User Reviews

I just saw this for the first time a few weeks ago on Smithsonian and I was mesmerized by the color cinematography in this series. I have read the other comments and they are not wrong. This is not a 'documentary' to learn about the Pacific War (of course, most viewers do not need to learn about the war from TV, I hope. And most probably know more than the producers of this series.)

It is true that the series is riddled with historical errors. But I see similar mistakes on the news often enough. (Anything with tracks and armor is a tank?) Also, some video clearly does not match up with the event being discussed. Maybe most noticeable is that the film dictates the episodes. Major events like Midway and Guadalcanal get short shrift, mainly because there is a lack of color footage. However battles like Tarawa get oversized coverage precisely because there is ample color film. The air war is mostly ignored for the same reason, until the B-29 when they apparently carried a lot of color cameras.

But that is the point here. This is not WWII in Color, with its colorized history. This is an attempt by the Smithsonian, which is more archive even than museum, to present rare footage that has mostly never been seen. Pre-war home movies of the US and the Pacific Islands. Raw battle footage, often from the aftermath of an event. This is what makes this such an effective series. If you watch a lot of documentaries, you already know the story. What this series does is give you a lot of new visuals that help bring those events to life. The narration may not be robust, but the film is maybe as close as future generations will ever get to feeling what it was like.

They might try to make the Documentary actually be more accurate by not referring to the Units invading as being all Marines! The US Army stormed these same Islands, and far out numbered the Marines. As well, there was no AirForce then, It was the US Army Air Corps. Try not to rewrite History please!

The footage is high in quality and comes accross as special or rare. I never saw most scenes before and i've seen quite a lot. The series has the feel and taste of an highlevel production so you are taking in some important history in comfort. I also think facts (and footage) has way more rawness and less cencorship than for example the other known ww2 color series. Which I definately appreciate. If you are into ww2 a must watch, def.

This 8-part series tries to cover the experience of the fighting man while giving an overall picture of the progress of the war. It uses real colour film with only a tiny amount of colourized footage. This naturally limits what can be shown. But it shouldn't limit the accuracy of the narration and it's here that the series falls down. When discussing Tarawa, we're told that Shermans had a 37mm gun. It didn't, they had 75's. It was the Stuarts, which were also used at Tarawa, that had 37's. When discussing the arrival of the Hellcat we're shown footage of a Corsair. (Once we're shown footage of a Corsair when discussing the Superfortress!) We're told Nimitz sent 4 carriers towards the Coral Sea but not that only 2 got there in time for the battle. In covering Midway, the attack on the Yorktown is shown before the American attacks on the Japanese carriers. These slips show a carelessness that sadly is all to frequent in documentaries that don't properly check their own documents. On the plus side I though the maps illustrated the conditions facing the fighting men nicely.

Violence and gore seem to trump historical accuracy here - but whatever.

Why dazzle the mind when you can dazzle the eye (when you're not making your audience vomit)?

O! So shocking! Just because you *have* footage doesn't mean you have to use it, we get it - war is hell.

Mostly great footage, overtly gory, wrapped in a rather lazy telling of factual military history.

The big problem this series has is that it straight jacketed itself to using colour footage and unlike other similar series "in colour" it only uses original colour footage. Ultimately this means the series is often restricted in its ability to tell the story it is trying to tell because of the lack of suitable footage and many key events are simply skimmed through or essentually skipped as "there is no original colour footage".

I gave it a generous 4 stars because it does actually provide a different perspective to your average WW2 documentary, not by its use of colour footage but because of the restrictions it self imposed on itself to use colour footage. Most of the footage is from 'behind the scenes' rather than the battles and it provides a good idea of what it was like to live through the mostly mundane history of those events, as the saying goes war is 95% boring and mundane and 5% sheer terror. If the series embraced the material it had and sold itself as 'the human story of the pacific war' or 'the untold stories of the pacific war' it could have been a great series exploring the day to day lives of servicemen and civilians living through this calamity of history.

Instead it comes across as a poor war documentary which skims over important events and either simplifies or misrepresents many events or gets many facts plainly wrong.