World War II: Payoff in the Pacific Review

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(More customer reviews)The war in the Pacific has always been overshadowed by the war against Hitler in Europe, and it really should not be. I would have gladly chosen to take on the elite of the German Wehrmacht and S.S. before I would have signed on to take the war to Japanese soldiers. The Japanese were tough as nails; they gave no quarter and fought on long after most soldiers would have surrendered. They also enjoyed a home field advantage of sorts, as the American military had never fought a campaign against island chains full of jungles and the tropical diseases that thrive there. The story of America's war against Japan is really quite amazing and should be heralded as such. Much intense fighting took place between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as this video makes clear.
Indeed, Payoff in the Pacific begins with the sneak attack on the Pacific fleet and takes the viewer all the way through the Japanese surrender. Long before the D-Day invasion of Normandy, American soldiers were storming beaches all across the Pacific. In the days and months following December 7,1941, Japan all but established its supremacy in the region. It would take time for the U.S. to rebuild the Pacific fleet and get new recruits ready to fight, but even in 1942 U.S. soldiers were fighting the Japanese in places such as Papua and the Solomon Islands. This video basically takes you through the American advance toward Japan, island by island, featuring impressive and telling footage of the battles - you don't get a lot of detail about each battle, but the big picture comes through loud and clear. At first, the Americans basically tried to hold back the Japanese advance, losing many islands in the process. As the new army took shape, however, the tide slowly began to turn. Long and deadly fights such as the battle for Guadalcanal (which took six months) evolved into shorter and less deadly battles as the U.S. forces began to go on the offensive. By summer 1944, the Americans were ready to take back the Philippines, and it is here that Japanese defeat became all but inevitable. A vicious two-day naval battle in the Gulf of Leyte essentially broke the Japanese navy's back, and by early 1945 the army had taken Okinawa (albeit with heavy losses) to land itself on the proverbial doorstep of Japan. It was at that time that the Enola Gay made her way into the history books with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After Nagasaki fell prey to a second atomic bomb, the Japanese were compelled to surrender.
The video doesn't stop at the signing of surrender papers, however. It offers a significant glimpse at how quickly American troops went to work rebuilding the infrastructure of the nation they had just defeated. Not only did this pave the way for a new friendship between these two formerly antagonistic nations, it highlights the character of the men and women who made up the Greatest Generation of Americans. This video was released officially by the U.S. Army, but I don't consider it propagandistic - it may be one-sided in its approach, but this is an American film about an American victory.

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