![]() ![]() Most major campaigns of the Pacific War get their own episodes (e.g. ![]() The series starts with Japanese incursions into China, beginning in 1931, and conditions in the Asian countries that would subsequently be occupied by the Japanese, followed by an episode about Japan’s actions before the war, leading up to Pearl Harbor, featuring pre-war footage taken in Japan. I discovered the series on YouTube and liked what I saw so much that I bought a DVD box set with all 26 episodes from Amazon that was released by MPI Home Video. ![]() There’s a great deal to cover, too much in one blog entry, so I’ve decided to focus on my chief discovery, a 26-part documentary series made for television, “Crusade in the Pacific” (1951), which features lots of incredible footage of the war in the Pacific, including many sequences taken from Japanese sources, so we get to see what the war looked like to the Japanese. My emphasis has been on the war with Japan and I began reading The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945, written by eminent historian John Toland and published in 1970, in which the author interviewed many Japanese participants and read through Japanese transcripts and documents to get their side of the story. For example, after watching a TV documentary about Guadalcanal and then a movie in which the battle is featured, I would look for chapters on Guadalcanal in various books to get the full story. Then, and most importantly, I pulled books about the war off my history shelves and began reading chapters on the subjects I’d just seen in the films and documentaries. I then plunged into my collection of Hollywood movies on the subject, watching or re-watching 18 so far. ![]() I began watching all sorts of documentaries and collections of original footage from the war. What started it was the random discovery of tons of material on the war on YouTube. I’ve been immersed in World War II research lately. ![]()
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