The problem with “The Pacific” is that you actually see very few East, Southeast Asian or Pacific Islanders. Nor are we asked to sympathize with the Japanese. There seem to be no interpreters, even though they seemed to be important in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers.”
“The Pacific” follows three Marines (Robert Beckie, Eugene Sledge and John Basilone) and draws from five books:
- “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa” (Eugene Sledge)
- “Helmet for My Pillow (Robert Leckie)
- “China Marine” (Sledge)
- “Red Blood, Black Sand” (Chuck Tatum)
Leckie, Sledge and Basilone were in the 1st, 5th and 7th regiments, respectively, of the 1st Marine Division. The 1st Marine Regiment is based at Camp Pendleton in California (San Diego County). The 5th was also based in Pendleton. The 7th was an infantry regiment based Camp Lejeune in North Carolina before being reassigned to the 1st Marine Division in 18 September 1942. The Marines were in eight ships out of San Francisco in June 1942 and landed in Guadalcanal.
In Episode 1 “Part One,” “Guadalcanal/Leckie,” the Pacific War is explained thusly:
The uniform that you wear and the globe and anchor emblem that you have earned will make a difference between the freedom of the world and its enslavement.
December 7 was quite a day in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On the same day, December 8th, on the other side of the international dateline, in places called Guam, Wake and the Malay Peninsula, Hong Kong and the Philippines Islands were also attacked by the army, airfare and navy of the empire of Japan. The Japanese are in the process of taking half of the world. And they mean to keep it with death from the air, land and sea. But here’s what the Japs are not expecting, The United States Marine Corps.
Here’s another thing you might not be expecting: a geography lesson. It’s important to know what Asia look like before World War II.
Historical Background
The article “500 Years of European Colonialism, in One Animated Map” (16 January 2015) notes:
A lot of interesting things pop out in that GIF. Thailand never gets colonized by any power, European or Asian. Denmark had the earliest westward European colonies, in Greenland. The Japanese empire was pretty huge in 1938.
The characterization of Japan is problematic. In 1920, the British Empire comprised of 26.35% of the world (35.5 million km or 13.71 million square miles) according to Wikipedia, while the Empire of Japan had only 7.4 to 8.51 million km (or 2.86 to 3.285 million square miles) for 5-6% of the world in 1942. The Second French colonial empire had 11.5 million km (or 4.44 million square miles) for 8.53% of the world in 1920. The Russian Empire as of 1895 had 22.8 million km (8.80 million square miles) or 16.92% of the world.
The Dutch in 1938 had 2.1 million km for 1.56% of the world. The Belgian colonial empire was almost 2% of the world and the Italian Empire was nearly 3%. Nazi Germany in 1941 had 0.61%.
Historically, Japan was not eager to increase its territory. The first excursion outside of Japan was at the invitation of a Korean court.
In 660 CE, once again Baekje appealed (albeit unsuccessfully) for Wa military assistance in meeting a combined Silla and Tang dynasty army. Baekje was conquered, but rebel forces held out and managed to persuade their Japanese ally to send over a 30,000 man army. This was wiped out by a joint Silla-Tang naval force on the Baecheon (modern Kum) River, though, and Baekje’s fate was sealed.
Hideyoshi Toyotomi sent troops to Korea in 1592-8, but soon after that Japan closed itself off (sakoku 鎖国) under Ieyasu Tokugawa. Expansion only came after Japan was forced open by the United States and attempted to become a modern nation. What did it mean to be a modern nation in the time of Manifest Destiny and European colonialism?
There are other questions that need to be asked such as: Why are the US military in Hawaii?
Hawaii was a monarchy, but Americans under the leadership of Samuel Dole deposed Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. Hawaii was annexed as a US territory in 1893. Hawaii was made a territory in 1900 with Dole becoming its first president. At the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was not yet a state. It would become a state with Alaska in 1959. While the White people were in positions of power, the population wasn’t predominately White.
According to this chart, the majority of the people in Hawaii in 1940 were of Japanese descent (139,631 compared to 112,087 White). The next largest population was Native Hawaiian (64,310). The Filipino population was 52,569 and the Chinese population was 28,774.
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial forces attacked the Philippines. Why was the US in the Philippines? The Philippines was part of the Spanish empire, but after the Spanish-American War, the islands were ceded to the US. The Philippines was a US territory until 1935 when it became a self-governing commonwealth. Even while it was a US territory, Filipinos were not welcome in California. Eventually this would lead to both independence for the Philippines and the loss of migration opportunities.
Growing anti-Filipino sentiment and the scarcity of jobs during the Great Depression helped contribute to the passage of the Tydings McDuffie Act in 1934, which granted the Philippines independence. Supporters of the act knew that granting independence would also redefine the Philippines a sovereign nation, making Filipinos aliens and essentially ending unchecked Filipino migration into the U.S. The federal government also instituted a program to repatriate Filipinos back to the Philippines. Ironically, by the 1930s Filipino immigration had slowed considerably because of the Great Depression.
Guadalcanal is the principal island of the Solomon Islands. The names comes from a village in Spain. Germany and Britain divided the Solomon Islands in 1886, but Germany transferred most of the northern islands to Britain in 1899 in return for recognition of German claims to Western Samoa and parts of Africa.
Historian Brooke L. Blower, associate professor at Boston University writing for Time Magazine noted about “The Pacific”:
It characterizes Guam, Wake, and the Philippines as far away, unknown lands, not the formal U.S. territories that they were, where more than 16 million Asian and Pacific Islanders had been living under U.S. colonial and Commonwealth rule for roughly half a century, and where as many as a million U.S. nationals would lose their lives.
Guam was a part of the Kingdom of Spain until 1898, with the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War. As part of the Treaty of Paris of 1898, it was transferred to the US Navy control. Wake Island was claimed by the US Army on 4 July 1898.
The Story
“The Pacific” begins (Episode 1) soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We meet Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda). Leckie meets his neighbor Vera Keller and promises to write to her. Basilone and his friends Manny Rodriguez and JP Morgan hear that the Marine Corps will be in the Pacific. In Mobile, Alabama, Sledge and his childhood friend Sidney Phillips say goodbye as Phillips prepares for boot camp. In August 1942, the Guadalcanal Campaign begins and the episode depicts the Battle of Tenaru and the Battle of Savo Island.
Episode 2 “Part Two” “Basilone” follows Basilone and the 7th Marins as they land on Guadalcanal defending Henderson Field. Rodriguez is killed in action.
Episode 3 “Part Three” “Melbourne,” shows the 1st Marine Division relieved and spending time in Melbourne, Australia. Leckie has a romance with an Australian woman of Greek descent. Things go badly and Leckie and his friends Lew Juergens are punished. Basilone gets the Medal of Honor and is sent to the US to sell war bonds.
While introducing a person of Greek descent goes with variations of Whiteness established in “Band of Brothers,” it does little to tell the story of the Pacific.
According to NiseiVeteransLegacy.org:
MIS played a role in the last stages of the Battle of Guadalcanal — considered the major turning point of the ground war in the Pacific. Victory in this battle allowed Allied forces to assume offensive operations until the end of the war.
The Military Intelligence Service Language School–then called the Fourth Army Intelligence School–began before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in November 1941 in San Francisco. A small group of about 60 soldiers, mostly Japanese Americans were part of a language training program. The school was moved for Camp Savage, Minnesota in May 1942 and renamed the Military Intelligence Service Language School.
The British had also raised British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force that comprised of UK-born officers commanding troops of indigenous Solomon Islanders who served in the Battle of Guadalcanal. There were also Solomon Islanders who were part of the Solomon Islands Labour Corps. There were also islanders who served in the Coastwatchers who observed enemy movements and rescued Allied personnel.
In “Part Eight” which is also titled “Iwo Jima” Basilone is transferred to the 5th Marine Division where he trains Marines for combat as a gunnery sergeant.
Asian Americans in the Pacific
The 5th Marines (activated on 11 November 1943) were at Camp Pendleton, California during World War II. In San Diego, Basilone meets and marries Lena Riggi. Basilone is killed during the first day the Marines land on Iwo Jima.
The Marines at Camp Pendleton would have been already in Guadalcanal (leaving in June 1942) when the Marine Corps’ Navajo Talker Program was established (September 1942). Yet the Marines would have been in California during the time (from the end of March to August) in California when Japanese Americans were sent to the 12 Assembly Centers in California. There was a sizable Japanese American population in San Diego County. Most of those people were sent to Los Angeles County (Santa Anita Racetrack).
On April 7, 1942, 1,150 residents of San Diego–men, women, and children–were placed on board a pair of 16-car railroad trains under armed military guard for evacuation to inland concentration camps.
According to the MISVeteransHawaii.com website, in February 1945, when the US Marines landed on Iwo Jima, “MIS teams were with each of the three Marine divisions.” The website features a photo of one of the MIS teams on Iwo Jima. That team had 11 men. Only one of them, Lieutenant Manny Goldberg was not of Japanese descent.
In “Part Nine,” also titled “Okinawa,” Sledge and the 1st Marine Division land in Okinawa. Sledge and Shelton lead new replacement Marines. As old hands, they have little compassion for the Japanese troops, but are horrified to find that Okinawa civilians, are being used as human shields. Sledge assaults a Japanese POW. The Marines later hear that a new kind of bomb has “vaporized an entire city in the blink of an eye.”
While we see someone in charge of the Japanese POW, we don’t see any Japanese Americans, even though they were there. .
According to the MISVeteransHawaii.com website, the battle on Okinawa began on 1 April 1945 and “hundreds of MIS language specialists were deployed for this climatic battle. So great was the demand that nearly 200 Nisei were pulled out of basic training in Hawai’i and sent directly into the battle.”
In “Band of Brothers,” we see how some people raised in the US ended up fighting for the other side. In this respect, we can see some of the Germans as fellow US citizens. This is never portrayed in “The Pacific” although American racism toward East Asians was very much part of the pathway between Japan being a US-UK ally in World War I to being an alienated enemy in World War II. While people of German and Italian descent were interned, it was not to the extent that the West Coast people of Japanese descent were. People of German and Italian descent could also become naturalized citizens and own land. This wasn’t true for the Japanese-born people in the US, just as it wasn’t true for the Chinese or the Korean-born residents of the US prior to World War II.
“The Pacific” provides a very White US point of view of the Japanese. There are plenty of missed opportunities for diversity, especially since this particular miniseries doesn’t follow just one company nor just draw on one book. The MISVeteranHawaii website notes one Hawaii-born Nisei, Warren Higa, and his brother, Takejirō, went to school on Okinawa, but returned in 1945 as part of the US Army 96th Infantry Division (ordered into active service 15 August 1942 at Camp Adair in Oregon). Besides the photo of Warren, there’s a photo of a Lieutenant Wally Amioka of Honolulu with a Japanese POW leading an American patrol searching for Japanese holdouts.
There was a Japanese American US Army soldier who was captured by the Japanese and spent three and a half years as a POW: Frank Fujita. Fujita’s father was born near Nagasaki. His father married Isa Pearl Elliott (anti-miscegenation law in Illinois only prohibited African Americans from marrying White people from 1829-1874). Frank was the second of five children. The Fujita’s eventually settled down in Abilene, Texas.
As a sergeant of the Texas National Guard, Fujita traveled to Fort Mason in California and then boarded a US Army Transport stopping first in Hawaii and then to Brisbane. Fujita and his mean boarded a Dutch liner to Java (port of Soerabaja). Fujita was taken prisoner by the Japanese after the Battle of the Java Sea in march of 1942. Because the battalion’s location was unknown from 1942-1943, the Texas National Guard was considered a “Lost Battalion.” Fujita published an account of his experienced in 1993 (“Foo: A Japanese American Prisoner of the Rising Sun”) and is one of only two known servicemen of Japanese descent known to have been a POW in Japan.
The other Japanese American man was Special Agent Richard M. Sakakida. Sakakida was born in Maui and raised in Oahu. Sakakida became a sergeant in the Corps of Intelligence Police in March of 1941. He was sent the the Philippines and was there when the Philippines came under Japanese control. He became a POW and later escaped. After Japan surrendered he would serve in the Air Force in the Office of Special Investigations, retiring as a lieutenant colonel with his last assignment as the commander of all OSI operations in Japan.
The Philippines had been a US territory before it became a commonwealth. Filipinos served in the military and fought with the US and its allies, but they were not well-served for their service.
- Filipino Americans Fought With US in WWII, Then Had to Fight for Veterans’ Benefits
- Integration of the Navy (1941-1978)
Sledge was posted to Beijing after World War II and wrote about the Chinese Civil War. Tatum was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but died in Stockton, California in 2014. Tatum passed away after the reparations were paid to Japanese American who were interned (1992). Stockton was the site of one of the 12 assembly centers in California, in this case, at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds. Peak population was 4,271 (21 May 1942). One of the redress movement activists, Grayce Uyehara was incarcerated there. The site was designated a California Historical Landmark (No. 934) and a monument with a plaque was dedicated on 2 June 1984.
While Japan was part of the Axis Nations, China was a US and UK ally. People of Chinese descent from the US were active in the Pacific before the US declared war on Japan, particularly in the Air Force (See my essay on “Masters of the Air“). There were also Chinese Australian soldiers serving during World War II.
Sledge’s book is titled “China Marine” and so obviously there is a connection that could have been made.
Bower in the Time Magazine article notes: “More than 120,000 U.S. servicemen were posted to wartime China (none of them in combat units), and another 200,000 served in India.” And while Bower discusses the experiences of Black Americans and how bringing them in to Australia challenged the White Australia policy, she doesn’t address the problems of Asian Americans and Chinese Australians nor the contributions of Chinese Americans. Bower also doesn’t mention the exclusion of Filipinos from this history nor the benefits they were promised.
Bower does write: “Chiang Kai-shek proved most successful at keeping Black GIs out of his territory. By the spring of 1945, less than a dozen of them—truck drivers—were allowed into China, and still with orders not to venture east of Kunming.”
According to Bower:
Black troops were sent instead, disproportionately, to some of the most dangerous hardship postings the U.S. military had: to garrison the malaria-ridden Roberts Field airport in Liberia; to build the Ledo Road, India’s overland lifeline to China across steep, unsurveyed terrain; and to work the supply line connecting the Soviet Union and Iran in heat that reached 140 degrees.
What is unnerving is Bower’s assertion:
So far the Hanks-Spielberg productions have avoided the entire topic of American race relations. (The Pacific, although based on the memoirs of E. B. Sledge and Robert Leckie which both documented the incident, does not, for example, let viewers know that the first thing victorious Marines raised on Okinawa was a Confederate flag). Masters of the Air, in welcome contrast, includes a subplot about the Tuskegee Airmen, the U.S. military’s first Black pilots. But it’s important to remember the odds working against such service.
As noted in my “Band of Brothers” essay, the US Jim Crow policies were studied by Hitler and yet Bower’s diversity emphasis is on “Black Americans” who are, granted, part of the equation of US racism, but people of African descent could become naturalized citizens of the US. Until World War II and for some, even after, people born in East Asia and parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia could not. African Americans are not, in today’s US, forever foreigners while Asian Americans often are.
Without the inclusion of the Chinese and people of Chinese descent or without the inclusion of Filipinos, we can’t really understand the full dimension of World War II in the Pacific and Asia (including South Asians). Most people are likely not aware of the troops from South Asia and how India was part of World War II. And Asian Indians in America did experience racial prejudice (US v. Bhagat Singh Thind). We cannot understand the complexities of racial prejudice against people of Asian descent and the mental gymnastics required to work with them as allies in Australia or the US without showing them.
Unlike “Band of Brothers,” we don’t see people raised in the US fighting for Japan nor do we see people of Japanese descent fighting for the US as interpreters. We don’t see Chinese Americans fighting for China or Filipinos who might be US nationals, fighting for the Philippines as we saw a German American fighting for Germany. We don’t see the contributions of Pacific Islanders. If there is a theater of war in which Asian Pacific Islanders should appear, it would be in “The Pacific.”
Age of the Geek 