Episode 18 - “Two if by Sea”

Summary

EP18 profiles America's fall 1944 invasions of Peleliu and Angaur, two of the Pacific's Palau islands southeast of the Philippines. Casualties were as high as in any such Pacific theater assaults, and these offensives’ strategic necessity continues to be debated. Still, many of the lessons learned were useful in the early 1945 attacks on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Henry Salomon may have most fully achieved his vision for Victory with EP18. The 826-word script, incorporating passages from Ecclesiastes 3 and Exodus alongside official Pacific Fleet Communiques, is Victory's tersest, leaving nearly twenty-one minutes of the soundtrack to the music, which is solely Bennett's and suggests the orchestral sound of an all-Bennett Victory. A present-day viewer first introduced to the series via EP18 would receive a markedly different initial impression from another who had first sampled the uplifting series conclusion of the tuneful EP26.

Another of the EP18 soundtrack's distinctions is its total lack of SFX, which, according to Bennett, Salomon “detested.” The timpani scoring, sensitively played by Karl Glassman, is a handy stand-in for the big battleship guns and mobile artillery, and viewers may not have missed audible ordnance at all. With limited narration and no SFX, this episode's soundtrack would have been especially uncomplicated to mix.

Bennett described EP18 as a “tragic episode” and his “most difficult” creative challenge of the entire series, this program being concerned with bloodshed-filled invasions which left several US combat cameramen among the casualties. The tensely scored Part One, lasting to 8:13, portrays the initial landings on Peleliu and, after 6:44, those at Angaur. Musical examples [A], [B], [C], [D], and [E] are components of this first reel's scoring, which constitutes a compact sonata form as detailed in the Musical Postlude below.

As with EP15's “D-Day” account, EP18 opens not with scenic vistas or grand strategies, but with close-in images of American servicemen aboard their landing craft, approaching the beaches of Peleliu. The narration's parallels are characteristically Salomon-Hanser: “These men are called Marines. These men are called Sailors. These men are called Soldiers. Pacific is the ocean. Peleliu is the island. 1944 is the year.” Within the first minute the Marines have come ashore amidst amphibious tanks aflame and dead comrades at the water's edge.