Band of Brothers

Slaanesh69 said:

My grandfather was in Italy. He would never talk about it. I remember finding a box of stuff in his closet once when I was young but don't remember details.

When my Dad died a little while ago, we scrounged up the grandfather's stash. A map of their route through southern Italy with notes. An AA shell with initials and a date punched into it. Some coins, medals, usual stuff. A piece of shrapnel I recall the old man saying he pried out of a doorframe after it almost hit him.

Yeah, nowadays young adults get PTSD when their Skip The Dishes/Uber Eats is 5 minutes late or is missing a condiment. Or if they have to actually talk to someone face to face, or, God forbid, on the PHONE. Hard to believe the tribulations those war generations endured.

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I think when my Grandfather went to regimental reunion things, they were a way of dealing with the ptsd. These guys didn't want to talk to other people about the shit they saw and experienced. He used to be away for a few days at a time, I've got a feeling he used to get blitzed as he liked a beer or two. You can't really talk about the experiences of war with anyone else because people can't understand it unless they experience it first hand.

Lanx said:

man these overhead animated battle maps are cool

there must be a better movie than ben affleck pearl harbor???

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I think the best documentaries on WW2 are the Battlefield series. They cover the large WW2 engagements with analysis of the battlefield, profile the main players and go in depth into the strategy and thinking.

The best documentary series on the war in general is of course World at War, that series is mindblowing due to the people featured.

Lanx said:

there must be a better movie than ben affleck pearl harbor???

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From an accuracy perspective, Tora! Tora! Tora!

If you didn't like the slowness of The Pacific you certainly wont like that movie though. It looks at both sides, and depicts the Japanese preparation VS the American normal daily grind (and mistakes made), ahead of the battle, with only the last ~3rd of the movie spent on the attack.

Here is the autist "historian" on Tora! Tora! Tora! accuracy:


This channel, which is mostly ancient battle tactics, with some overarching strategy built in, has started a series on WW2 pacific (there are 3 videos preceding these, on the lead up to war):

If you wanted a series more in the style of Band of Brothers but set in the Pacific, you could probably follow the First Marine Raiders through Tulagi and Guadalcanal.

I only tried the Pacific in its first run, got 2/3rds the way through. It was too much of a brutal grind.

I can remember a scene where one soldier with a 1000 yard stare was casually tossing small rocks the were going into the top of the open skull of a dead jap.

There was a little splash of water each time. Gross as fuck. I'm sure it was supposed to show the effects of the horrors of combat etc. Kills your own humanity.

But pretty sure that's what ended me watching the show.

Gavinmad said:

If you wanted a series more in the style of Band of Brothers but set in the Pacific, you could probably follow the First Marine Raiders through Tulagi and Guadalcanal.

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I mean 1st Marine Division you could do from Guadalcanal through Okinawa technically (like Pacific did), but the 1st got decimated during Pellilu badly. My grandfather was wounded 1st day and then even more seriously wounded and put into a coma on the 3rd day. He was convinced he wouldn't have survived the battle if that hadn't happened.

I said it before but the books that were the basis for The Pacific (My Helmet for a Pillow and For the Old Breed) were great. The show just wasn't super interesting. The books are still a little memorable many years later but all I can recall from the show is following around the medal of honor dude in a military hospital or training camp thing as an instructor, not doing much and then going back in to combat and dying while the whole time his arc is playing out I'm just bored.

Masakari said:

Considering the Japanese would decapitate you and put your sliced off balls in your mouth... lol

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If you got captured by the Germans you had a good honest chance of making it through intact, something like a coin flip. That was not the case with the Japanese. I think it was Flags of Our Fathers where the one dude's friend gets kidnapped and when they eventually find him he's been mutilated with his genitals in his mouth? Unit 731 also sounded completely bananas even in comparison to what the Germans were doing.

Well for Germany, you still had a number of people in the Wehrmacht who still prescribed to the traditional European rules of war.

The Imperial Japanese army you had a whole slew of issues. Take the racism of the SS, and combine it with a warped Bushido code and massive abuse of their conscripts, and you had a recipe for disaster.

Unit 371 was fucking horrifying and a whole different beast

Pacific fighting was just brutal, though. I remember when I was younger, I asked my grandfather what kind of weapons he carried around. He listed most of the standard stuff you'd expect, then he mentioned a hatchet and remarked that he got really good at throwing it. He never elaborated on that, although that probably speaks a lot to the type of fighting they were involved in. I remember when he would come down for breakfast in the morning and his knuckles were sometimes bloody looking, because he would have still have nightmares about the war and basically strike out and usually injure himself when he would hit the nightstand or whatever.

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I am sure most of you already know, but Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East gives a great rundown on all this stuff. I never knew much about this side of the war and it was pretty eye opening.