BOOK REVIEW: THE PACIFIC

The American Second World War and the British Second World War were very different experiences. Before their joint invasion of continental Europe in June 1944 the two countries were largely engaged in separate theatres. Even after D-Day the United States continued to fight on two fronts. Their first and last enemy was the Empire of Japan. The Pacific is more the book of the film than the book which inspired the film, or rather the TV series which will be broadcast next month. It is different from most other books-of-the-film because it is, in its own right, extremely good. The Band of Brothers formula is to tell the story of a military campaign through the experiences of a handful of fighting men. In covering the 11 months between the D-Day invasions and the fall of Berlin, the original Band of Brothers was following a relatively short and linear narrative.The war in the Pacific was not like that. It was fought for 44 months on land, sea and air over millions of square miles. It involved two superpowers: one an imperial hereditary theocracy; the other a secular republican democracy. The war in Europe was contested chiefly between Europeans, even if many of them had transplanted to America. The war in the Pacific was fought by men who had almost nothing in common but their humanity, and who consequently felt enabled to deny even that. The characters chosen by Ambrose to tell his story overlap but are not synonymous with the men in the Spielberg/Hanks TV series, which is largely based on two established Pacific war memoirs, EB Sledge's With the Old Breed and Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow. Sledge and Leckie both feature in the book, but Ambrose included in his five-strong central cast two men who you will not see on television. One was an aviator and the other a US marine who escaped from a Japanese prisoner of war