The Pacific war gets far less screen time than the war in Europe, and the films it does get tend to cluster around a handful of famous battles. But across more than a hundred episodes, we’ve found the richest stories out on the edges: a Studio Ghibli film about two children in a firebombed city, a Godzilla movie that is really about survivor’s guilt, an Indian series about soldiers who fought alongside Japan for their own independence.
Not many of them are faultless. A Navajo code talker becomes a supporting act in his own story. A film about the Bataan nurses turns their ordeal into romance. The Pacific was fought by Americans, Japanese, Australians, Indians, Pacific Islanders and many others, and the screen has a strong preference for just one of them.
What we’ve found is that the most honest portrayals often come from unexpected places: Japanese animation, an Australian creature feature, a war musical with a genuinely radical streak. This page also has some films we simply love. Both things can be true, and we’ll tell you which is which.
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WW2 in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor and the Road to War
1970 · Pearl Harbor from Both Sides
The 1970 epic tells the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the American and Japanese sides, with each nation’s own filmmakers shooting their half. It is meticulous and arguably the most historically accurate WW2 film ever made – which is exactly why later blockbusters borrowed so heavily from it. We get into how a film this even-handed about the enemy got made at all, and why accuracy and spectacle keep pulling against each other.
Our angle: Even-handed history, very slow cinema: a lot of men in offices before the planes arrive. And Michael Bay clearly took notes.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 6.8 and Sam 6 out of ten (hastily finished national anthems). Great attack scene, slow first stretch, and almost no women anywhere near Pearl Harbor.
2001 · Hollywood Blockbuster
Michael Bay’s three-hour love triangle with an air raid in the middle – a nostalgia watch for one of us and a genuine ordeal for the other. We pull apart what the film gets wrong about the attack, how the romance swallows the history, and the way a day that killed more than 2,400 people becomes the backdrop for two pilots and a nurse.
Our angle: Ninety minutes of love triangle before the attack, in a film called Pearl Harbor. Fourteen-year-old Maartje forgave it everything; grown-up Maartje and Sam are less sure.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 6, up from 4 for nostalgia, and Sam 3 out of ten (presumed deaths). Sam: “if you can go out of your way to get something wrong then you can go out of your way to get it right.”
1953 · Prewar Army Drama
The 1953 classic, adapted from James Jones’s novel, spends almost all its runtime on the peacetime army in Hawaii before December 7 ever arrives – the boxing, the brutality, the famous beach embrace. We hold the film against the real garrison life it dramatises, and against the women who ran the wartime radar operations that the story mostly keeps offscreen.
Our angle: Sam calls it a tapestry seen through a keyhole: James Jones’s angry anti-army novel, tidied up for the Hays Code. Still, the women actually get dialogue.
What we thought: We both give it 8 out of ten (unusually sexy for the time beach makeout scenes). Better than Maartje expected, and true to the spirit of the book.
Further reading
From Here to Eternity by James Jones – the sprawling 1951 novel behind the film, and far blunter than Hollywood could be about army life.
WW2 in the Pacific: The Island Battles - Midway to Okinawa
1976 & 2019 · Naval Battle Epic
We take on Midway twice: the 1976 all-star classic against the 2019 CGI remake, and walk through the battle itself – the codebreaking, the carriers, the events that turned the Pacific war. We get to know the real players and make the case for why the older film, cardboard and all, still comes out ahead.
Our angle: Same battle, same title, forty years apart. The 1976 film sticks to the battle and wins; the 2019 one crams in half the Pacific war in CGI.
What we thought: For 1976, Maartje gives 7 and Sam 7.5 out of ten; for 2019, 5.5 and 4. The unit is not printable here. Sam notes the 2019 film fails the sexy lamp test.
Further reading
The Battle of Midway by Craig L. Symonds – a seminal, clear-eyed account of the codebreaking and the carrier duel that decided it. Sam’s pick.
1998 · Anti-War Drama
Terrence Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s Guadalcanal novel might be the most philosophical anti-war film ever made: less a battle picture than a meditation on paradise, dread, and men who would rather be anywhere else. We talk about Guadalcanal as Eden and the war itself as the real antagonist.
Our angle: Sam calls it the anti-Band of Brothers: even when the Americans win, it is scored like a tragedy. We wish more war films took a swing like this.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 9 and Sam 8.5 out of ten (two second cameos). Maartje has never seen an American war film with fewer people being brave.
Further reading
The Thin Red Line by James Jones – the semi-autobiographical Guadalcanal novel behind both film versions.
2006 · Iwo Jima Drama
The story behind the most famous photograph of the war – the flag raising on Iwo Jima – and what the military did with the men in it. Eastwood shot this alongside its Japanese-perspective companion, Letters from Iwo Jima, and we get into how one image was turned into a bond-drive tool while the reality stayed far messier.
Our angle: A film about selling a war with one photograph, and how the men in it got used. The topics turn out more interesting than the film.
What we thought: We give it 6.3 and 6 out of ten (misidentified back sides). Good on the propaganda machine, great Adam Beach, otherwise a bit flat.
Further reading
Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley with Ron Powers – written by the son of one of the flag raisers, and the source behind Clint Eastwood’s film.
2016 · Okinawa Biopic
Desmond Doss, the conscientious objector who went to Okinawa without a weapon and carried dozens of wounded men off the ridge, gets the Mel Gibson treatment – which means real reverence bolted to real carnage. We talk Andrew Garfield, southern accents, and whether the film’s extreme violence honours or undercuts a story about refusing to kill.
Our angle: Mel Gibson directing a film about a pacifist medic. The unbelievable parts really happened; the gore and the slow motion at the end are a lot.
What we thought: We give it 7 and 7.5 out of ten (one mores, from Doss’s prayer). Andrew Garfield is great, and the feared religious preaching never comes.
2002 · Code Talkers Drama
The real Navajo Code Talkers built the one code the Japanese never broke, serving through the brutal island campaigns including Saipan. This 2002 film tells their story – and then hands the lead to a white Marine assigned to guard, and if necessary silence, his Navajo partner. We are glad to talk Code Talkers. We are a good deal less glad about whose story the film decides to centre.
Our angle: A film about the Navajo Code Talkers that, in Sam’s words, focuses a lot on “the nearest white guy his struggles”. That guy is Nicolas Cage.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 6 and Sam 4 out of ten (dangerous fire stunts). Entertaining, but a story about Navajo Marines needed a Navajo lead.
WW2 in the Pacific: HBO's The Pacific
HBO 2010 · Part One (Eps 1-3)
Our favourite HBO war drama, and the start of a three-part deep dive. With Bec back on the pod, we take on the opening stretch – the landings, the friendships, that theme music – and do a fair amount of gushing about Robert Leckie along the way. Sorry. Not really.
Our angle: The Pacific looks hard at what the Americans did too, not only the enemy, which makes it harder to watch than Band of Brothers and more honest.
What we thought: No score from us yet: we rate the series in Part Three. Our guest Bec, a tour guide and big Robert Leckie fan, gives these episodes 7.5 out of ten (regurgitated peaches).
Further reading
Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie and With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge – the two Marine memoirs the whole series is built on, and the best possible companion reading.
HBO 2010 · Part Two (Eps 4-6)
The meaty middle of the series, with our friend Merc joining in. This is Peleliu, which means everyone on screen is having a catastrophic time, and Pavuvu, which is barely an improvement. We meet new favourites, brace ourselves for losing them, and get into why this stretch is some of the hardest viewing of the whole show.
Our angle: The middle episodes work best when the new boys meet the old hands. We also count the places where the show makes things up.
What we thought: No score from us yet. Merc, a museum professional, gives the whole show 7.5 out of ten (mortar rounds): it loses points for being disjointed and gains one for being so personal.
HBO 2010 · Part Three (Eps 7-10)
We close out the series with episodes 7 to 10 and guest George in tow: the brutal end of Peleliu and Okinawa, John Basilone’s final chapter, and the long road home for Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie. We talk leadership, disillusionment, the place of civilians, and the way grief and memory trail these men long after the shooting stops.
Our angle: The show lets you see that Peleliu may have bought almost nothing. Then we give Lena Basilone the life her end card leaves out.
What we thought: George gives it 9 out of ten, losing a point for the dark lighting, and one of us gives it 9.5. The unit: in our hearts, Andy Haldane didn’t die and lived happily ever after.
Interview · Actor Scott Gibson
Scott Gibson played Andy Haldane in The Pacific, and joins us for our first-ever video episode. He talks about stepping into Haldane, his trip to Guam and Peleliu with Beyond the Call, and how the role has stayed with him. Candid, warm, and a lovely counterpart to the series itself.
Our angle: Scott Gibson built Andy Haldane from his real letters, and they show a man that Sledge’s famous memoir only partly captures.
What we thought: No score, it’s an interview. We came away agreeing with Scott: watch The Pacific as many times as you can, it gets better each time.
Interview · Writer Bruce McKenna
Bruce McKenna is the principal writer and co-executive producer of The Pacific, and wrote the Bastogne episode of Band of Brothers. We talk about the moral stakes of war, what made it into the show and what didn’t, and why, for him, everything comes back to narrative and theme. This one may change how you watch WW2 media.
Our angle: The man who wrote The Pacific tells us there is no such thing as historical drama: only good drama and bad drama, and all good drama is about us now.
What we thought: No score, it’s an interview. Bruce McKenna’s point that drama is about theme, not plot, changed how we watch these series.
WW2 in the Pacific: Civilians, Children and the Cost of War
1988 · Studio Ghibli Drama
Studio Ghibli’s account of Seita and Setsuko, a brother and sister trying to survive in Kobe in the last months of the war, after firebombing has taken almost everything. It is one of the most devastating films ever made about civilians in wartime, and about the ways a society lets its own children slip through the cracks. We talk about why it matters, and why once through is usually enough.
Our angle: It never sets out to be an anti-war film and is one anyway. We also look at the firebombing of Kobe, a part of the war that is easily forgotten.
What we thought: We give it 8.5 and 8 out of ten. Beautiful and heartbreaking, and like many people, neither of us wants to watch it again.
2023 · Postwar Japan Drama
Yes, a Godzilla film, and one of the most affecting WW2 stories in years. Set in a shattered postwar Japan, it follows a former kamikaze pilot living with survivor’s guilt and the wreckage of a nation, the monster standing in for everything he can’t outrun. We get into how it works even if you are sure monster movies aren’t for you (one of us was very sure).
Our angle: A monster film that would work without the monster: Godzilla as nuclear war and PTSD, and a hero who chooses to live rather than die for nothing.
What we thought: Our friend Julie, our resident Godzilla expert, gives it 9; Maartje and Sam both give it 8 out of ten (Japanese Navy bleach budgets). Maartje didn’t expect to like a creature film. She did.
1987 · Occupation Drama
Spielberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s memoir, told through a privileged British boy separated from his parents and interned near Japanese-occupied Shanghai. It is a coming-of-age story about the end of innocence, a very young Christian Bale, and the strange spectacle of a child who half-worships the planes overhead. We talk about what the war looks like from inside a child’s confusion.
Our angle: The war through the eyes of a boy who never gets to be a kid, while British Shanghai collapses around him.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 8 and Sam 7.8 out of ten (Cadillacs of the sky). A strong adaptation of one of the best WWII novels Sam has read.
Further reading
Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – the semi-autobiographical novel behind Spielberg’s film, based on Ballard’s own childhood in wartime Shanghai.
Peque Gallaga’s three-part epic follows two wealthy families from Negros as they flee the Japanese, from 1941 to 1945. It is long and very dark on screen, but it rewards patience: the slow scenes of mahjong and dinner parties are where the film shows who these people are, and who quietly keeps their world running. We talk about class, masculinity, and how the war strips the families down.
Our angle: The war is the trigger, but class is the story: two rich families flee to their estate, and the servants keep everything running.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 7.8 and Sam 8 out of ten (Mahjong victories). Long and hard to see in the dark, but it rewards a second viewing.
WW2 in the Pacific: Prisoners of War
2014 · POW Survival Drama
Louis Zamperini – Olympic runner, downed airman, castaway, and finally a prisoner of the Japanese – had a life almost too extraordinary to film, and this adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s book gives it a game try. We might be a little mean about the movie. That has nothing to do with Zamperini, whose real story outruns anything the screen manages to capture.
Our angle: A staggering true story, told flatly. The film leaves out Zamperini’s life after the war, and Sam says the book does all of it better.
What we thought: One of us gives the story 7.5 but the film-making about 3; the other gives it 5 out of ten. Forgettable rather than bad.
Further reading
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand – the extraordinary bestseller behind the film, which follows Louis Zamperini far past where the movie stops.
The 1957 classic about British POWs forced to build a railway bridge for their Japanese captors, and the colonel whose pride curdles into something stranger. Sam read the source novel so you don’t have to, and Maartje gets improbably invested in a Canadian character. We weigh the film’s craft against how far it drifts from the real horror of the Burma Railway.
Our angle: Better than Pierre Boulle’s novel, which Sam found staggeringly racist. But the bridge and Colonel Nicholson are invented, and the few women in it only carry bags.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 7 and Sam 7.5 out of ten. Tense in the jungle, slow for the first forty minutes.
Further reading
The Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle – the source novel Sam read for the episode. For the real Burma Railway, The Railway Man by Eric Lomax is a survivor’s memoir the film never comes close to.
2025 · POW Drama Series
Based on Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel, this series follows Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans before, during, and long after his time as a prisoner forced to build the Burma Railway. We talk about the adaptation, the symbolism, and the way every character seems trapped – by the war, by love, by memory. And yes, we ask once more why it all has to be quite so dark.
Our angle: A brutal, carefully made series about the Burma Railway that leaves out the local labourers who died on it and softens Amy’s story from the book.
What we thought: We give the show 8 and 6.5 out of ten. Sam, who read Richard Flanagan’s novel, gives the book about 8.5.
Further reading
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan – the Booker Prize-winning novel behind the series, drawn in part from his own father’s captivity on the railway.
WW2 in the Pacific: Beyond the Famous Battles
1943 · Army Nurses Drama
Made in 1943, while the war was still on, this follows American Army nurses through the Japanese invasion of the Philippines – jungle hospitals on Bataan, the desperate evacuation of Corregidor, and eventual captivity. We recorded it for our 100th episode, and got into how a film made in real time honours these women while also folding them into wartime romance and 1940s ideas about their place.
Our angle: The nurses of Bataan and Corregidor survived a siege and years of captivity. Hollywood in 1943 gave them romance plots instead, and the real nurses hated it.
What we thought: We both give it 6 out of ten (impractical nightgowns). Fun, but the real nurses deserved better.
Further reading
On the real Bataan and Corregidor nurses: I Served on Bataan and We Band of Angels.
Kabir Khan’s Hindi-language series on the Indian National Army – the soldiers who broke from the British Indian Army and allied with Japan to fight for India’s independence. It includes the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all-female combat unit, and treats the war as a hinge in a much larger story. We talk about a theatre most Western WW2 media never touches.
Our angle: Indians who fought alongside Japan against the British: a side of the war in Asia neither of us knew, with a women’s regiment at its heart.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 7 and Sam 7.5 out of ten (cave letters). Once you accept the vibe, Maartje says, it’s fine; Sam was hooked from the start.
2025 · Survival Horror
Our accidental monster-movie streak continues. Loosely inspired by the real 1942 sinking of the Australian ship HMAS Armidale in the Timor Sea, this follows soldiers stranded on a failing raft and hunted by a great white shark. Our returning SAS-Rogue-Heroes-turned-creature-feature correspondent George joins us to work out why it is more than just a horror gimmick.
Our angle: Is it really a WWII film, or is the history just chum? Underneath the shark sits the real sinking of HMAS Armidale.
What we thought: Sam and George give it 8 and Maartje 6 out of ten (choppy chomps). Maartje was scared; George calls for justice for sharks.
1958 · Wartime Musical
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical set among Americans stationed in the South Pacific – which raises the obvious question of whether war is any place for a musical. We dig into its genuinely progressive streak, especially the anthem You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught, alongside portrayals that have aged far less well, plus a detour into the Seabees that one of us is frankly obsessed with.
Our angle: A musical brave enough to sing about racism, with a 17-year-old love interest it should have thought harder about. The real heroes are the Seabees and the coast watchers.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 5 and Sam 6.5 out of ten (self aware songs about racism). In Maartje’s words: “It’s mediocre but not quite a six.”
Keep Listening
The Pacific war reaches into two more episodes, though neither is set in the Pacific itself:
- Ep 125 – 1941 – Spielberg’s comedy about invasion panic in Los Angeles days after Pearl Harbor, with Sam on the real Battle of Los Angeles and the internment of Japanese Americans
- Ep 122 – Oppenheimer – the Manhattan Project and the reasons behind the bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945, with George
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Frequently Asked Questions about WW2 in the Pacific
What are the best films about WW2 in the Pacific?
Some of the strongest films and series on the Pacific war include Tora! Tora! Tora! and Midway (Pearl Harbor and the great naval battles), HBO’s The Pacific (the Marine ground war), Flags of Our Fathers and Hacksaw Ridge (Iwo Jima and Okinawa), Unbroken and The Narrow Road to the Deep North (prisoners of the Japanese), and Grave of the Fireflies and Godzilla Minus One (the war’s cost inside Japan). We break down what each one gets right and where it falls short.
Why is the Pacific war less represented on screen than the war in Europe?
Partly distance and unfamiliarity, partly discomfort. For Western studios the European theatre offered a more familiar landscape and a cleaner moral story, while the Pacific raised harder questions about racism, colonialism, and the atomic bombings. So the same few battles get retold while huge parts of the war – especially the experiences of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Pacific Islander people – rarely reach the screen at all.
Is HBO's The Pacific based on a true story?
Yes. The 2010 series follows three real Marines – Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge, and John Basilone – drawn largely from Leckie’s and Sledge’s own memoirs of the island campaigns at Guadalcanal, Peleliu, and Okinawa. We cover the whole series across three episodes, plus interviews with actor Scott Gibson and writer Bruce McKenna.
Where can I hear more about Pacific war films and history?
Every episode linked on this page is available on the Rosie the Reviewer podcast, where we review WW2 films and TV against the real history behind them. Get in touch if there’s a story you think we should cover next.
