Re: The Pacific Airs Tonight
This is from an e-mail I received from a good friend of mine...
"The Pacific" Is An Insult
The TV Series "Pacific" is an insult to the Marine Corps, particularly to the Marines that served in World War II. I served in World War II and I feel insulted at the portrayal of the Marines that fought so hard for Guadalcanal. In the first place, the heat was about the worse Marines felt in most of their campaigns. At least forty Marines were hospitalized with heat exhaustion, that's the ones that went to the hospital. How many were treated on line by the Corpsmen?
They didn't portray Medal of Honor Winner John Basilone with much respect. When the battles were over, the Marines didn't sit there and gaze at the havoc they had wrought, The Gunny wouldn't have allowed that, they went to work immediately to rebuild defenses, repair weapons, care for the wounded and dead. War is chaos and the Sergeants and Officers turn chaos into orderly confusion, by rallying their men after each battle, prepare for the next one. They feed their troops, make sure they have the weapons and ammunition to continue.
John Basilone had a machine gun section, he kept the guns firing by rallying his troops, fixing the machine guns when they stopped firing. He went through open fields of fire to go back and bring ammo to the machine gunners. He helped fire the guns when the Marines were killed or wounded until the guns were red hot. How about Platoon sergeant Mitchell Page who held a red hot machine gun in his arms and fired into the attacking enemy until they stopped? He had a blister from shoulder to wrist.
My favorite Marine hero of Guadalcanal didn't get the Medal of Honor, only a Navy Cross, during the battle of Tenaru River. His 1917A1 Water Cooled machine gun nest was hit by a grenade, his loader was wounded and couldn't use his arms, Al Schmidt was blinded. The loader told him to shoot the gun and he would tell him where to shoot. They even made a movie about him starring John Garfield and named; "Pride of the Marines". There were a total of twenty Medal of Honor reipients at Guadalcanal, twelve of those were Marines and Marine Corpsmen.
Before the Series started Tom Hanks went on TV to announce that World War II was a Racist War like the War in Iraq. No one told him about the "Rape of Nanking", the capital of China in 1937, or the brutality that was the worse the world had ever seen. In some instances worse than anything the Nazis did.
No one told him about the 75,000 Thousands of American and Filipino troops captured at Bataan and marched sixty (60) miles without food or drink. Men that tried to get a drink of muddy water alongside the road were bayoneted or decapitated by samari swords. Filipino citizens who tried to give them water and food were summarily shot or bayoneted regardless of whether they were a man, woman or child. Only 54,000 of the marchers survived the march, only to go into a prison camp guarded by sadistic Japanese soldiers.
There were several instances of kind Japanese Soldiers who dared treat the prisoners decent, for if they had been caught they, too, would have been killed. Read this story to see just how badly they have researched.
What I have told about in the first few lines was only the beginning, there were three more years to go of island hopping, of terrible heat and dug in Japanese. When we went into Okinawa the Japanese started their full blown suicide planes, boats, swimmers and human bombers. Ask any Marine, Soldier, Sailor or Airman that went into Japan at the end of the war, even up to the Korean War, you could still see the tunnels that had held Suicide Boats. Hundreds of tunnels. The Japanese has 5,000 planes ready to Hari Kari the American/Allied Fleet when it was preparing to invade Japan. Read about the suicide plane attacks at Okinawa... then multiply that by a few thousand more.
The Military Advisor is a former Marine by the name of Captain Dale Dye who fought in Vietnam. I am assuming he read some books about the battles in the Pacific War but he either allowed the producer to rewrite actual events to please himself.... or he did as he was instructed, gave information of racist Marines, American Soldiers, British, Canadian, ANZAC, and other Allied fighting men to make the Americans and their Allies seem as racist rather than Fighters of Freedom who had been forced into a war the Japanese had been fighting for several years.
You can watch the "Pacific" Series if you want and watch the degradation of the American Fighting Man, I prefer not to allow a Hollywood billionaire to drag my life through the mud he calls movies. I would like to see Captain Dale Dye apologize to all Marines for getting involved in a production that calls Americans "racist" because they fought against the people who bombed Pearl Harbor, who tortured and killed our men and other peoples.
If you are of a mind, read; "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II". by Iris Chang.
GySgt. F. L. Rousseau,
USMC Retired