dense mass of jungle vegetation. There’s no mistaking the symbolism, which is straight out of Conrad: What lies beyond is dark, unknowable, minatory.

The moment is beautiful and despairing all at once, a lyrical first note in the symphony of violence and mayhem about to play out over 10 epic, hour-long installments. (With a budget of $200 million, the series is the most expensive in the history of television.) The Pacific borrows the narrative structure of its 2001 companion series Band of Brothers (along with its producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks), but that’s about it. The Pacific theater rendered here is a hellish odyssey of endurance and moral equivocation rather than a mere triumph of enemies bravely overcome. (It’s also, at times, more vivid than you might like it to be — for starters, there’s a scene depicting a Marine extracting a gold tooth from a still-living Japanese soldier.) And instead of an ensemble cast of the Greatest Generation, the story follows the fates of three real-life marines who fought in a campaign still largely unknown or misunderstood by most Americans.

To properly tell a story of such monumental scope required a monumental production. “We filmed from August of 2007 to May of 2008 — with two entire units shooting simultaneously,” says writer and co-executive producer Bruce C. McKenna. (Since filming on the dozens of tiny islands and atolls that were the Pacific’s battlegrounds was impossible, the episodes showing the white sand beaches and humid jungles of Guadalcanal and New Britain were shot in Port Douglas, Australia; those featuring the forbidding landscapes of Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa were shot in a rock quarry not far from Melbourne.) The rookie producer recalls the queasy thrill of walking onto a set and “seeing 1,400 people working — and realizing we were spending close to a million dollars every day.”

Watching the series in its entirety is a bruising experience that will likely shock the millions of viewers unfamiliar with the particular brutality that marked most of the combat in the Pacific theater. The writers scoured scores of books and official histories, but the primary source material came from a pair of remarkable battlefield memoirs: Robert Leckie’s Helmet For My Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Leckie’s sprawling remembrance is filled with boozy brawls and camp camaraderie; Sledge was a quiet 20-year-old Southern gentleman when he enlisted, and his account is spare, measured — and lacerating. Both served in the fabled 1st Marine Division, and both endured their particular hells on a five-square-mile speck of coral called Peleliu. Unlike 1,794 of their fellow soldiers, both Leckie and Sledge survived.

The three-episode arc concentrating on Peleliu — one of the most ferocious battles of the entire war — forms the centerpiece of the series, illuminating the snarling hatred displayed by combatants on both sides like no popular account of the war ever has. Perhaps the great legacy of The Pacific, though, will be the way it subverts the red-white-and-blue-tinged mythology of a square-jawed John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima.

Both Leckie and Sledge, says a clearly admiring McKenna, were “searingly honest about the moral strengths and failings of everyone around them — including themselves.” It’s the “failings” part that’s been largely whitewashed in popular accounts of the Pacific war, but Sledge also wrote that “Uncommon valor was displayed so often, it went largely unnoticed.” This series, which comes at you from both angles and then some, will have you reconsidering what you think you know about war — or at least this war.

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The Pacific airs on HBO on Sunday, March 14 at 9 PM EST/PST.

Watch the trailer: