The Pacific theater in WWII in 10 easy pieces

Did you think HBO's "The Pacific" would be a special about the ocean? No, it's a war saga of grand ambition - too grand, probably. This Hanks-Spielberg-Van Patten epic is meant to cover the entire Pacific theater of World War II in 10 episodes. Can it? From evidence of the first episode: Not likely. Episode one establishes, more or less, the main characters, all bound for the Marines and Guadalcanal, in such quick strokes that it's very hard to distinguish them from one another and, to the extent that we can, they're nothing more than "types": the wealthy Southerner, the guy leaving his girlfriend behind, the working-class Italian, et al. Will we see them grow and change through the trials of war? No doubt, but we see very little about who they were before the war - we're in Guadalcanal within 20 minutes I think. Once there, has there been a recent war movie that has done a worse job in depicting life in combat? These guys look like they're in summer camp, laughing, joking, tromping through the jungle. It's a shock when bullets fly, and even more so when we see the beach littered with dead (Japanese) soldiers. How did this battle happen? Did I miss it? Were any Americans killed? This episode is very awkwardly paced and by the end I know nothing about the battle and little about the characters. I see that the goal of this series is, apparently, to tell the whole story from the POV of the soldiers - nothing about the war rooms, the generals, the home front - but then we have to know them, care about them, and believe in them. For comparison, see the great HBO five-part series on the invasion of Iraq as seen from one platoon.