To prepare for the filming of HBO's epic, $200-million World War II miniseries "The Pacific," screenwriter Bruce C. McKenna accompanied a locations crew to a tiny coral island near Guam known as Peleliu. A ridge there is laced with hundreds of caves -- undisturbed for more than half a century -- where Japanese troops hid out from U.S. Marines during one of the war's deadliest conflicts.
"There are still skeletons in the caves, and we saw them," McKenna remembers with amazement. "At the first cave we found, we walked in and there was the rib cage of a dead Japanese soldier. Up in the hills, every square inch is covered with shell casings and rusted machine guns. The place is unbelievable."
And -- unlike Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Guadalcanal, whose names still ring in the popular lexicon -- Peleliu is also largely unremembered, a fact troubling to surviving veterans who fought there. If the oversight deserves fixing, justice will be delivered when "The Pacific," the long-awaited companion piece to HBO's Emmy-winning 2001 miniseries "Band of Brothers," begins airing on March 14. The 10-part production, probably the most expensive miniseries in television history, will run on consecutive Sundays at 9 p.m., presenting the war in the Pacific from the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor to the emotional return of troops home after final victory over Japan.
A full quarter of the series -- 2 1/2 of the 10 hours -- unfolds on Peleliu, compared with, for example, less than a single hour on Iwo Jima. For the filmmakers -- notably, executive producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman -- the beaches and jungles of Peleliu turned out to be a convenient place to show the horrors of battle as experienced by the real-life soldiers whose stories they are telling.
Fittingly, though, Peleliu also symbolizes the plight of tens of thousands of soldiers caught in the glamourless, mind-wrenching mire of the Pacific war. It was a fight engaged on the other side of the world, on tropical archipelagoes with names nobody knew, for purposes that often seemed pointless to the average man in a foxhole. Isolated from families, cut off from familiar landscapes of roads and buildings, the troops on places like Peleliu battled oppressive heat, thirst, rats, dysentery and a particularly fearsome enemy in the Japanese, all to claim strategic islands that were barely habitable.
"You're fighting for nowhere in the middle of nowhere," as Hanks, a lifelong military buff, put it.
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Topic: HBO returns to the battlefield with 'The Pacific' (Read 2734 times)