I need to say something about HBO's "The Pacific," but I'm not sure what

Historical Background, Part 8: Iwo Jima

by Ken

I keep thinking I ought to write something about the Steven Spielberg- and Tom Hanks-produced HBO series The Pacific, especially as tonight, finally, we reach a name that everybody knows, Iwo Jima. (Air time is Sundays at 9pm ET/PT, with innumerable repeats, but as always, check your local listings.)

This follows two episodes devoted to a battle that I suspect hardly any Americans have heard of: the incredibly bloody fight for the inconsequential island of Peleliu, in the Palau Islands, whose airstrip was seen as a gateway to the Philippines. Possession of that airstrip, the strategic thinking went, was "do or die" for any chance to retake the Philippines from Japanese control. But unfortunately U.S. intelligence had no inkling of the elaborate network of heavily fortified (and manned) caves and tunnels in the hills above the airstrip, and so the marines dispatched to take the island literally had no idea what they were going up against. The casualty figures are numbing. According to the Stamford Historical Society's account of the Battle of Peleliu (Sept. 15-Nov. 25, 1944):

The Americans suffered 2336 killed and 8450 wounded. The Japanese suffered 10,695 killed and 202 captured, only 19 of which were Japanese, the others were Korean and Okinawan laborers. The assault on Peleliu resulted in the highest casualty rate for any amphibious assault in the entire Pacific campaign.

For those who haven't been watching, the way The Pacific works, the opening minutes are devoted to some quick background on the historical moment, including pieces of interviews with marines who survived the action in question. I love this stuff. In the case of Peleliu, for example, it's impossible to describe the force of the quiet horror of those marines' recollection of an action expected to take two or three days which stretched to more than ten weeks. Of course the survivors remember the horrible losses. But there's something about the way they recall the absence of water, pointing out that the human body can go surprisingly long without food, but not that long at all without water.

You see the Palau Islands in the Central Pacific Area, north of New Guinea and east of the Philippine island of Mindanao? (You can click on the map to enlarge it.) That's the group that includes tiny, inconsequential Peleliu, the site of unimaginable carnage in the battle for its airstrip, which then went unused -- see update below.

I never heard of Peleliu, so I can say that The Pacific serves a useful educational function. (UPDATE: At the start of Part 8, we learn that Peleliu, once captured, was never used for any military purpose. Even in the planning for an invasion of Japan, General MacArthur decided on a different plan. Which perhaps explains why most of us have never heard of Peleliu. The battle might as well never have happened, except for the fact of the very real losses incurred there.)

Still, the series is able to present only such a tiny, selective portion of the War in the Pacific, and it does so with that always-nervous-making mix of fact and fiction in the dramatized depictions that fill out each episode, so that I never know quite where we're supposed to be going here. That war is hell really shouldn't be news to anyone, should it? And yet Spielberg seems to have gotten away with having nothing more on his mind than that in the making of Saving Private Ryan. But then, I'm the only person I know who thought that a decidedly dubious and largely un-educational undertaking.

Still, as I've gotten to know the characters (I think the producers of series like this forget how long it takes viewers to sort out the individual characters), I've found myself more compelled by the drama -- without enough personal knowledge of the events to know how well or badly I'm being informed historically. The shows have a feeling of authenticity, but that doesn't count for much.

I was surprised, rummaging around the show's page on the HBO website, to find that Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie, two of our central characters, are real persons, who've written real books, Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawaand Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific, about the real war they observed and participated in, on which -- I now discover! -- the series is at least partly based. Maybe all of the characters are based on real people. As with so many other things about the show, I (and I suspect most viewers) just don't know.

When I mentioned to Howie that in tonight's episode (Part 8, as I recall) we get to Iwo Jima, he said he thought I was going to say that tonight we find out who won the war. And again, I can't tell you what function the series has set out to fill. I certainly have the feeling that, while there is a small subset of Americans who remain fascinated by World War II, by and large the war has receded into dim memory, and I guess I think this is a bad thing, though I can't tell you why exactly, beyond the ways in which ignorance of the past is a bad thing generally, and equips us poorly to make decisions about the present and future.

Howie also asked if the show has devoted much attention to the Japanese perspective, an issue he's had with a book on Afghanistan he's reading, Seth Jones's In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan,which devotes careful attention to the life background of many of the American servicepeople it chronicles while treating all the Afghans as interchangeable anonymities. I had to think. On the whole the portrayal of the Japanese in The Pacific has seemed to me limited to the incarnation-of-evil image in the minds of most of the American fighting forces. But then, is there any other way to fight a war? If you're sending soldiers, or sailors or marines, into battle, can they fight with any attitude other than, "It's them or us"? Is there a "nuanced" way to fight a war? (One of the hellish things about war is that it reduces us to beings who think about geopolitical issues and other people in such cartoonish terms.)

Of course nuance is desperately important when it comes to the people who get us into wars and then strategize them. I think an awful lot of us have long had the feeling that we got into both Iraq and Afghanistan without even the most rudimentary knowledge of what was at stake in either region or how it's seen from local perspectives, and this is a singularly terrible way to run a war machine. In addition, in prosecuting any war it's certainly important for all concerned to have given detailed thought to what is and what isn't permissible behavior.

Those issues don't come up in The Pacific, and I'm not sure they should. I know that I will come away from the series knowing more about the War in the Pacific than I knew. What I'm not so sure about is how much of what I need to know about the Pacific war I'll come away knowing. I'm really curious to know what other people's experience of the series has been -- including those who chose to give it a pass, as I almost did.

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