Customer Reviews

Price for Peace

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This DVD is very, very well done. I hesitated at first to buy a "bargain" DVD, because it's hit-and-miss with them; some are horrible quality. Well, this one is one of the good ones. No, make that excellent. There's no special effects, just reality, and trust me, the reality you will see puts multi-million dollar fiction like "Private Ryan" to shame. I'm not putting down Saving Private Ryan; I own that movie too. But truth is more dramatic than fiction. This movie concentrates entirely on the Pacific war; it only briefly mentions Europe and the Nazis in the very beginning. But after you see a few island-hopping beach landings, you'll forget all about der fuhrer. The music and editing is very well done, and they mix in interviews with American and Japanese veterans all throughout the movie. Best of all, it is fair and unbiased. At the end, when it came time to deal with the atomic bombings, I braced myself for another Liberal assault on the use of the bombs. It never happened. Instead, I was shocked to see, they discussed the atomic bombings fairly, with an equal number of arguments for and against, and left it entirely up to the viewer to make up their own mind. They did in this movie what the mainstream media fails to do on a regular basis: they presented the facts in an unbiased fashion and let the viewer decide. They showed the good that came from the bombs; the war ended early and saved countless lives. They also showed the bad; flattened cities and radiation victims with skin falling from their bodies. This DVD is an honest, well-made, unflinching look directly at the face of real war. It's unrated, but probably would earn an R rating. Definitely worth the money.

This moving and informative documentary tells a very important and often overlooked story, that of the WWII experience in the Pacific Theatre. It seems as though most people are very familiar with the events of the European Theatre and THE D-Day, but not so much with the bravery of those who fought in the Pacific, nor of the countless D-Days that took place on all of the islands in the Pacific. Although one can never compare what the two groups of soldiers went through, because their experiences were so radically different, in some ways it could be said that the young men and women fighting to liberate the Pacific had it harder and suffered even more casualties. A lot of the aging veterans got very choked up when talking about their buddies dying, or of seeing all of the dead, dismembered, and bloated decaying bodies of their comrades all over the beaches and bobbing about in the water. The film footage of some of those very bodies was particularly chilling, and the horrific shocking impact was even greater because it was in color (as were numerous of the film clips). It seems fair to say that most people think of the events of WWII as taking place in black and white because that's what we're used to seeing them shown in, but having them shown in the color they actually took place in really makes these events seem even more real and immediate.

This documentary also brings us the stories of Japanese veterans and civilians, some of whom have since made mutual peace with the Americans they fought against. While a number of the American vets said they still had no qualms about what they did (the African-American veteran interviewed even said he was so angry at Japan that he would have shot anyone, even a woman, child, or baby), some of them had more mixed feelings, either in hindsight or during the war itself. One vet said he never got used to killing the enemy, even though his sergeant told him everyone got used to it eventually, and another vet started crying when talking about how awful he felt for having taken the lives of young men who were serving their country the same way he and his friends were, people who weren't much different from them but for the fact that their governments were at war. As the vets who have become friends and made peace in their old age explained, they were fighting against another government, not personally against other people, the way all wars are really fought. Some of the Japanese vets also expressed sorrow over how they had to kill innocent people in the course of war, such as the pilot who regrets his role in Pearl Harbor, saying he could have accepted fighting in the war or carrying out an attack if the U.S. had declared war against his country, but it wasn't a fair fight to carry out a sneak attack like that. Also interviewed are some Japanese-American vets and their families, who faced double discrimination. When one of them came home after the war, he could only touch and speak to his family through the barbed wire of the internment camp. The African-American soldiers faced discrimation also; I was angered to hear the one vet saying the Navy Cross he had been awarded at the end of the war was taken away from him because of his race. He earned that decoration and didn't deserve to have it snatched away just because he wasn't white. The documentary ends with some of the surviving vets going back to the islands they fought at and meeting with young Marines today, kind of bridging the gap between the generations.

There are also a number of interesting extras, such as a commercial for the National D-Day Museum, an introduction by Stephen Spielberg, a photo gallery, some commentary by Tom Brokaw, and a featurette on the dogs who served with the Marines. These were family pets who were sent into the service because their people wanted to do their part for the war effort, and in many cases their people gave permission for the boys who'd been partnered with them to keep them after the war ended. The bond between the dogs and their human partners was an amazing thing, and these dogs were every bit as heroic as the human Marines.

Overall, this is a great disc, and serves as a great general introduction to the Pacific Theatre for someone not very familiar with the subject yet. There are enough fascinating and compelling subtopics covered for one to want to seek out additional and more specific material on them (such as women in the Pacific, Japanese civilians, the campaigns on specific islands, war dogs, Japanese-American soldiers, and the debate over the atomic bomb). Perhaps next they'll make a DVD on the Indian-Burmese-Chinese Theatre!

This is a must have for anyone even remotely interested in the battles taken place during our Second Great War. My only hang-up is that it doesn't include anything about the invasion of Europe, in that it is purely infromation and footage from the battles of the Pacific, and everything that led to it.

The video contained a segment on the war dogs and I saw my cousin that was killed on Iwo Jima in March 1945, a training picture with his dog. I am very disappointed that the second DVD that was payed for has never arrived. It was payed for with my Amazon gift card. please contact me about that. Mary Butler

Nice documentary beautifully made. However it's very annoying to see someone being proud and showing off, or maybe simply justifying the slaughter of 250,000 thousands civilians (without accounting for the long term damages and army casualties). Why don't we see it the other way. Would we enjoy a Japanese documentary saying that it was the right thing to do to kill the same amount of US civilians by H-bombs or whatever, because there were no other way they could win the war?