The Pacific (HBO Mini Series)

[Miriel]

Anyone else watch this? It's from the creators of Band of Brothers (one of the best mini series ever imho).

It's amazing and awful at the same time.

Amazing because of the scope, the realism, and I love the format (which they used in BoB as well) where they start off each episode with real life veterans of the war in the Pacific.

Awful cause I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so gut-wrenching and tragic. Band of Brothers was more about the war itself, and the Pacific is much more about the effects of war (the unimaginable soul-crushing effects) on the individual soldiers. The war in the Pacific was so much more brutal, it's hard to watch most of the scenes and sometimes I'll have disturbing nightmares after watching an episode.

I've pretty much loved every single mini series that HBO has put out. Band of Brothers, Rome, Angels in America, etc. It's always top quality stuff.

[Del Murder]

Haha you said BoB and I was like wtf does Loony BoB have to do with this?

Yeah, amazing and awful are the two words to describe this series. HBO does a great job with these shows and they have the credibility to make me believe that what they portray is as accurate is it can be.

I did not know how absolutely brutal the Pacific war was until I saw this. The soldiers in Europe had it easy compared to these guys. Hits home for me all the more since this was the campaign my grandfather participated in. The conditions were absolutely dreadful, and the Japanese were relentless. I still can't comprehend what would possess their people to take up this kind of cause and commit the brutality that they did. So much of WWII is about what the Nazis did in the Halocaust, which was completely barbaric, but should not overshadow all the unnecessary brutality and death that the Japanese caused.

Soon there will be no more veterans of this war and it will be sad. My grandpa is 85 and still going strong. He talks about the war sometimes but he never said anything about it until a few years ago.

The show isn't as good as Band of Brothers, but it is still powerful stuff. It does a great job showing how not just bodies, but minds and souls can be destroyed during war.

[Crop]

I'd love to watch it, but in this country those selfish bastards at Sky have stuck it on Sky Movies for some reason, which I don't have and would have to pay extra for. I'll have to catch it when it comes on a channel I have in about a year or something.

I agree Del, it'll be a sad day when all the veterans of WW2 are gone. The last person who faught in the trenches in WW1 died a few months ago, and it seemed like the end of an era, even to me. Now no one in the world knows what it was like in the trenches of WW1.

[Cuchulainn]

Love it. Also loved Band of Brothers. That speech by the German General still makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

[Madame Adequate]

I've got to see this. Compared to the Western Front there's not nearly enough material out there about the Eastern Front, the Pacific, or China.

And yes, the Japanese were incredibly vicious and that often seems to be overlooked - China and Korea especially have very good reasons for still being angry, not least because Japan hasn't really admitted to it. The thing about the Nazis is that they absolutely were as bad, just not to us Western enemies because the Nazi ideology simply didn't consider us the inveterate and incorrigible enemies that the Jews/Slavs/Bolsheviks were. Compare the death rates for American and British POWs to Russian; it's something like 3 or 4% vs. around 60%. So as terrible as they were to us, we were fighting them when they were feeling a sense of mutual honor and worthiness. We were belligerents rather than ideological foes.