Unternehmen Seeadler

I like submarine films, but in watching them one has to realize that there are only so many plot situations and each film seems to cover just about all of them. In fact the officers and men of the U.S.S. Thunderfish during what little spare time they had were watching another Warner Brother submarine adventure, Destination Tokyo. If you remember they exchanged the film with another submarine crew for George Washington Slept Here.

Operation Pacific unfortunately suffered with an additional handicap, not foreseen by the Brothers Warner. Another film from Paramount entitled Submarine Command came out right about the same time as Operation Pacific. It starred John Wayne's very good friend and box office rival William Holden. A lot of the same situations are covered in that film, hard to distinguish between the two.

That being said Operation Pacific is one of John Wayne's better war films and a good tribute to the men of the Silent Service. I remember back in the day, I had a history professor in college who was a marine in World War II. He said without reservation that for all of what he was doing in places like Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, the tipping balance in the Pacific War was the American superiority in submarines. Due in no small part to the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet Chester W. Nimitz who trained on submarines and appreciated their worth. Cutting supplies to the home islands helped in no small measure to American combat success ultimately.

John Wayne is the Executive Officer of the Thunderfish which is commanded by Ward Bond. His former wife Patricia Neal is a navy nurse at Pearl Harbor. He'd like to win her back, but she's now dating Philip Carey, a navy flier and Bond's younger brother.

Besides the romantic problems the Thunderfish goes on all kinds of missions. We first see them rescuing some orphan children off a Japanese held island, later they have some real problems with defective torpedoes in which Chief Jack Pennick has a big hand in solving. And of course the usual tangles with the Japanese Navy exploding depth charges around them.

In the supporting cast I have to say that my two favorite performances are from Paul Picerni who plays crewman Jonesy. Picerni's best known for being Robert Stack's number 2 guy in The Untouchables, but he's absolutely great as the comic relief in Operation Pacific. Happy-go-lucky sort of guy, if he were Latino, Gilbert Roland would have had the part.

The second is Jack Pennick. You can't think of too many John Ford films his horseface presence wasn't in. He plays the Chief Petty Officer on the Thunderfish and he's simply known as the Chief. Ford usually gave him minimal dialog in his films, he speaks a bit more here. One of my favorite John Wayne moments in cinema is when Wayne speaks a heartfelt tribute to young ensign Martin Milner after Pennick has been killed. Talking about the accomplishments that people of his rank make to the U.S. Navy. If your eyes don't moisten you are made of stone. It is in fact one of my favorite John Wayne scenes of all time.

Though the Duke and Patricia Neal got a lot more attention fourteen years later in In Harm's Way, I think they do just fine in Operation Pacific and I think you'll feel the same way when you see it.

... in that it is overall what I would expect from the genre and the actor. John Wayne stars as Lt. Cmdr. Duke Gifford, the first mate aboard a US Navy submarine fighting in the Pacific theater during WWII. He and his fellow submariners brave depth charges and leaky hulls while battling Japanese forces.When they make it back to base, Duke tries to rekindle the flame with his ex-wife, Navy nurse Lt. Mary Stuart (Patricia Neal), but she's also seeing Navy airman Lt. Bob Perry (Philip Carey). Ward Bond, of John Ford's stock company (although this is not a Ford film) and Milburn Stone also make an appearance.

The submarine action is exciting and well-executed, with fine miniature work and editing. Things really bog down, though, when the plot moves back to base and the tired love triangle comes to the forefront. The opening scenes, involving the rescue of a group of nuns and small children, is very corny. All-in-all, I liked the movie well enough, and I would recommend it for fans of John Wayne action films.

I love this movie for two reasons:

1) It causes me to relive my submarine war patrols in WWII. 2) It's a typical John Wayne movie.

It would probably not excite a viewer who does not care for John Wayne or war movies, but for anyone who participated in WWII in submarines, it's a must have.

For the current generation, it would be worthwhile just to get the feel of how things were in those days. For many of my vintage, watching this movie over and over, as I do, is a priceless reminder of those days when a few did so much for so many.

It's hard to decide which genre provided John Wayne the greater opportunity to showcase his talents - the "Western" or the "War Movie". Clearly, he excelled at both (and had more than a few opportunities to demonstrate it). Personally, I've always been a greater fan of his westerns, but when this film appeared on one of my favorite cable channels this afternoon, I found myself willingly drawn in. Although a lot of its elements are standard WWII fare, Operation Pacific still demonstrates why the genre has proven so successful to Hollywood.

This one includes all the cliches - the tragedy of lives lost for a just cause (in this case, the war in the Pacific), the heroism of the men who gave up their lives for that cause (here it's a submarine crew based out of "Pearl"), and the women forced to wait patiently while the men they loved went into harm's way.

Although a lot of this seems outdated and stereotyped some 50 years later, the movies that were made during and immediately following WWII nevertheless reflect the ideals and values that drove an entire nation (and generation) to act and feel as it did. My own father, who was a Navy man during the war, was a big fan of John Wayne. I have to believe that Wayne personified some of the very same values my father had come to embrace as a youth and during his time in the military. For me, this adds some validity and perspective.

I know this is not considered to be Wayne's best war film (and admit to not being an enthusiastic student of the genre), but I'm confident that it's a good example of why these films were (and remain) so popular.

Duke E. Gifford (John Wayne) is second in command of the USS Thunderfish, a submarine which is firing off torpedoes that either explode too early or never explode at all. It's a dilemma that he'll eventually take up personally. Even more personal is his quest to win back his ex-wife (Patricia Neal), a nurse; but he'll have to win her back from a navy flier who also happens to be his commander's little brother.

We know this movie is going to be an eye-roller during the opening scene in which the Thunderfish is transporting two nuns, a baby and a group of orphans who go running past a ludicrously tolerant crew as they're trying to sink a Japanese ship. While the action scenes are good, nearly every human moment in this film is phony; and the few that aren't are thanks to the usual expert performance from Patricia Neal, not from writer-director George Waggner.

The special effects and production values in this submarine drama are okay, but occasionally we'll see a cable pulling a torpedo or a night-time sky that has a ceiling and a corner. Max Steiner's score underlines every banality in the script and then underlines it twice more. At one point a crew member laughs at the Hollywood hokum in the Cary Grant film, "Destination Tokyo." If only he could have been out in the audience for his own picture.