A veteran’s view of WWII

Sid Phillips has never seen a war movie that really conveys what it’s like in the trenches, said Stephen Armstrong in the London Times. A mortar operator in the Marines during the fierce six-month Battle of Guadalcanal, Phillips says that when he returned home from World War II, he was unable to talk about the war to friends and family. “You didn’t want to go there,” he says. “They hardly knew what you were talking about. I was determined not to dwell on it, to be affected by it.” He finally began talking decades later, when Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg approached him about dramatizing his experiences for their World War II miniseries The Pacific. Despite providing stories and experiences for the series, Phillips says it doesn’t truly capture the misery of being a soldier. “Everybody thinks of war as constant combat,” he says. “It is not. If it was, everyone would be dead within two weeks. Combat comes in violent episodes. The horror of war to the veteran is the daily life.” To depict that, Phillips says, “we’d have to throw you in a mud hole, leave you there all night with no toilet paper and skip breakfast in the morning, with a warship shelling you all night long. That’s what war was like. But that doesn’t really make for great TV.”

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