When the Marine First Division landed on Guadalcanal in October of 1942, there was little opposition because there were hardly any Japanese combat troops. The Japanese underestimated the number of Americans ashore and fed in more troops piecemeal. The Americans followed suit. The battle for Guadalcanal seesawed back and forth both on land and at sea. For months the Japanese controlled the waters at night, while American air power ruled during the day. It became increasingly difficult for the Japanese to supply their ragged troops, many of whom died from disease and malnutrition. They finally executed a successful evacuation and Guadalcanal and its air field were permanently in American hands.
The facts as presented seem accurate enough and the visual effects are just fine, as usual. The CGIs have two important functions. They illustrate vividly the events being described and they show us sights for which no newsreel or combat footage is available.
If the virtues remain the same as in the other episodes, so do some of the irritations. The narration never seems to lie about engagements but -- this is difficult to describe. If an American ship "suffers a bomb hit amidships," its Japanese counterpart is "eviscerated." And the intonations of the narrator tell us exactly what we're supposed to think. He makes a sports announcer sound like an amateur. For a much clearer example of the point I'm clumsily trying to make, watch an episode of an earlier post-war documentary series like "Victory at Sea" and listen to the narrator pronounce the word "Jap-a-NESE," filling those three syllables with unspeakable contempt. Two of the talking heads are professional historians and avoid this sly attempt to manage our emotions.
The events happened more than seventy years ago. Aren't viewers entitled to the kind of resigned but non-judgmental narration that David McCullough provided for Ken Burns' "The Civil War"? I found myself wondering from time to time what any young Japanese might think of these techniques.