WHY WE FIGHT, EASTERN DIVISION: With apologies to fans of Richard Chamberlain and Alex Haley, the greatest miniseries of all time, hands down, please don't bother objecting, was Band of Brothers. I roll my eyes at baby-boomer self-congratulation and loathe reruns, yet I've watched this series in its entirety three times. So, as I've said here before, I'm pretty excited for The Pacific, Spielberg & Hanks's companion to BoB, focusing on the American campaign that fought leftward, rather than rightward. Set your DVRs for March 14.
BoB was largely about heroism and cameraderie, but it also did a good job showing some of the innumerable hellishnesses of war -- cold, confusion, the enormous consequences of both large and seemingly small decisions and mistakes, murderous egotism and bureacracy, painful or numbing attrition, the hollowing out of stout men; to say nothing of the ceaseless violence and inhumanity that they experienced or found. I do not mean to diminish the horrors of the European theater by saying that, from what I've read, the Pacific was far worse. Both sides of the Pacific campaign believed they were fighting a savage and subhuman enemy, something that should have been a mutual fallacy but that became, in some measure, a self-fulfilling truth. Because the Japanese were, for various reasons, unwilling or unable to consider surrender, the territory in play so discrete and small, and the Japanese defensive preparation time so great, the battles were more intense than in Europe. Because the battles were fought on volcanic rocks, not in forests and across farmland, it was impossible for the Americans in the Pacific to dig foxholes or find much decent cover. Because of the greater difficulty in crossing an ocean than in crossing a continent, the forces in the Pacific rotated off the front lines less frequently than did their European cohort. The casualty rate of junior officers -- college boys fresh out of officer training school, targeted by the Japanese because of their leadership and susceptible because of their inexperience -- who landed on Okinawa was ridiculous, something like 80%, if I remember correctly. BoB was brutal, but lyrically so; expect the same, but more so, in The Pacific.*
The emblem, or one emblem, of the brutality in the Pacific theater was the battle for Sugar Loaf Hill, a small mound of barren rock on Okinawa. It took the Marines a week and 2600 casualties to take Sugar Loaf.
Today, it takes a few minutes to climb the stairs up Sugar Loaf -- at least the part of it that's not a luxury-goods mall. For the trickle of veterans who have returned, that's got to be a surreal place.
*Steven and Tom -- if one of you wants to send me a screener, you know where to find me.
