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Battlegrounds on ‘Tiny Specks of Earth’
 Alessandra Stanley - New York Times
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March 12, 2010
At war’s end, the cabbie won’t take money from the Marine returning home from the Pacific. “I might have jumped into Normandy but at least I got some liberties in London and Paris,” the driver, a veteran of D-Day, says pityingly. “You gyrenes, you got nothing but jungle rot and malaria. Welcome home.”
Jungle rot and malaria, not to mention dysentery, hunger and nervous breakdowns, are as much a part of “The Pacific” as machine guns and bombing raids. And that helps explain why this mesmerizing World War II mini-series that begins on Sunday on HBO is the second one by the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks team and not the first. “Band of Brothers,” which ran in 2001, was one of the best and most popular series in recent times; not coincidentally, it explored a chapter of history that has been told and retold in movies, television and books.
The happy few in the parachute infantry unit known as Easy Company took viewers with them onto Utah Beach on D-Day, through the Battle of the Bulge, and in the final days of the war, all the way to Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountaintop fortress near Austria. (With a stop to raid Goering’s wine cellar.)
And it is telling that in the final episode of “Band of Brothers,” the men are comfortably ensconced in the drawing room of a commandeered Nazi lodge, solemnly watching a scratchy newsreel of the Battle of Okinawa, one of the most savage and deadly of the war. Even back then, for many the Pacific front seemed distant and imponderable, vitally important but obscure.
“The Pacific” is that newsreel brought to life. This 10-part series follows the First Marine Division from Guadalcanal through the mosquito-infested Peleliu, Cape Gloucester, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. These are places that even the division’s commanding officer, Col. Lewis B. Puller, known as Chesty (William Sadler), dismisses in the opening episode as “tiny specks of earth that we have never heard of.”
Those battlegrounds became famous, but they have since faded from the collective memory in a way that the Normandy invasion or the London blitz have not. This is an overdue but fittingly painstaking and lavish tribute to men who were never supposed to have been forgotten.
The series pivots on three real-life members of the First Marine Division: Eugene B. Sledge and Robert Leckie, both privates, and Sgt. John Basilone, who earned the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal. Mr. Leckie and Mr. Sledge, who both died in 2001, wrote memoirs that are the backbone of the script; Sergeant Basilone, who was put on tour with Hollywood stars to sell war bonds, was almost as famous a hero in his day as Audie Murphy.
Unlike the comrades in “Band of Brothers,” a series that was as intent on the bonds of fellowship as the trials of combat, these three were not best friends who got one another through the war. Their stories complement one another — three different experiences that paint a broader picture — but don’t overlap. The narrative jumps from one character to the other, sometimes muddlingly. In the fog of war movies, some events are hard to follow, a few characters are easily confused, but the series is never less than spellbinding.
The story opens shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Leckie (James Badge Dale), the youngest in an Irish-American family of eight children, signs up for the Marines, without complaint or even much notice from his distracted parents.
In Mobile, Ala., the 18-year-old Sledge (Joe Mazzello) weeps when his father, a doctor, says he cannot enlist because of a heart murmur. It takes months for Sledge to be deemed healthy enough to join the Marines and reunite with his best friend, Sidney Phillips (Ashton Holmes), who by then is a weary veteran of Guadalcanal. (Mr. Phillips is still alive and describes his experiences in one of the mini-documentaries that precede each episode; he was also featured in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary “The War,” and in those archival newsreels and photos there is a shot of Mr. Phillips on Guadalcanal, his back to the camera, relieving himself — a random shot by a combat photographer.)
Basilone (Jon Seda), an experienced noncommissioned officer who has already served in the Philippines, invites two Marine buddies to share Christmas dinner with his large Italian-American family in Raritan, N.J. Even Basilone has no idea what he and his men are in for once they land at Guadalcanal.
The art of warfare keeps evolving and so does the art of filming warfare — battle scenes in “The Pacific” are as vivid, gruesome and haunting as any in “Band of Brothers” and even “Saving Private Ryan,” the movie that Mr. Spielberg directed and that starred Tom Hanks. The scenery on Peleliu or Iwo Jima doesn’t vary much, but the array of carnage — heads exploding, limbs severed, bodies smashed to pieces — is wide and unrelenting.
Downtime is as disturbing as the worst firefights and ambushes. Exhausted, starving men rest on banks of mud filled with the rotting, maggot-covered corpses of Japanese soldiers; a Marine idly tosses stones into the open skull of a recently killed enemy, the crown sheered off like the top of a pineapple. There is nothing noble about this desperate, take-no-prisoners warfare. Japanese suicide bombers blow up the American medics trying to help them. Marines pry out the gold teeth of fallen enemy soldiers, sometimes not waiting until they are dead.
There are moments of comic relief, of course, and also the heavy perfume of Herman Wouk-style romance. On a leave, Leckie has a passionate love affair with an Australian woman in Melbourne. While in training for Iwo Jima, Basilone woos, and weds, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, Lena Riggi (Annie Parisse).
Some details are made up, some experiences are reconfigured, but over all the story lines are faithful to the spirit of the memoirs they rest on. Sledge, who begins the war as a shy, polite guest at someone else’s battlefront, becomes a ferocious combatant, only to be worn down by filth, fatigue, brutality and moral corrosion. He has the hardest time of all readjusting to civilian life. “Something in me died at Peleliu,” Mr. Sledge wrote after the war. “Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.”
“The Pacific” comes at a time when American troops are once again fighting on two fronts against an implacable enemy that combats advanced weaponry with fanaticism and suicide bombers. The series makes its debut a week after “The Hurt Locker” won the Oscar for best picture, and like that film, its tone is in somber tune with the times.
For all its realism, “Band of Brothers” was veined with an almost romantic infatuation with just war and noble warriors. “The Pacific” is harder to watch and all the better for it.
THE PACIFIC; HBO, Sunday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Produced by Playtone and DreamWorks. Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman, executive producers; Tony To, Graham Yost, Eugene Kelly and Bruce C. McKenna, co-executive producers. Cherylanne Martin, Todd London and Steven Shareshian, producers; Kary Antholis, executive in charge of production for HBO Miniseries.
WITH: James Badge Dale (Pfc. Robert Leckie), Joe Mazzello (Pfc. Eugene B. Sledge), Jon Seda (Sgt. John Basilone), Jon Bernthal (Sgt. Manuel Rodriguez), Joshua Bitton (Sgt. J. P. Morgan) and Tom Budge (Pfc. Ronnie Gibson). |
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