TV One of my abiding memories of The Pacific (which just completed its run on Sky Movies HD) will be a shot from episode five which deals with the storming of the beach at Peleliu. For just a fraction of a second, a severed arm is seen flying through the air in the middle distance from a source unknown, as yet again one of the many messy battles starts to purposefully resemble a Picasso or Bacon portrait rather than a coherent action sequence.
Like similar orphaned limbs throughout the series, which have been thrown about by the exemplary production designers or digital effects animators to demonstrate yet another aspect of the horror of war, the fictional source is unknown. In real theatre of battle they’d still become a vital way in which the identity of a dead marine, blasted to pieces, might be discovered.
Except as we learn throughout the back eight episodes (I've previewed the first two previously) the rest of this absolutely superb series is as much about the search for identity in the living as well, about how these marines cope with the transformation that is wrought upon them in the aftermath of Guadalcanal and then in the hellish conditions of Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Still scarred by these skirmishes the 1st Marine Division take their leave in Australia, which is a well earned breather for the viewer too. The pacing of the series is such so that grim war stories aren’t piled on top of one another. Branded a hero, Basilone is shipped home to sell war bonds throughout the country (a thread which will continue through the next few episodes to contrast with the hell in the pacific) as Leckie enters focus. His war story, as far as the series portrays, is one of much waiting, with bursts of action before being shipped home.
Leckie discovers, and this is achingly etched in actor James Badge Dale face, that once he put on the uniform he was marked for death. The effects of this revelation are played out in the next episode, were after the division is stationed at Cape Gloucester, he’s slowly stripped of his dignity, demoted to the kitchen for standing up to his commanding officer, contracts a urinary disease and sent to a mental hospital. Though his fellow marines are unusually sympathetic, he’s unable to even countenance their existence.
Again he becomes an avatar for the audience in a part of the war the audience rarely sees, the pure psychological effects, as we see men who fought at Guadalcanal and broken by the experience locked away (neatly foreshadowing later episodes when in the midst of battle that isn’t possible). Leckie discovers that death won’t necessarily become him, but as he chooses to return to the regiment early we’re left to wonder if that choice makes him crazier than they are.
Meanwhile in episode four, Eugene Sledge leaves basic training. Sledge’s journey is the strongest as we see the young man as I predicted previously experiencing “the gap between the dream of fighting for one’s country and the horrific reality”. The fresh faced youngster dealing with petty injustices of the gremlin-like Snafu and his other brigade colleagues is initially shown (in a beautifully poised key scene) as having great religious fortitude.
In the following episode the newly nicknamed Sledgehammer clutches his bible unable to comprehend Lackie’s Dawkins-like explanation for why he doesn’t believe in God, which is, to paraphrase, if God created everything why does he sadistically allow war? There’s a subliminal religious undercurrent to the whole series though as Sledge’s faith is shaken it has to be said the series sides more with Lackie’s point of view.
That’s no more obvious in the next battle set piece, that storming of the beach at Pelilu, which in employing the same increased shutter speed technique and high speed cutting, directly references the Omaha landings from Saving Private Ryan underscoring that though the geographic locations were diverse the experiences for soldiers on the ground were just as appalling.
We begin to understand why Sledge’s colleagues are so harsh on him – like their Japanese opponents they subliminally have to dehumanise their social group so that their death means less, so that the rapid mortality of those they’re fighting with doesn’t stop them being able to carry out their orders, divesting themselves of their individuality.
Which is the change Sledge undergoes. Firstly his bible becomes little more than a place to keep a tally of the days this brigade has spent in action. Then he takes up smoking after some initial reticence. He even becomes a bully. Finally, he loses his ability to see his opponents as human beings, even when they’ve become prisoners of war, attempting to remove the gold teeth of the fallen for sale on the black market.
It’s at this instant we realise why the series has, with the exception of a few brief shots of behind enemy lines and a moment when Lackie regards the severed hand of a Japanese soldier, offered a one-dimensional view of the war. This is the experience of Sledge and soldiers just like him. It makes killing easier too. And so the process of war continues.
Episode six shows the group’s desperation for water creating twin reasons for fighting to take the airport at Pelilu, for territory but more importantly to survive. As with many of the incidental manoeuvres, the destruction of a Japanese tank is expertly directed as we see heroism born out of anxiety, hundreds of men running directly into gunfire often unable to see just feet in front of them as there vision is blocked by blood and tears.
The strategies developed at headquarters are modified from moment to moment to fit the present circumstances (not too much though – now and then action halts because an officer requires new order on one occasion at the cost of their own life). The actors all went to boot camp in the jungles of Australia and it pays dividends in aiding their ability to give an authentic impression of the difficult choices they’re being asked to make, all too easily scrutinised and criticised by academics and others in retrospect.
The production design becomes more artificial as the series continues, as the scenery changes gradually from verdant green forest to barren dust bowls to unapproachable mud fields. Even if this is a budgetary limitation, it has the added consequence that when Sledge and the 5th Marines reach Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge, its as though their whole world has been reduced to some dusty ground from which they’ll never escape with the unreal quality of a nightmare.
When, in one of the series’ most disturbing scenes, Sledge seeks the origin of a plopping noise and finds Snafu tossing stones into the sodden open cranium of a dead Japanese soldier like tossing cards into a hat, the two realities, sub-conscious and otherwise have finally intermingled. It’s in that moment Sledge divests himself of humanity to become a killing machine and we almost can’t blame him given the grotesque stimulus that have bashed his senses for the many weeks he’s spent outside of civilisation.
His story up until this point is much the same as that of the soldiers portrayed in Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers, shipped in luxury across the country to sell war-bonds as their survivor-guilt sweats through their pores along with the residue of alcohol they turn to, the original events mythologised and rewritten to a point of meaninglessness, as though they happened to someone else. At one point, he even finds himself reading a scripted version of his own experience over the radio.
Your reaction to this episode will be different depending upon your knowledge of the history which I’m about to spoil so I’d skip the next three paragraphs if you’re yet to watch the series and don’t know Basilone’s fate. For much of its emotional duration it’s the story of man who’s caught between survival, public persona and duty but the result of his actions are some of the most emotionally wrenching moments the series has to offer. He's simply not the kind of person who can deal with having ships and buildings named after him.
In asking to train “fresh meat” (as enlistees were described in Starship Troopers) he’s perhaps hoping that he’ll be able to prepare them better than he was when he first entered the danger zone and fairly quickly he shifts from being a grunt to SargeAnt, despite not being certain of his abilities. When camp cook Riggi enters his life, her love for the forces and his love for her saps away his uncertainly and sends him on the road from supposed hero to legend.
Personally, I viewed this with admiration and surprise and not without some doubt as to Basilone’s motives. In retrospect, knowing that he would ultimately die in battle, the wedding night scenes aren’t just tinged with the sadness of a perfect moment snatched during wartime, they’re a portent of certain doom. Though in reality he lived for seven more months, Riggi gives him a look that suggests it’ll be for the last time and she wants to remember the moment.
I would imagine that knowledgeable viewers would note the inevitability of his demise as surely as if he’d deliberately stepped out into a bullet as he runs himself ragged amid Iwo Jima not living long enough to sense the flag being raised. Not knowing about his death, I audibly gasped as the bullets hit because I’d genuinely believed that he would be allowed to prove his worth to himself in battle and live to tell the tale.
The average viewer watching week to week will certainly have a different experience with the series than me. Sky were good enough to send this episodes for review and I watched them back to back over a few days (just as many you will do once the box set is released) which by this point, despite the pauses underscored to me that some series are designed to be watched on a weekly basis if only so that the viewer can calm down.
Unless you have a strong constitution, I would recommend you take a break at this point, because after the sands of Iwo Jima, we’re immediately flung back into Sledge’s harrowing story as the 1st Marine Division land at Okinawa and the moments when the morality of the soldiers finally comes into question as their ability to distinguish between civilians and enemy combatants. Despite what is ultimately a hopeful message, the transition is a big ask.
Thematically redolent of other more recent war zones, it’s also the story of Sledge’s psychological redemption. When he and Snafu (who by now has become a firm friend) stand apparently ready to murder a baby, because of the bleakness of the everything else in the series, not least those moments when soldiers have ended the lives of their fellows for the good of the regiment, for a few tense moments we’re convinced they’re going to do it and indeed it takes the intervention of another to snaps them back into focus. But it requires an act of real humanity, clutching the body of a dying mother as the life saps out of her, before his real identity begins to return and he’s presented as the more enlightened figure he began as, unable to shoot an unarmed soldier. He’s been changed by war – he still smokes – but with a pipe which marks him out as an individual again. Snafu sharing a sunny outcrop Sledge in the closing moments, in contrast seems roughly the same, his attitude to generally keeping his fellow fighters at arms length having been confirmed when one such figure randomly lost their life.
Much of the series is played out in close-up. Partly that’s a result of the medium, its somewhat budgetary, but it also means that like these soldiers we’re in a constant state of surprise, information visual as well as tactical is a precious commodity. We discover a well liked commanding officers has died when his stretcher is carried into shot so that we empathise with the reaction of his troops. When Enola Gay goes about its business, its destructive power is reduced to just few words of reported speech miles away in the war zone at the close of episode nine, abstract and lacking emotion weight in comparison to the slaughter which has just been witnessed.
Other war stories may have (and have) ended there. The Pacific, a series which concerns itself with the interior of the characters follows the “boys” home. Neither Lackie or Sledge are quite able to comprehend their change in lifestyle however gradual it is (the war may be over but their tours of duty continue into the following year). When Lackie returns to his previous employer, the newspaper, to demand his job back he’s full of Carry Grant’s His Girl Friday bravado though later we can see that he’s pretending to be his old self, the cracks developing when faced with the teenage object of his desire, who thankfully is understanding of his state.
Sledge is similarly numb with guilt, perhaps because, unlike his brother and friends, because of his initially high moral code he lost the most. When he says he’ll never wear a uniform again, he means it. He can’t comprehend even using it to attract women let alone to impress the induction clerk of a Polytechnic. Its in the final moments of the episode that Joe Mazzello’s exemplary performance comes full circle as, in the blaze of a different sun, his character finally seems at rest.
Having seen a fair amount of everything including war films, I’ve become rather cynical so my barometer of quality is the depth of my emotion. But the poise with which the Basilone story is unexpectedly resolved with Riggi visiting his parents to return his medal of honour is breathtaking, the wariness, signalled by his brother continuously asking her if she’d like something, and accentuated by the blackness of the house (in comparison to the cosiness of previous dinner table scenes) evaporating as she produces the presentation box and they’re united in grief. Oh how I cried.
The series closes with a final set of caption cards in which the actors faces are replaced with the real marines and short biographical information revealing what happened to them in later decades. As well as emphasising the detailed research of the casting directors in finding actors who time and again bear an uncanny resemblance to their real life counterparts, we’re also reminded that though many of them have died since the second world war, they all, in the main, went on to have long, full lives.
They didn’t die then and mores to the point some of them still live on, as we discover that the veterans who’ve been speaking of their experiences in short documentary prologues at the top of each episode have been portrayed in these very episodes. All too often in war films, even in these kinds of drama documentaries, the audience is divorced from the action somehow, even with the best of performers. Seeing the reality in eyes of the real veterans, some of whom have been rendered speechless during their interview when they attempt to describe what they’ve seen, makes The Pacific all the more impressive because it so vividly speaks for them.
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