The Revisionist Attitude Towards The Pacific Theater

[Sailor Steve]

Good movies (not sub-related):

Tora! Tora! Tora! (outstanding history, great movie as well)

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (slows down in the middle, as it's one man's true story) but great carrier and flight scenes)

Wake Island (made during the war, propoganda, but informative and good)

Midway (way too much romance and fiction, but gives a good overview of the battle, and some good aircraft shots)

Flags Of Our Fathers (mostly about the aftermath, but still good battle scenes)

Letters From Iwo Jima (great movie about the Japanese side, and marks Clint Eastwood's entry into the Great Directors Of All Time category)

The Great Raid (little-known recent film, tells the true story of a prisoner-of-war-camp liberation)

Help me out here, guys. Movies that tell the story of the Pacific war.

[krashkart]

Pearl Harbor.


I watched Tora! Tora! Tora! one night. Good movie.


EDIT - Letters From Iwo Jima. I haven't seen it yet but I really want to.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by krashkart

Pearl Harbor.

I hope that means that your suggestion was a joke, because that movie certainly was.

[krashkart]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I hope that means that your suggestion was a joke, because that movie certainly was.

Yes and yes. Didn't like it much.


Half of my family are smartasses, btw.

[onelifecrisis]

I think you're mixing small scale and large scale considerations, subnuts, and your confusion is the result. A single person can be brave/heroic/whatever in the smallest of conflicts. The size of the conflict overall has no bearing on the merits of the individuals involved.

As for the PT being "boring" I couldn't comment.

As for it being a "side show", by which I assume you mean small scale, it is a fact that the Germans and Russians each lost more men in a single battle than the US lost in the whole war.

The US Navy specifically lost 62,000 men in WW2 (I'm not sure what that translates to in numbers of ships) where as the British Commonwealth naval forces lost more than half a million. No matter which way you look at it, the Pacific War was small-scale compared to everything else that went on.

I think your POV is being coloured by your personal ties to people that served.

[Skybird]

Over here in Europe and Germany it maybe is just natural that the war in Europe gets more covarage, than the Pacific. However, there are TV programs on the Pacific war, too - just not as many, but also not rare. However, myself never thought of it as a less violent or less important war - only as a "different" kind of war involving more water , which began later and all in all did not last as long as the war around and finally in Germany.I would estimate that of the European theatre, the fighting in Russia and the way to power by hitler and finally the Holocaust get covered most.

[nikimcbee]

Originally Posted by krashkart

Yes and yes. Didn't like it much.


Half of my family are smartasses, btw.

Now that's not what I heard! Mr BenAflakfan.....



My favorite part of the PTO, is the early part of the War, when it was still an even fight or the Japanese had the upper hand. I think it took a lot of courage to fight in those early days.

[Weiss Pinguin]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

My favorite part of the PTO, is the early part of the War, when it was still an even fight or the Japanese had the upper hand. I think it took a lot of courage to fight in those early days.

Outgunned and poorly equipped... But on the flipside I wouldn't have wanted to go up against the desperate late-war Japanese army either.

[nikimcbee]

Originally Posted by Weiss Pinguin

Outgunned and poorly equipped... But on the flipside I wouldn't have wanted to go up against the desperate late-war Japanese army either.

Yeah, the Japanese Army, is a whole differnt story.

[sharkbit]

Originally Posted by krashkart

Letters From Iwo Jima. I haven't seen it yet but I really want to.

I highly recommend the book that the movie was based on as well.
"So Sad to Fall in Battle" by Kumiko Kakehashi.

It puts quite a human face on what is usually a enemy portrayed as a fanatical weapon based on so much propaganda.
The movie does a good job as making the Japanese soldier human as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Sad-Fall-Battl...9113299&sr=1-1

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Letters From Iwo Jima (great movie about the Japanese side, and marks Clint Eastwood's entry into the Great Directors Of All Time category)

Letters was brilliant. It's companion film was also very good, but this one is one of the all-time great films set in World War II.

[Raptor1]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Tora! Tora! Tora! (outstanding history, great movie as well)

One of my favourite war films of all times, probably.

Originally Posted by onelifecrisis

I think you're mixing small scale and large scale considerations, subnuts, and your confusion is the result. A single person can be brave/heroic/whatever in the smallest of conflicts. The size of the conflict overall has no bearing on the merits of the individuals involved.

As for the PT being "boring" I couldn't comment.

As for it being a "side show", by which I assume you mean small scale, it is a fact that the Germans and Russians each lost more men in a single battle than the US lost in the whole war.

The US Navy specifically lost 62,000 men in WW2 (I'm not sure what that translates to in numbers of ships) where as the British Commonwealth naval forces lost more than half a million. No matter which way you look at it, the Pacific War was small-scale compared to everything else that went on.

I think your POV is being coloured by your personal ties to people that served.

Small scale? The Pacific Theater covered an era several times greater than that covered by the European theater. It saw just as many people die, especially in China, which lost the most people of any country in the war. It eventually included all of the major Allied powers fighting, saw some of the largest naval battles in history and one of the largest land offensives ever conducted. I hardly think the scale was small compared to anything in the ETO.

[onelifecrisis]

Originally Posted by Raptor1

Small scale? The Pacific Theater covered an era several times greater than that covered by the European theater. It saw just as many people die, especially in China, which lost the most people of any country in the war. It eventually included all of the major Allied powers fighting, saw some of the largest naval battles in history and one of the largest land offensives ever conducted. I hardly think the scale was small compared to anything in the ETO.

I think you are talking about the scale of individual battles whereas I am talking about the scale of the whole thing. Also, I'm not sure what the area covered has to do with anything? If two men fought mono e mono in the Sahara, would that count as a large scale conflict?

[Raptor1]

Originally Posted by onelifecrisis

I think you are talking about the scale of individual battles whereas I am talking about the scale of the whole thing. Also, I'm not sure what the area covered has to do with anything? If two men fought mono e mono in the Sahara, would that count as a large scale conflict?

I am talking about the whole thing. The land battles in the ETO were generally larger than those in the PTO (With a few notable exceptions), but when one combines the scale of forces involved and casualties suffered on the PTO it is quite clearly not "small scale" compared to the ETO.

[UnderseaLcpl]

I had to think about this one for a while, but I have ultimately decided to support August and OLCs view of the situation. As a whole, the Pacific Theatre of Operations, while very large geographically, was primarily a low-intensity conflict punctuated by brief but bloody naval/amphibious clashes. I'm not saying that the fighting wasn't hard or important or anything like that, but when one looks at the resource gap between axis and allied forces, the result was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
The Chinese side of the conflict is different, but ultimately boils down to a slow-paced eight-year slugging match between Japan and the Chinese tar baby.

Where I would consider the PTO to be a real sideshow is in the arena of international politics. FDR tried very hard to force Japan into a war, and thus get the US into the larger conflict by refusing any diplomatic compromises the Japanese offered. What he really wanted was to get into the war in Europe, of course.

I'm also inclined to believe at least some revisionist history because the popular history is so heavily colored by the propaganda needed to rouse people to war for reasons other than the real ones most of the time. Much of it hangs on for generations after the war, though I believe that trend will change (and has been changing) as global communications become more and more accessible.