March 14 will air the first episode of HBO’s ten hour epic TV miniseries, The Pacific, a very expensive, graphic retelling of the US battles against the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. Much of the ferocious fighting took place on countless islands such as Peleliu. Many of these campaigns are long forgotten.
Co-producers are Tom Hanks
, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman. HBO won an Emmy for a previous miniseries, Band of Brothers, in 2001. The Pacific is a TV production on a much larger scale, even more realistic. It is featured today in the LA Times Calendar section (2/28/2010).
My just completed post for Friends of 1776 featured the biography of Marine Sergeant John Basilone as a selection for a military history award.
He is one of the three main characters focused on in The Pacific.
He won the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism on Guadalcanal and was killed on Iwo Jima. HBO previously also produced the outstanding John Adams. – Renata Breisacher Mulry
Sunday, February 28, 2010
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1 comment:
I was saddened to hear Tom Hanks refer to WWII in the Pacific as a “racist” war.
I know that this type of thinking is the rage in academia, but for him to verbalize such PRIOR to the release of his miniseries shows the series degradation in historical knowledge in our Republic.
Hanks defended his position by claiming that the use of phraseology, e.g., Japs, and caricature images in print and movies to describe or enemy was indicative of the racist intent of the war.
What he didn’t say, and should have, was that Japan started the War for racist reasons. Believing in the racial superiority of the Japanese people and presuming their dominance of Asia and the Pacific as an outgrowth of such superiority. The “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” is now but a memory, but Japan still has some of the most stringent racial laws vis-à-vis qualifying for citizenship.
I think too that Hitler once used the moniker “Aryans of the Orient” to describe the Japanese, albeit as an honorific.
If language and caricature are proofs of a racist war, then the Allies in World War One, the Great War, would be guilty of such. The perception of Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary as “the Hun” would meet such a test. This also at a time when the Axis had a true causus belli in the assassination of the heir to the throne of a hereditary monarchy!
Blake - Fresno, CA
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