The Pacific

Right now I'm reading Islands of the Damned by R.V. Burgin who is retired and living in Lancaster, TX. He was on Eugene Sledge's 60mm mortar team.

Last night, I remembered something. About 25 years ago, I worked with a guy at Employer's Casualty in Dallas who went by the name R.V. He was 60ish years old. He was in another department, and I only had a few casual conversations with him, so I don't recall his last name. I only remember his first name because one of the guys in my department used to make up nicknames for everyone to help him remember their names. His nickname for R.V. was Chinook.

Maybe they'll tell something about what happened to each of those guys. How many guys could there be of that age going by the initials R.V. in Dallas?
 
part six in the bag and i'm feeling empty. i have really have no bond with any of these characters except MAYBE lucky and sledgehammer.

still worth watching, but not a classic unless there is a MAJOR turnaroudn in the last few episodes.
 
Yah thanks for that HUGE SPOILER alert there. You couldn't save that for like 2 more weeks when The Pacific covers Basilone's involvement on Iwo Jima.
 
Burgin's character showed last night. He was the soldier who was told 'we are working on it' when he asked for water for the troops just before crossing the airstrip. The real Burgin also was on screen during the interview. He was the thinner gentleman.

HBO In Demand has background on some of the characters, including Burgin.
 
just feels like a "saving private ryan" redux regarding crossing the airstrip...not getting a whole lot of who these guys were as opposed to Thin Red Line or BoB...its good but I guess I had high expections after those 2...
 
Maybe I took this picture in an alternate timeline reality ... no, wait... that's LOST.
rolleyes.gif


(sorry guys, didn't think about the "extra info" on that plaque!)
 
i feel ike it is starting to pick up and i really like it. they should have made more episodes possibly, i dont know. ill have to watch it all to form a final opinion.
 
Another thing they didn't realize about the flatter end of the island where the airfield was is that from the Southeast all the way to the Northeast side of the field was a huge mangrove swamp that would have made any other approach almost impossible.

Here's an excerpt from R.V. Burgin's book Islands of the Damned. I just got to that part of the book last night:

"Chapter 5 The Unnecessary Island

You read nowadays that the Battle of Peleliu should never have been fought. We should never have invaded, experts say. And I agree.

We took that island to secure the airfield so the Japs couldn't use it against MacArthur when he was landing on Mindanao, to the west. But we had already bombed that airfield three months before, and we could have gone on bombing it 24-7. We could have made it absolutely unusable. There was no way the Japs could have rebuilt it in time. They were finished as an air power.

Just days before our landing at Peleliu, Admiral Bull Halsey wanted to pull out, but Admiral Nimitz, his superior, refused. General MacArthur wanted to take the island as well, and President Roosevelt approved it. We were committed."

He goes on to write:

"the maps and photographs and the model we'd all studied so carefully didn't tell the whole story. They didn't tell us that a lot of that level ground was thick mangove swanp. They didn't tell us that beneath the tops of the trees the ridges were steep, and honeycombed with more than five hundred limestone caves and man-made tunnels. One fo them was big enough to hide fifteen hundred troops. They didn't tell us that before it was over we'd have to fight our way from one cave to the next. One of our generals said it was like fighting in Swiss cheese."

By "they," Burgin was referring to the photographs and models, not the military command.
 
That was a great battle map Shark. I kinda wish that they showed something like that in Pacific, like when they zoom in from the Pacific ocean at the start if they showed slightly more in depth map with battle lines. I can see maybe them wanting to keep it more on foot solider basis rather than a general's birds eye view but, even they had a decent idea beforehand of the topography.
 
I wasn't sure if they could come close to showing how bad Peleliu really was. After Part 7 I can't imagine how they might have done more. Hell of an episode and right out of Sledge's book.
 
Thought this was the best, and most disturbing, episode yet.

I liked the part where the kind of psycho guy told Sledge not to cut out the dead Japanese soldiers gold teeth, even though he did it himself all the time. It was like he already knew he had lost a lot of his humanity, and didn't want to see Sledge lose his. Maybe even by preventing Sledge from doing this, he regained some of his humanity.

Shark - was this in the book?
 
According to R.V. Burgin's book, the scene where the Marine was shot at night by one of his fellow Marines was somewhat different from the HBO version. I think the way it really happened would have been more powerful.

Sledge saw and heard two Japanese, one charging toward him before jumping into another foxhole. Sledge heard a struggle in the other foxhole, then a figure jumped out of the foxhole and start to run away. That figure was clubbed by with a gun by another Marine, then layed in the road moaning.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"There was a rifle shot from the foxhole just in front of Sledge, and someone yelled, 'I got him.'

Everyone was awake now, but nobody knew what had happened.

'How many were there?' somebody asked.

'I saw two,' Sledge said.

'There must have been more,' somebody else said.

No, Sledge insisted. Two. One ran across the road and the other ran down to the right, where he got shot.

'Then who was that groaning in the road?' the other Marine asked.

'I don't know, ' Sledge said. 'I didn't see but two of them. I'm sure of it.'

'I'll check it out,' somebody said and crawled out onto the road in the direction the groans were coming from. There was a sharp report of a .45, and the Marine crawled back to his foxhole.

In the graying light before dawn, Sledge looked over at the figure lying in the road. Somehow it didn't look Jap. He wore Marine leggings. Sledge crawled over for a closer look.

He recognized the fallen man instantly. It was Bill Middlebrook, one of the riflemen. He had a hole in his temple.

'My God,' Sledge gasped.

A sergeant ran over. 'Did he get shot by one of the Japs?'

Sledge couldn't answer.

The man who had crawled into the road to see who was groaning turned pale. With quivering lips, he went straight to the command post to report what had happened."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

He goes on to say that later, Captain Ack Ack Haldane (who was killed later in Part Seven) told Sledge to keep to himself the identity of the Marine who shot the other Marine because he'd have to live with that the rest of his life.
 
I love this series a lot and haven't given much thought to any comparisons to BoB. To me they are both amazing, but entirely separate entities.
 
I had the honor of meeting R. V. Burgin last Saturday at a book signing. He is a quiet reserved gentleman, and an American hero. His wife still has her Australian accent after all these years.
 
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