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The early years of the great battle that spanned the Pacific Ocean in World War II featured an improbable rivalry between brilliant admirals whose lives on opposite sides of the enormous ocean had somehow sailed along a parallel course. This documentary produced by
U.S. News profiles Japan's Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the massive Imperial Fleet, and America's Chester Nimitz, who found himself locked in a monumental chess game as he maneuvered his naval forces to counter the Japanese threat. The biographical sketches in this video portray how the two men were both farm boys of modest means who found a life in their beloved navies. Yamamoto even lived in the United States, spending two years as a graduate student at Harvard. Meeting in the historic Battle of Midway, Yamamoto and Nimitz labored mightily to outsmart each other, and their strategic moves will be studied and debated for centuries. Indeed, this documentary places their careers in the context of naval history, as it contains a brief segment mentioning great naval commanders who preceded them, including John Paul Jones and Britain's Horatio Nelson. Profiling the parallel lives of the admirals is an interesting approach to history, and the archival footage of the Pacific naval battles provides a dramatic punch to the production.
--Robert J. McNamara
