Summary

  • The Pacific strives to depict the brutal reality of warfare in the Pacific Theater, but certain details from the true story are left out.
  • The Pacific differs from Band of Brothers in its tone and the extremity of violence depicted.
  • Band of Brothers is more historically accurate than The Pacific, as it is based on interviews with over a dozen soldiers from Easy Company.

Serving as a companion piece to the hugely acclaimed HBO World War II miniseries Band of Brothers, The Pacific is based on a true story - but that doesn't mean absolutely everything in it is true. The series follows the 1st Marine Division across campaigns against the Japanese forces occupying the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Based primarily on Robert Leckie's memoir Helmet For My Pillow, and Eugene B. Sledge's book With the Old Breed, The Pacific strives to depict the grim reality of warfare in the Pacific Theater as accurately as possible. But with the wealth of source material that had be condensed into a 10-episode series, there are inevitably some details from the true story that are left out.

Along with the different aspects of World War II shown in the miniseries, The Pacific also differs from Band of Brothers in both its tone and the extremity of violence and gore depicted. According to the accounts of Leckie and Sledge, the atmosphere of the Pacific campaigns was quite different to those in Europe. There was less glory to be found in the fighting, lower morale among the men, and a far greater intensity of hatred between the U.S. forces and the Japanese military. The Pacific succeeds in capturing the brutality and grinding horror of combat in the Pacific Theater, but here are some stories and details that the series leaves out.

Bob Leckie Had To Be Circumcised To Join The Marines

Robert Leckie looking disheveled on a boat in The Pacific

Robert Leckie, one of the main characters in The Pacific cast, paid a steep entry fee for joining the Marines. In Helmet For My Pillow he writes that he initially attempted to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor, but was told he couldn't enlist until he was circumcised. He set out for training just a few days after his sutures were removed, and his memoir opens with the detail that "I could feel the wound in my lower regions, still fresh, still sore." This insistence on Marines being circumcised was an attempt to avoid infections like balanoposthitis, which ran rampant due to the difficulty of maintaining personal hygiene in the war-torn terrains of North Africa and the Pacific Islands, and had led to significant numbers of men being removed from active duty.

Desecration of the Dead

Joseph Mazzello as Eugene Sledge looking distressed in The Pacific

The Pacific brutality is even more extreme than Band of Brothers. It doesn't shy away from showing the ill-treatment of the bodies of Japanese soldiers, including a particularly gut-wrenching scene in which Merriell "Snafu" Shelton idly throws pebbles into the open skull of a dead Japanese gunner. As documented by both Sledge and Leckie in their memoirs, "souvenir-hunting" became a standard part of the battle aftermath, with Marines pulling gold teeth from corpses and looting their bodies for weapons and flags.

Perhaps wisely, the series avoids depicting the more extreme mutilations of American bodies by Japanese military forces that Leckie and Sledge witnessed. Both of them describe in their memoirs coming across dead Marines whose genitals had been cut off and put into their mouths, as an act of posthumous humiliation. Sledge also recalled an incident in which an American soldier who tried to take a Japanese soldier's severed hand home as a souvenir, but was pressured to throw it away because of the smell.

The show also leaves out some of the more sadistic practices of Lieutenant Robert "Mac" MacKenzie (played by Ashley Zukerman in The Pacific). According to Sledge, Mac would urinate in the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers, and made a game out of trying to shoot different body parts off of corpses. This callous sadism did not impress the veteran Marines who had been on active duty in the war for months or years, and who were too worn down to see any entertainment or novelty in the desecration of the dead. In his account of the incident with the pebble-throwing Marine (who is not identified in the book), Sledge wrote that the man wasn't doing it out of any particular malice, but had simply grown numb to the sight of corpses.

The Crocodiles of Guadalcanal

Soldiers leaning on a tree in The Pacific

The first major clash depicted in The Pacific is the Battle of the Tenaru on Guadalcanal, where the Japanese lost a total of 24,000 men. In a particularly gut-wrenching scene, Japanese soldiers run en masse directly into machine gun fire and are helplessly cut down, leaving their bodies piled high in the water and on the beach.

In Helmet For My Pillow, Leckie recalled that the bodies attracted large numbers of crocodiles to the Tenaru River, and the reptiles became unlikely allies for the Marines. "We never shot at the crocs because we considered them a sort of 'river patrol,'" Leckie explained. "They seemed to promenade the Tenaru daily. No enemy, we thought, would dare to swim the river with them in it; nor would he succeed if he dared."

Gunny Haney's Hygiene Routine

The Pacific Gunny Haney

While Easy Company in Band of Brothers is largely made up of inexperienced soldiers, The Pacific looks at some veteran soldiers. Sergeant Elmo "Gunny" Haney is one of the "old breed" referred to in the title of Sledge's book; an older Marine who had first enlisted during World War I. In The Pacific his eccentricities make him a memorable character. In one scene he strips off and gets out a bar of soap to take advantage of a brief rain shower, and in another he claims he is better at detecting enemy soldiers than the war dogs before emphasizing his point with a "woof!"

But while the rain shower scene was representative of Gunny Haney's belief in the importance of getting clean at any opportunity, The Pacific leaves out an eye-watering anecdote from Sledge's book. While K Company were showering one day they were subjected to the sight of Haney cleaning his genitals with a GI brush, a tool with tough bristles that was designed for scrubbing everything from heavy canvas gear to floors. As Sledge described it: "About a dozen naked, soapy replacements, including myself, stared in wide-eyed amazement and shuddered as Haney held his genitals in his left hand while scrubbing them with a GI brush the way one buffs a shoe."

Jay De L'Eau's Near-Miss

In the chaos and uncertainty of active battlefields, friendly fire was all but inevitable. As portrayed in The Pacific, the Marines had procedures in place to try and avoid friendly fire as much as possible, using passwords like "Lilliputian" that were difficult for Japanese soldiers to pronounce. Unfortunately, these practices only worked when they were adhered to. The series depicts a particularly tragic incident, taken from Eugene Sledge's book, in which a pair of Marines were attacked by Japanese soldiers who jumped into their foxhole. When one Marine stood up without warning he was shot and killed by one of his own brothers-in-arms.

On another such occasion, not shown in The Pacific, Sledge came extremely close to shooting his friend Jay De L'Eau after he failed to use a password or otherwise identify himself in the dark. Sledge writes that he saw a figure approaching his gun pit, and couldn't tell from the silhouette whether the man's helmet was U.S. or Japanese. He aimed his pistol at the soldier's head with his finger on the trigger, readying to release the safety. Fortunately, he called out before firing and De L'Eau identified himself. "He saw the pistol and moaned, 'Oh, Jesus,' as he realized what had nearly happened. 'I thought you knew it was me,' he said weakly."

The Corpsman's Face

World War 2 Navy Corpsman

A frequent cry heard throughout The Pacific's battle scenes is "Corpsman!" - called out when someone had been wounded and a U.S. Navy corpsman was needed to patch them up on the battlefield. Band of Brothers dedicated an episode to one such field medic who served in the European Theater, Eugene "Doc" Roe, and "Doc" was also the nickname given to corpsmen in the Pacific Theater. One anecdote from Sledge's book, which wasn't included in The Pacific, highlights "the selfless dedication of the navy hospital corpsmen who served in Marine infantry units."

While a corpsman was attending to a Marine whose arm had been wounded on the battlefield, the Marine assisting him slipped while cutting the wounded man free from his pack. "Before the Marine could arrest its upward motion, the knife cut Doc in the face to the bone," Sledge recalled. Unfazed by his own injury, the corpsman calmly asked Sledge to hold a battle dressing against his face while he continued to work on the wounded man. Sledge concluded the story by remarking, "It was little wonder that we held them in such high esteem."

Burying The Dead

John Basilone's death on the battlefield in The Pacific

Hanks and Spielberg plan to continue their dramatization of World War II's key battles with the upcoming companion miniseries Masters of the Air, which will focus on the actions of the Eighth Air Force during the war. But while these snapshots of different branches of the U.S. armed forces offer valuable insight, one wartime job that's unlikely to ever get a glossy drama miniseries is that of the graves registration outfits. More than 400,000 members of the U.S. armed forces were killed in combat during World War II, and in the aftermath of battle it was essential to bury the bodies on site as quickly as possible for reasons of both sanitation and morale.

Because of the enormity of the task, there were entire companies of soldiers whose sole assignment was to collect bodies, attempt to identify them, and bury them with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. These soldiers underwent specialized training that involved observing autopsies and building model cemeteries, before they were shipped out to do the job for real.

After the war, many of the bodies buried in the wartime cemeteries of the Pacific Islands were exhumed, transported to the United States and reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery - something that was only made possible by the efforts of the graves registrations outfits and their harrowing task. Nonetheless, tens of thousands U.S. military personnel who fought in World War II remain unaccounted for, and the search for their bodies is still ongoing.

Band Of Brothers Is More Accurate Than The Pacific

Band of Brothers easy company cast

While The Pacific is based on a true story that also comes from the accounts of real soldiers during the war, Band of Brothers ends up being the more historically accurate miniseries. A big part of this comes down to the level of accounts given for the two miniseries. The Pacific largely focuses on Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge's accounts of the war in the Pacific with their two different books offering most of the details along with stories about soldiers like John Basilone. On the other hand, Band of Brothers is based on a book by Stephen A. Ambrose which interviews over a dozen soldiers from Easy Company and takes all their stories into account.

Each episode of Band of Brothers would feature commentary from these real soldiers, showing the accuracy of the series. Both miniseries also had to cover the timelines of their stories into 10 episodes, but The Pacific had to condense and combine more often as the war in the Pacific Theater was longer and the show covers elements before and after the war. However, Band of Brothers certainly still leaves things out while The Pacific still deserves a lot of praise for its accuracy with both shows giving some of the more realistic and well-researched depictions of WWII.