The Pacific

Here's an account from the New York Daily News' Bill Gallo, a WWII Marine vet who thinks it was pretty damn realistic (I don't recall if this was posted here earlier or not):

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2010/03/14/2010-03-14_yes_its_as_real_as_hell.html

He reviewed every episode and while thumbing through them it's mostly a play-by-play kind of thing but he throws in good tid bits of his own experience. At the end of the 10th episode review he said there were a few liberties taken with plot, but that it was the most realist war depiction since Saving Private Ryan.

I'm sure that there are vets who don't like this kind of thing or don't think anything would match their experiences -- and I'm sure that's true. Hell, many have commented that the scenes in the series were tame compared to what was depicted in the books. Still, I thought the war scenes in The Pacific were some of the most intense I've ever seen.

Even if it didn't hit it right on the head, and it had to be fairly close, I'd have to think to most who watched this series that they have an even greater respect for the men who fought in this war, what they went through and what they sacrificed.

 

Rosc, that's what I've been saying. I just repeated what two gentlemen who should know told me. They felt it was glamorized too much. I don't know. I wasn't there. I can only go by what they said they experienced.

 

Drip: Do not discount the possibility that these men saw their reality depicted by talented (and mostly handsome) professional actors and THAT ALONE turned them off to the series, no matter how hard it worked for versimilitude.
Of course, their own memories are not reliable at this point. That's human nature. We alter insupportable memories to get past them.

 

One way to really show the horror of war would have been to include a main character who got killed coming off a landing craft on his first day of battle. Spend a lot of time on him in the opening episode and then - BAM - he's gone.

 

You may have a point there Michael.

 

BTW: The Military History Channel is reshowing, on no fixed schedule but pretty regularly, the BBC documentary from the late '60s "World at War." People on this thread should check this out -- not for the newsreel footage, but for the interviews with senior participants. This series was done to get people on the record before they checked out and in something that's unbelievable today, they cooperated. Genda, the aviator who planned and led the Pearl Harbor attack, cooperated. Albert Speer cooperated.
I predict that if some television operation tried to do a documentary on the Afghan War or 9/11 or the Iraq War 20 years from now, nobody would cooperate. And that goes for Barack Obama as much as for G.W. Bush.

 

Drip, this is how you phrased your comment in case you forgot, so what the fuck kind of response did you expect?

That's a far cry from you more recent posts, where you toned it down to "They felt it was glamorized too much. I don't know, I wasn't there," and that first post gave no specific number and no mention of where you spoke to these WWII vets and why.

So that should give a little more context as to why I said you're full of shit and why Steak also called you out. Perhaps had you put a little more thought into that first post and explained yourself better we wouldn't have had a reason to call you out.

 

Yeah, unlike a lot of people I don't having a running war with Drip (or anyone else, really) on this board. But his post was the kind of blanket "take my word for it" statement that I didn't think should just be let go.

 

Points well taken. And steak, i can't have a war with anyone who acknowledges the greatness of Kenny "The Snake" Stabler. He's always been one of my favorites along with Dan Pastorini.

 

The son of Robert Leckie gives his thoughts on the series. An interesting perspective to say the least. Now I know things on TV and the movies are not always accurately portrayed for dramatic sake, but I got a kick out of the son saying there wasn't one girlfriend in Australia - there were many!

http://www.recordernewspapers.com/articles/2010/05/27/the_citizen/news/doc4bfd962bac1c1654993714.txt

 

Good stuff from the family.

But the writer had two glaring errors in there. He got the title of Leckie's book wrong, calling it "The Helmet is My Pillow," and also later referred to him as a solider rather than a Marine.

Calling a Marine a solider just shows a lack of knowledge. Getting the title of the book wrong is just poor journalism.