“Right now, some lucky bastard’s headed for the South Pacific. He’s gonna get billeted on some tropical island, sitting under a palm tree with six naked native girls, helping him cut up coconuts so he can hand-feed ’em to the flamingos.” The character Warren Muck shared this perception of the Pacific theater in the first episode of Band of Brothers, as he and the rest of Easy Company sailed to England. Nearly a decade later, HBO would release another mini-series, The Pacific, which completely dismantled this idyllic image in ten harrowing episodes. And perhaps that is why—with its in-your-face brutality, psychological, and morally gray characterization—the show’s tenth anniversary came and went earlier this year with little fanfare. It is a show that we (especially white Americans) want to forget, just as we want to uphold the myth World War II was a “good war” fought by a united country during simpler times. The Pacific is an inconvenient reminder that there are no good wars.
Truth be told, while I appreciate The Pacific’s more critical perspective, I’ve found it hard to resist the tug Band of Brothers exerts on my heartstrings. This dynamic also plays out within the extensive “HBO War” fandom on Tumblr and other sites, where The Pacific has never held the same place in fans’ hearts that Band of Brothers has. I want to interrogate my own bias as a fan, an American, and a historian. After all, if film and television shape how the public understands, memorializes, and mythologizes the past, then Band of Brothers and The Pacific are particularly important because they were marketed as semi-documentaries, grounded in veteran oral histories, memoirs, and scholarly sources. They act as authoritative texts.1
When I first watched Band of Brothers, I fell hard for its sense of heroism, romanticized and oozing with nostalgia. The show buys into the story that World War II was “America’s golden age, a peak in the life of society when everything worked out and the good guys definitely got a happy ending.”2 The camaraderie developed within Easy Company almost makes the show feel like a sports movie, where the team somehow comes together and overcomes immeasurable odds. There is even a baseball montage at the end of the final episode; defeat the Nazis and then play a pick-up game with your boys, what’s more American pie than that? While there are certainly moments of great physical and mental pain in Band of Brothers, they are “ultimately placed within a larger frame of patriotic valor” in the fight for a just cause. The show allows the audience to continue believing the myth.3
Put simply, Band of Brothers makes me feel better after watching it. And I’m not alone. I asked members of the HBO War fandom on Tumblr (names changed for anonymity) which of the two shows they preferred and why. Dana said that Band is a “comfort show,” while The Pacific is “a lot harder” for them to watch due to the extent of the atrocities depicted on screen. Kirk also described The Pacific as “brutal” and “emotionally taxing,” while Band is “accessible and rewatchable.”
The consensus among everyone I talked to was that The Pacific felt like the more accurate show. For a few people, that is precisely why they appreciate it the most. Caitlyn especially valued how the show demonstrates the mental trauma soldiers brought home. Lacey agreed and pointed to the emotional realism of The Pacific’s ending, with the formerly doe-eyed Eugene Sledge falling apart in his father’s arms. War is hell, and The Pacific shows the audience no mercy with its under-the-helmet storytelling.
When The Pacific premiered in 2010, a Time critic described it as “part Vietnam, part Iraq, part horror movie.”4 By the end of its first episode, The Pacific signals that following its three main characters (Eugene Sledge, Robert Leckie, and John Basilone) will be a grueling experience. Unlike in Band, we do not spend the first episode watching the troops bond during training. Instead, we get a taste of the terrors to come: blatant racism toward the Japanese, an unforgiving jungle environment with torrential rain, blood and gore and disease, guerrilla warfare and heart-wrenching night battles with an unseen enemy. The episode fades out as the Marines sing “How fucked are you now?” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.” The question may well be intended for the viewer, who faces nine more episodes.
For people knowledgeable about the Pacific theater, the show’s direction is not shocking. The war in the Pacific was quite different in environment, psychology, and military strategy from the war in Europe. Yet, just as The Pacific’s Marines have no idea what they are getting into (many cannot even pronounce Guadalcanal), much of the audience in 2010 was unprepared as well. Most Americans know little about the Pacific theater beyond the flag-raising at Iowa Jima and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The obscurity of this history adds to the fear and confusion the viewer feels as they trudge their way through mud and maggots with the Marines.
The core themes of The Pacific—brutality, psychological terror, and a shifting moral compass—can best be seen through Eugene Sledge’s journey. Determined not to be left behind, Sledge ignores medical advice and joins the Marines with a heart murmur, though not before we hear his father give an ominous warning: “The worst thing about treating those combat boys from the Great War wasn’t that they had had their flesh torn, it was that they had had their souls torn out.” Sledge arrives at the warfront in time for the viewer to watch him suffer through three agonizing episodes covering the Battle of Peleliu. The landing on the beach rivals the infamous Normandy invasion scene from Saving Private Ryan in both accuracy and horror, and watching the Marines make their way across the airfield in the next episode is similarly intense. Then comes the night, which, much like the jungle, is its own character in the show. We hear a Marine loudly whimpering and others struggling to silence him, until someone hits him in the head with a shovel, killing him. Sledge says, somewhat to the viewer’s surprise, “Better him than all of us.”
Through Sledge we meet Merriell Shelton, who at first seems like Sledge’s opposite, but the longer the war goes on the more their personalities blur together. Shelton, who is often referred to as “Snafu” (military slang for “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up”), exemplifies the darkest side of war. He casually cuts gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers and tosses rocks into their blown out-skulls. He is a man with his soul torn out, and he tries to save Sledge from the same fate. But both men come to a breaking point at Okinawa. A short-tempered Snafu refuses to learn the replacements’ names because “they’ll be dead in two days,” while Sledge disobeys a ceasefire and murders a Japanese soldier with his sidearm. When asked why, Sledge bluntly answers, “We were all sent here to kill Japs, weren’t we? I’d use my goddamn hands if I had to.”
When Sledge returns home, he cannot go back to the life he had before he got “pretty damn good” at killing. He has frequent nightmares and never wants to wear his uniform again. The show ends without any grand visions of brotherhood or patriotism—just a boy walking alone in a field, wondering how he will survive.
American studies scholar Michael C.C. Adams says that when we remember the past, specifically World War II, we often “forget the ugly things we did and magnify the good things.”5 If Band of Brothers mostly magnifies the good things, then The Pacific magnifies the ugly things. Still, both shows fall short of portraying the nuance and complexity this history deserves in the 21st century. Because Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks privileged the memories of white straight men, those memories are largely what have been absorbed by the public. The experiences of Black Americans, women, queer people, and other minority groups who greatly contributed to the war effort abroad and at home are undermined and overlooked. Instead, the white male veteran becomes the war’s most prominent hero and victim.
There is a third installment from Spielberg and Hanks coming soon that focuses on the Eighth Army Air Force bombers who fought in Europe. It would be unacceptable for this story to remain exclusive to white male voices, including behind the camera; almost every episode of Band of Brothers and The Pacific were written and directed by white men. Amid calls for more inclusive representation in Hollywood and historical teaching, Spielberg and Hanks must do their part to force audiences to remember all the good and ugly things about America during this era. As World War II passes out of living memory, we must not mistake myth for history; we must not forget what killing does.
All images from Ebay
- Debra Ramsay, “Television’s ‘True Stories’: Paratexts and the Promotion of HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific,” InMedia 4 (2013).
- Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 2.
- John Bodnar, “Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America,” American Historical Review, 106 (June 2001): 806.
- James Poniewozik, “HBO’s The Pacific: What Fresh Hell,” Time, March 12, 2010.
- Adams, Best War Ever, 1.