As a pretty steady viewer of channels like The History Channel and The Discovery Channel, I never think to go to PBS for war documentaries, which is funny because perhaps one of the greatest war documentaries ever produced, the 26-part The World at War, premiered on PBS when I was a kid, and created an indelible impression on me. Watching Dogfight Over Guadalcanal, an episode from PBS's Secrets of the Dead series (which I've never seen), I was impressed with the overall production of the documentary, although I did notice some rather telling differences with PBS's approach, as opposed to what The History Channel might have done with the same story. Detailing the most famous dogfight in the Pacific theater during World War II, Dogfight Over Guadalcanal not only recounts this remarkable story, it offers, through interviews with military historians, a new interpretation of the mysterious outcome of this legendary aerial combat. That interpretation, as well as a curious weighted approach to this well-documented story, will no doubt cause some problems for history buffs watching the show.

On July 7th, 1942, the U.S. Saratoga left Pearl Harbor with 19,000 Marines, headed for the tiny island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Its mission was to stop the Japanese from building an airstrip that would provide the Japanese with a vital hopping off point for potential attacks against the United States forces. Aboard the carrier were eight Wildcat fighters intended to secure the air over the beachheads. One of the Wildcat pilots, James "Pug" Sutherland, would soon become the first U.S. pilot shot down over the island.

After the Americans slammed into Guadalcanal, surprising the occupying Japanese force, reinforcements were called for over five hundred miles away, at Rabaul, in New Guinea. Among the seventeen fighter pilots ordered to support the twenty-seven Japanese bombers scrambled to hit the Americans at Guadalcanal was Japanese ace Saburo Sakai, one of Japan's elite airmen with over 50 American kills to his name. Once the Japanese bombers unsuccessfully unloaded their bombs on the American transports (in their haste, the Japanese had forgotten to substitute highly effective torpedoes for the inaccurate aerial bombs), Sakai spied Sutherland engaging two of his wingmen in a desperate dogfight. Amazed at the agility and grace of this American pilot, Sakai nonetheless joined the fight, engaging Sutherland in a vicious cat-and-mouse game of aerial combat.

According to Sakai's own account after the duel, after his initial confrontation with Sutherland, the American pilot had Sakai dead to rights in his gun sight, but mysteriously failed to fire, where he would have certainly killed Sakai. Sakai then gained the upper hand, and pumped over two hundred rounds into the battered Wildcat (which fortunately was heavily armored, unlike the faster, more agile Japanese Zeros). Seriously wounding Sutherland, Sakai supposedly flew alongside Sutherland, and according to this documentary's reading of Sakai's account, showed mercy for the pilot until Sutherland made a defensive move, which then prompted Sakai to down his plane - but significantly, not by shooting into the cockpit, but into the American's engine housing. Sutherland's Wildcat exploded, but not before he managed to bail out. Sutherland endured a torturous journey through the rough jungle, sporting serious wounds, before he was returned by island natives to Allied hands.

The fact that Sutherland and Sakai's dogfight has entered into popular history can perhaps be traced to the fact that it's one of the best documented dogfights in the WWII records. Both pilots managed to live through the war, and come back and write memoirs about the famous encounter. And certainly, this idea that a fierce Japanese samurai airman took pity on an American pilot during the dark days of WWII, plays on popular, modern humanistic readings of history that want to infuse all actions of American war enemies with ennobling behavior, perhaps as a guilty counterpoint to the wartime propaganda that smeared in particular, the Japanese people. What's troubling about Dogfight Over Guadalcanal is the fact that much more time is given over to explore Sakai's exploits at the expense of Sutherland's. Much detail is given about the actual training practices of the Japanese pilots, but no such detail is given about the American methods. Sakai is looked at in detail, including his exploits in the Japanese Air Force, while Sutherland's is glossed over quickly. And most curiously, almost all of the narration from the two memoirs is taken up with Sakai's account - not Sutherland's. We only hear one or two passages from Sutherland's memoir, while Sakai's makes up the bulk of the show. Why is that? The documentary never explains this selection process.

Even stranger is the documentary's insistence on looking at the story of Sakai's "benevolence" at shooting Sutherland's engine, and not Sutherland directly, as fact, and not what it really is: interpretation. Both of the American military historians, Colonel Ralph Wetterhahn (who's also a crash site investigator) and Barrett Tillman insist that Sakai showed mercy towards Sutherland by not blasting him directly in his cockpit. In fact, the documentary (which really plays like a biography of Sakai, and not a balanced account of both pilots) appears to have a lot riding on this essentially altruistic, compassionate take on Sakai (perhaps to jibe more closely with his avowed pacifism after the war). What I find troubling is that one of the Japanese military historians used in this documentary, Henry Sakaida, plainly states that Sakai would never have shown mercy to the American pilot. The documentary details the hideously brutal training tactics that Japanese soldiers endured (blows to the face, beatings with baseball bats to the buttocks), turning them into hardened, remorseless soldiers (an assessment that any American solider fighting the Japanese in the Pacific would concur with). Dovetailing right in with that overview, Sakaida directly contradicts Wetterhahn's assertion that Sakai was a benign, chivalrous soldier, touched by the humanity of Sutherland's wounds.

Indeed, the documentary mentions the samurai code that Sakai lived by; such a code would view actions attributed to Sakai by the American historians as weakness, not something honorable. Given this important divergence from the documentary's main focus, I assumed someone would comment on Sakaida's statement. But the documentary simple ignores it, with Tillman coming on, saying in effect, "Well, I believe he did show mercy," as if that's the end of that discussion. Further support for this conjecture is supposedly garnered from Sakai's own words, which suggest that he did show mercy. But those words are taken out of context. Anyone can read Sakai's own words on the subject, and there's a key sentence or two that suggest interpretation:

The documentary seems to take this for mercy, but in his previous passages, Sakai makes it clear that he thought the pilot was mortally wounded. Thus, there was no reason to hit him directly. The rather cold rationalizing on Sakai's part that hitting the plane again was just hitting the plane, and not really the man, only further emphasizes the professional nature of Sakai's thinking, while devaluing the notion that he was showing mercy. In fact, the documentary then interprets Sutherland's last maneuver as aggressive (thereby allowing Sakai the moral authority to shoot at his engine), but reading Sakai's account, there is no such attribution to Sutherland's final attempt at a loop. It just reads as if Sakai made up his mind to blast him out of the air. Not mentioned in the documentary, but certainly pertinent, is the fact that Sakai's account of Sutherland's "weakening" in front of him, may have caused embarrassment for Sakai, not mercy. Reading his memoirs, it's open to interpretation, especially considering Sakai's samurai code that viewed any kind of weakness shown in front of the enemy as disgraceful, and worthy of death. Unfortunately, the documentary refuses to take this into account.

Why is this all important? I guess because the documentary goes out of its way to be P.C. about this whole thing, when it really isn't necessary. There's no reason to "humanize" or "excuse" in any way the actions of Sakai (or Sutherland, for that matter), particularly when it's a stretch to think so (especially when an alternate theory is introduced and dropped on this point). These were professional soldiers, engaged in combat in a war they both fervently believed in. You can debate the motivations of the governments who fought the war, but taken as a dogfight between two professionals, why is it so important for these filmmakers to go out of their way to re-interpret the story, favoring Sakai as the moral superior? Certainly they do this when the second half of the documentary shows Wetterhahn returning to Guadalcanal, finding wreckage from Sutherland's plane crash, and based on two rusted-out rounds from (he assumes) Sutherland's plane, determines that Sutherland most certainly would have blasted Sakai out of the skies, but that his guns jammed. That's certainly the most logical conclusion as to why Sutherland didn't go in for the kill on Sakai - but why can't we hear Sutherland's reason from his memoir? The documentary refuses us that bit of narration, which is curious, to say the least. Clearly, the documentary makers were more taken with the idea of a fierce samurai warrior taking pity on a wounded American pilot, a pilot, by the way, who the documentary states would have shown no similar mercy had his guns not jammed. You can make up your own minds as to why PBS wanted to have this slant to Dogfight Over Guadalcanal.

The DVD:

The Video:
The widescreen, enhanced for 16x9 TVs, 1.78:1 video image for Dogfight Over Guadalcanal is flawless, with some really incredible (but relatively brief) CGI footage of the dogfight. Colors are quite good, and I saw no transfer issues.

The Audio:
The English 2.0 stereo sound mix is lively, but I would have preferred something a little more dense, certainly a 5.1 for the combat scenes. Close-captioning is available.

The Extras:
There are no extras for Dogfight Over Guadalcanal.

Final Thoughts:
While the actual production of Dogfight Over Guadalcanal is impressive, the slant to the story of the famous aerial dogfight between Saburo Sakai and James "Pug" Sutherland, interpreting the combat as ultimately an act of mercy by Sakai, flies in the face of one of the documentary's own historians -- whose contrary theory is unfortunately ignored. Military and history buffs may enjoy Dogfight Over Guadalcanal for its alternate theory concerning this dogfight, but I would suggest another more balanced account for the average viewer. Rent it.