[COLUMN] Band of Brothers Is a War Story, The Pacific Is an Anti-War Epic | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Masters of the Air premiered on Apple TV+ this Friday. It is the third miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks looking at American involvement in the Second World War, following Band of Brothers and The Pacific. These are all impressive shows, from both a narrative and technical standpoint. However, while Band of Brothers is rightly celebrated as one of the best television miniseries ever produced, The Pacific is often overlooked and ignored.

The Pacific premiered in March 2010. It was budgeted at $217m, with another $10m for marketing. This was substantially more than the $125m spent on Band of Brothers. Reviews were positive, but it was haunted by comparisons to its predecessor and expectations it would be “Band of Brothers 2.” While between 5 and 10 million people watched Band of Brothers, The Pacific only attracted between 3 and 2 million viewers per episode, figures so disappointing that TV By the Numbers screamed, “kamikaze!” (Tasteful.)

It makes sense that audiences were more drawn to Band of Brothers. In terms of its subject matter, Band of Brothers was set in Europe, following “Easy Company” on the march from the D-Day landings to V-Day. The fight against the Nazis occupies a central place in American history, with Jon Zobenica noting that the discovery that the Allied troops had stopped the Holocaust “bestowed upon that campaign a narrative, moral, and even aesthetic appeal that is exceptional for any war.”

Band of Brothers has a clear and linear structure. It is based on a single book, written by historian Stephen Ambrose, and follows its central case through ten episodes. There is a sense of progression, purpose, and closure. In the show’s penultimate episode, helpfully titled “Why We Fight”, the heroes liberate the Kaufering Concentration Camp. In the finale, “Points”, they raid Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. The show is ultimately so wholesome that news of Japanese surrender reaches the men during a baseball game.

There is also the timing of the show’s broadcast. Although it was produced during “the long, peaceful, well-fed slumber of the Clinton boom,” it premiered two days before 9/11. This depiction of a patriotic and necessary war resonated with audiences who needed to feel part of something larger than themselves. “Now I understand the urgent patriotism Steven Spielberg was trying to get across in Band of Brothers,” wrote Judith Shulevitz two weeks later, “in retrospect the most prescient television program of the days before the attack.”

The Pacific is a very different show about a very different war broadcast at a very different time. As Ken Tucker noted in his review, The Pacific “doesn’t often offer the comfort of triumphant surges and comradeship under fire” that defined Band of Brothers. Cord A. Scott wrote about “the disappointment of expectations” felt by many audiences who expected the same swell of patriotism and purpose Band of Brothers had offered almost a decade earlier.

Band of Brothers presents the European conflict as a single linear narrative written by a historian, but The Pacific understands that there is no way to do that with the war against Japan. There is no single unifying story thread. Instead, the show is cobbled together from two first-hand accounts, Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale) and With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), blended with the well-known story of John Basilone (Jon Seda).

This gives the show a weird structure. Leckie is essentially the lead for the first half of the series, before he is sent to hospital. Sledge is a supporting character in that first stretch, but becomes the protagonist in the second half. Basilone plays a prominent role in the opening episodes, then appears in a few scenes during the middle stretch, before returning as the focal point of the antepenultimate episode. To put it frankly, that is a very strange (and often disorienting) way of mapping a season of television.

However, it is also very effective at underscoring the show’s themes. It captures the sense that there is no single experience of war, and that the march of armies across thousands of miles of ocean does not adhere to a neat three-act structure. It also allows The Pacific to afford a more holistic perspective of the Second World War. Basilone’s propaganda work with actor Virginia Grey (Anna Torv) is contrasted with the experience of the men in the trenches, reading sanitized accounts of his exploits in comic books.

There is no sense of progress or purpose guiding The Pacific. In that way, it captures the experience of that war. The show spends two of its ten episodes on the brutal battle for Peleliu, only for Hanks’ opening narration of the next episode to underscore the futility of it all. “Ultimately, General MacArthur would not use Peleliu in retaking the Philippines,” Hanks explains. “Nor was the island ever used for any future operations. Few would hear of the fierce battle fought on Peleliu.”

It might be possible to understand the horrors of Peleliu if the battle had accomplished anything, but it didn’t. “It became clear to the military then and to scholars afterward that the battle was unnecessary—securing the island made no difference to the outcome of the war,” explains Nancy Franklin. “It was a battle between two American admirals: one who wanted to cancel the operation and one who wanted to proceed as planned.” This is a recurring theme in The Pacific.

The soldiers in Band of Brothers have a clarity of purpose and a clearly defined enemy. Reflecting the fact that two of its three leads are memoirists, The Pacific takes a more existential perspective. It is, at times, lyrical. “We have met the enemy and have learned nothing more about him,” Leckie narrates. “I have, however, learned some things about myself. There are things men can do to one another that are sobering to the soul. It is one thing to reconcile these things with God, but another to square it with yourself.”

“[S]omething in me died at Peleliu,” wrote the real-life Sledge. “Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war's savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.” Historian Elizabeth D. Samet accused Ambrose’s Band of Brothers of fashioning “a fantasy that American soldiers somehow preserved a boyish innocence amid the slaughter.” The Pacific harbors no such illusions.

The Pacific is packed with nightmarish images. Between battles, Merriell Shelton (Rami Malek) idly tosses pebbles into the open skull of an enemy soldier. Ronnie Gibson (Tom Budge) searches out wounded Japanese soldiers to strangle with his bare hands. Troops pry gold fillings from the mouths of dead (and soon-to-be-dead) enemy combatants. The first soldier to die on the show is an American victim of friendly fire on Guadalcanal. On Peleliu, a soldier’s (André de Vanny) night terrors threaten to expose the platoon’s position, so he is bludgeoned with a shovel until he stops, killing him.

Perhaps there is no satisfying spiritual explanation for this horror. Midway through the season, Leckie and Sledge share a scene. They argue about God. Leckie muses on the world that God has made. “That makes us chumps and God's a sadist,” Leckie warns the new arrival. “And either way I got no use for Him.” A few episodes later, explaining why the Japanese won’t surrender, Shelton muses, “Emperor is God. Duty to God.” The Pacific suggests that any God present during this carnage is no God worth praying to.

In contrast, the show emphasises the frailty of both the body and the mind. In Cape Gloucester, Leckie is afflicted with enuresis, wetting his uniform and his bed. He is sent for psych evaluation. “What war movie have you ever seen where the main character was in a mental institute for half an episode?” pondered writer Bruce C. McKenna. On Peleliu, a private (Dylan Young) relieving himself in a cave is attacked by two Japanese soldiers. Fleeing, he leaves a trail of excrement. There is little glory in battle, just messiness.

The show’s two leads, Dale and Mazzello, were child actors. Mazzello was a “Spielberg kid”, appearing in Jurassic Park. Over the miniseries, both performers are hollowed out by a war waged over what Lieutenant Colonel Lewis "Chesty" Puller (William Sadler) describes as “tiny specks of turf that we have never heard of.” Sledge is transformed by his experiences. His innocence is erased. His soul is “torn out.” When it’s suggested the Japanese could surrender, he replies, “I hope they don't. I hope we get to kill every last one of them.”

The Pacific initially teases a more conventional war movie narrative for John Basilone. Distinguishing himself on Guadalcanal, Basilone is brought home to sell war bonds. He reenlists to train new recruits. He falls in love with a cook (Annie Parisse). The pair even get a love scene that evokes From Here to Eternity, one of the defining images of the war in pop culture. However, The Pacific cuts that off, too. Basilone is killed without ceremony on Iwo Jima. The camera cuts to an overhead shot, revealing all the other, anonymous marines dead in the mud alongside the celebrity veteran.

The Pacific isn’t just about the Second World War. It’s about American wars in a broader sense. As Caryn James noted in her review, “the scenes look startlingly like Vietnam, reminding us that recent combat—from Vietnam to Iraq—is not about capturing land, but about political philosophy, hearts and minds.” Band of Brothers coincided with the patriotic surge following 9/11. The Pacific spoke to a different moment entirely.

As The Pacific aired, America was almost a decade into two unwinnable “forever wars.” The country was grappling with moral compromises like “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition”, confronting shames like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Three weeks before The Pacific aired, The Hurt Locker took home the Best Picture Oscar, cementing the sense that the American public’s understanding of war had shifted dramatically since Saving Private Ryan. The show’s depiction of suicide bombers and guerilla ambushes and civilian atrocities spoke to more than just its setting.

This resonance was not lost on Hanks, who explained, “The war in the Pacific was more like the wars we've seen ever since, a war of racism and terror, a war of absolute horrors, both on the battlefield and in the regular living conditions.” When Band of Brothers aired, war was an abstraction to a large number of Americans, allowing for short-term engagements like Grenada or the Gulf War. As a result, Band of Brothers could be romantic about the idea of fraternity through combat.

In contrast, by the time The Pacific aired, that fiction was unsustainable. War was not romantic or meaningful. It was horrific and brutal. Band of Brothers might be the more populist and accessible of the two miniseries, but – in hindsight – The Pacific is undoubtedly the more mature and considered work.