Hell in the Pacific Episode Rating Graph

This first of four episodes covers the early part of the war in the Pacific. One of the most bitter battle arenas of the Second World War, Pearl Harbour represented the trigger that led America into the greatest conflict ever recorded and the eventual liberation of the people of Asia and the Pacific. On the 7th December 1941 Japan launched surprise attacks across the Pacific region, setting battleships ablaze in Pearl Harbour, then routing the British in Malaya and capturing Singapore itself: the greatest humiliation in British war history. The Japanese now seemed unstoppable and after being at war with China for a decade, and shocking the world with atrocities like the Nanking Massacre, they believed their destiny was to rule Asia under the Emperor, for them, a living god.

After Pearl Harbour was struck, the Japanese swept across the Pacific. Thousands of Americans and Filipinos died on the Bataan Death March and prisoners were forced to labour for the Japanese, building the infamous Thai-Burma 'death' railway. But the Allies struck back. 'Doolittle's Raiders' flew from an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo itself. The Battle of Midway halted Japanese naval expansion, while U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal learned to take no prisoners. Australian forces defending their homeland against invasion turned back the Japanese in New Guinea - a brutal fight against desperate troops, some of whom turned to cannibalism.

It was a war of hatred, fanned by propaganda. The Allies filmed themselves machine-gunning Japanese survivors in lifeboats and showed it in cinemas. The Japanese scoured their appalling prison camps to find prisoners fit enough to act in a propaganda film, playing golf and eating steaks. The reality was brutal. Women on both sides toiled and suffered. Two hundred thousand Asian women were forced into Japanese military brothels: rape on an industrial scale. Rather than face the shame of defeat and - according to their propaganda - inevitable rape by the Americans, Japanese women on Saipan jumped off cliffs with their babies.

The closer the Allies got to Japan, the more savage the fighting. Tiny islands like Peleliu and Iwo Jima were carpeted with corpses. The Americans slaughtered wounded Japanese; both sides looted and mutilated the dead. Desperate and starving, the Japanese turned to cannibalism - but would not surrender. The atomic bomb seemed a godsend to the Allies poised to invade mainland Japan; it would also deter the Soviet Union. The Hiroshima pilot and a survivor recall the moment that changed the world. Then came the joy of going home - and the pain of having to live with the memories of hell. Powerful, emotional interviews and striking, rare archive film showing combat and victims may be distressing to some viewers.