War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Music host, James Early. Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of the Guadalcanal campaign series.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And as always, I'm accompanied by Dave Holland.

Well, as you know, listeners, I love movies.

I love historical miniseries, TV shows, and so I could not resist doing a few episodes on some of the movies that are relevant to the things we discuss in the series. So you've

already heard that I reran my episode on Torah, Toro, Tora,

after we did our first episode, most of which was Pearl Harbor,

and then after the second episode in which we discussed the Coral Sea and Midway

and some other things I ran, reran my review of the movie Midway from 2019 with Sean McIver. But this time we are going to talk

about the first episode of the magnificent HBO miniseries, The Pacific. Dave and I are actually

going to talk about two episodes. We'll do the first episode this time and in the future we'll do

the second episode. But we're not going to do the whole series. At least and in the future we'll do the second episode.

And, but we're not going to do the whole series, at least not now.

Who knows, we may eventually come back and do the other episodes, but we're, we're going to stick to the ones that take place during the Guadalcanal campaign.

So that's just the first two episodes.

So let's talk about HBO's the Pacific.

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