The US had a big advantage because our factories were never attacked , they could crank out boats, tanks, planes, bombs, guns, etc. around the clock. Once production got going we were able to get a big advantage by making more equipment then the other side. It certainly helped a great deal to use bases in England for bombing raids and also to launch the Normandy invasion.
It’s not so much that they are being portrayed as an underdog as they are being protrayed as a few isolated companies of Marines and not a force of 11,000.
Yes…they really did fight like that…and yes…it was greatly flawed. Later in the war some Japanese commanders forbad this type of fighting so there was Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Pelielu (spellings?)
Japanese had much less artillery than other armies and less heavy weapons. Their tanks were shit and few.
The Japanese tactics shown in Pacific were, IMHO, probably close to what they did.
Why did they do this? Because they worked up to that point. Think about it…you are a peasant from China thrown in the front line and see that coming? You are poorly armed and less then stellar in your conviction to fight? You will break.
Against the Amercans though…with their determination and their love of artillery and firepower? It just becomes stupid. Some of those fights in GC were like … a billion Japs dead and one American was winged in the arm. (ok I exaggerate but something like that )
Keep in mind when considering the chronology. BoB covers essentially one year from episode 2 on. We’re not even in 1943 timeline wise, so we still have nearly 3 more years of the War to cover.
It’s a shame no one has written a similar scholarly (not that Ambrose’s work was very scholarly) treatment of a Marine rifle company in the Second World War. It would probably help tighten up the narrative.
There are all kinds of film making conventions to connote the passage of time. But they’re not using any of them. It’s as if they’ve been on the island for a week, and then get on a boat. They have not adapted the origonal war memoirs well for episodic television.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘scholarly’, but there have been hundreds of books written about the battle of Guadalcanal, and thousands written about the Pacific campaigns, many wrltten by historians and a pretty fair number of first person accounts. I don’t think the program lacks information – they write the action sequences accurately, but they don’t stitch them togther very well.
I mean that Band of Brothers’ source material was Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers book. While not a scholarly work, it was note worthy in the fact that it was essentially a combat chronicle of a single parachute infantry company from training to combat. Insofar that it’s a combat chronicle is not unusual, but you won’t really find them on the unit level as small of as a company. I’ve read hundreds of books on the American experience in World War 2, and I can recall nothing similar for a unit of that size in the Pacific Theater of Operations. Narrative books of that nature in the Pacific tend to be from Division to Regimental size, or individual memoirs.
I think since BoB only needed to follow one company to tell it’s story, it was able to have a tighter flow. That’s really because of it’s source material. That’s not to say that Ambrose’s book is better then Helmet for My Pillow or With the Old Breed. In fact when I recently reread it for the first time since high school it struck me as very poorly written, but must have helped keep the writers focused. Staying with a single company rather than 3 different Marines in two different regiments makes it alot easier.
And it’s going to be even more confusing when Sledge gets to the 5th Marines, Leckie leaves the 5th Marines and gets sent home, and Bastilogne gets sent on his little tour before joining the 5th Marine Division.
As an aside, I’d like to be wrong about there not be a work on a single Marine rifle company’s experience from state side to VJ Day. In fact if anyone knows of a book along those lines I’d love to read it.
i think they made guadalcanal seem like one night of fish in a barrel type fighting
I am not going to disagree with your points, but there were some books written following the history of individual units. Unfortunately, not infantry units.
Most of the ones I recall are about ships (USS Enterprise, for example) or the Black Sheep squadron.
I never read much about the US Army’s experiances, except for Bataan.
To be fair, the fish had machineguns.
Ah, yeah… I should clarify. There is plenty written on the larger warships, and plenty on individual aviation units. The poor bloody infantry has not really attracted that sort of attention at that low of a level.
With the Old Breed is great, one of the best memoirs to come out of the war, but it’s just really about Eugene Sledge. Not Kilo company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.
Episode 3: yet another with no sense of time. How long were they in Australia? Seemed about a week, and that only because the march near the end was supposed to take 3 days.
Yeah, I agree, that’s one thing that has seemed to totally escape this series. I feel like I need a read-along companion to the series just to figure out what’s going on some of the time.
HBO has a kind of read along companion on the web site. I figured I would enjoy the series more the first time through if I knew who everyone was, so I went looking there. At least 3 of the marines looked enough alike that I couldn’t tell the difference in the first episode, and I didn’t know any names.
It helps to have some context on the battles as well. Tenaru just seemed like, “We’re going to guard this river crossing”. I didn’t get from the show that they were part of a perimeter formed around the captured air base.
At the beginning of Pt. 3 it was explained that after Guadalcanal it would take almost a year for the military to arm up enough to push further, so I expected that it would be an extended stay. It might seem like a wasted episode to some who are looking for battle, but it gave some much needed characterization. I enjoyed Leckie’s interaction with Stella’s family enough to not mind the lack of action.
Same here, and agreed. Plus, boobies!
However, once they went back to the stadium after the hike I immediately couldn’t recognize any characters. I swear I actually thought to myself “all these white boys look the same.” This is notable because I am white, but felt like I was trying to distinguish faces from a different race. First time I’ve ever had that experience with my own ethnicity. When the two guys were standing there and one is told he’s being transferred to intelligence, I had no idea who either of the two guys were. Or, for that matter, who the third guy dressing them down was.
Also, toward the end there seemed to be a second Australian family that showed up out of nowhere with some other soldier I’d never seen before. I couldn’t follow that at all. Did we see her before? Have we seen him before? Was he in previous episodes?
I have never in my life been so completely unable to distinguish characters before. I remember similar minor issues with Band of Brothers in the first couple episodes, but it quickly became clear who was who. With this, however, it’s getting much, much worse. Especially because these guys aren’t all in the same company, I never have any clue what the hell is going on.
I recognize the gun that gets hot and nothing else. But even then, the guy who wields it who burned his hand I couldn’t pick out of a lineup to save my life. It’s really quite frustrating.
Also, this is a really lame complaint because these are real stories, but I was totally psyched to finally care about a character for the first time, that being Leckie. Here we finally have a guy with something to get back safe to that I was invested in. Get back to the cute Greek chick, Leckie! I’ll be rooting for you, and will put extra effort in trying to recognize you. But then she dumps him. Fuck, now I don’t care about any of the characters at all yet again. Gah!
I think I can tell the major characters apart now but I really had to work at it.
The 2nd Aussie family at the end was also in an earlier scene. The earlier scene was the one where the father said “keep your hands off the merchandise” to the Marine.