I read that book about sixty years ago! Great read along with Ernie Pyle’s books.
Been years since I have seen the movie.
I first read this when I was 11 or 12 years old.
Just after the war, many of the war movies about WW2 were not “comfortable”. You had to walk a tightrope between being realistic and being entertaining. My dad started the war during Operation Torch and ended it on Okinawa. He was the envy of his friends who served because he never fired his weapon. He was a Staff Sgt similar to Radar on MASH. He never had the nightmares.
Great book. I read this as a 12 year old back in the Sixties. Rendering it faithfully into a movie has not been adequately done. IMO.
In my opinion, the best approach via film I have seen is “The Pacific” series, where they show the fighting on Bougainville. The privation of the men, the assault by everything natural ranging from the humid, fungus filled climate to the deadly disease bearing insects, to the constant strain of combat is close, but not yet approaching the actual conditions for those of us who have not been there.
The opening portion of the series “The Pacific” is devoted to Guadalcanal. It’s based on Eugene Sledge’s memory of that battle in his “With the Old Breed”.
The Pacific is able to show war a lot more realistically than what movies were able to do in the 1950s. The great Dale Dye served as advisor to the production. Well worth watching.
Contrast the US Military of 1942 with the intellectually and morally confused military of 2023!
It's easy to see why America's enemies are emboldened. It's also easy to see the terrible danger that threatens the American People and the USA in 2023.
If the American People don't wake up fast, they're going to be in much greater danger--and in the near future.
But after serving in combat in Vietnam, my view of war movies became much more jaundiced. All war movies seemed contrived, comfortable and faked. They were cartoons, designed to make war seem easily endurable and not excessively scary.
Even Vietnam war movies were lousy: the directors/writers were intent on presenting their messages, rather than trying to show us (or the Vietnamese) in a favorable light. As with the previous generation's war movies, the firefights didn't at all sound like real firefights, gunfire sounded like blanks (which of course, they were) and grenades looked and sounded like trashcans full of gasoline being exploded by black powder.
Unlike earlier war movies, we Vietnam combatants were portrayed as witless stumblers (Forrest Gump, Deer Hunter) and/or war criminals (Platoon, Apocalypse Now).
I keep hoping for a good movie to made about us and what we did - but it likely won't come out until all of us who were there are long gone from this earth.
This is an uncharacteristically rambling Steyn article.
...
There are two scenes on the troop transport before the landing that show the Jirenes using both of the devices issued for loading the cloth ammunition belts for the .30-06 M1917 Browning water-cooled machine gun.
Two Marines feed single cartridges into the hopper while a third turns the crank handle that stuffs them into the belt one round at a time
First lay nine cartridges with the tip of the bullet slightly in the loop in the belt, then pull the lever over to seat all nine to the proper depth
Until I saw this movie I had never considered how they loaded the cloth belts, or that the Marines in the field loaded them themselves. Which makes sense, since M1917 Browning used the same cartridge as their M1903 Springfield rifles (they didn't get M1 Garands until later in the war).
Most war movies make you forget that guns have to be reloaded now and again. GCD even showed how they loaded the belts for the belt-fed machine gun.
JMB's M1917, BTW, was the gun that that John Basilone employed so successfully en route to earning his Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal. His section (probably about 16 men and four Browning MGs) got cut off and surrounded by an entire Japanese regiment, about 3000 (three THOUSAND) men.
Whenever ammo ran low (which was often) Basilone would run straight at the flanking Japanese and through their positions to get to the Marine resupply point. Most of the time he'd pick up six 250-round belts of ammo (at about 15 lbs ea.), drape all 90 lbs of it around his neck, then run back through the Japanese lines to get back to his section. With 90-lbs of shiny brass cartridges around his neck jingling like Santa's sleigh bells. It's incredible he didn't get killed on the first trip.
Basilone and his men held for two days until they were relieved, by which time the Japanese were decimated and Basilone was one of only three Marines still standing.
After receiving the MOH he was sent home to do War Bond tours. But he couldn't stand not being with his Marines and kept complaining until he got what he wanted. About two and a half years after being the hero of Guadalcanal, he was killed by an artillery round on Iwo Jima.
And a little later in the movie you see a Marine officer carrying an M50 Reising .45 ACP submachine gun.
The Reising is an obscure piece now but the Marines fielded it because they wanted something lighter than the Tommy gun, which was a couple of pounds heavier than the M1 Garand battle rifle. The Reising was about five lbs lighter than the Thompson but it wasn't adequately jungle-tested before issue and it failed because in a tropical rain forest it was a hopeless jam-o-matic.
If you're a gun guy, GCD is a must-see.
The difference between hollywood actors in a war movie and the real soldiers in battle is how old the soldiers looks after being in combat. The soldiers being 18, maybe a few years older while many of these actors are 30+ and still look soft.