"One hundred men against twelve hundred. Either they're incredibly brave, or incredibly stupid."
"Or they just really fucking hate us."
—Runner and Leckie, foreshadowing just how willing the Japanese were to make the war as violent and nightmarish for the Marines.
- The wounded Japanese soldier committing suicide with a grenade while Marine corpsmen were helping him following the night attack in Part One.
- At Guadalcanal, the company comes across the corpses of soldiers who had been captured, tortured, and brutally killed by the Japanese. One was tied to a tree, his genitals clearly having been cut off and stuffed into the mouth of his decapitated comrade a few feet away.
- Jungle Warfare on Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, and Okinawa. Not only do you have the Japanese attacking and counter-attacking Marine positions both during the day and night, but there's also the weather, the issue of diseases like malaria and dysentery, and supply problems, most notably a lack or shortage of clean drinking water and quality of food. And then there's the vast jungles themselves.
- Familiarity with the history of the Pacific theater really doesn't make things like this all that surprising. There were some very pragmatic reasons for the Marines in the field to adopt a "take no prisoners" attitude against the Japanese.
- A group of Marines are found blown up and dismembered in a crater; one of them still has his head, but not his face, which was a few feet away.
- The Marine who chokes a Japanese soldier to death with his bare hands, and then the completely unhinged grin he gives to Leckie and the other marine who witness him doing it. Fast forward to the end of the episode, and the same soldier is in a soldier's hospital, completely shell-shocked.
- Snafu digging out a gold tooth of a dead Japanese soldier with his Ka-Bar. Bonus Nightmare points in that he was just eating with it beforehand.
- Snafu dropping pebbles into the pool of brain matter/blood that's left in a Japanese soldier's head, the top of which has been blown off.
- Earlier, another Marine attempts to take gold teeth out of a STILL LIVING Japanese soldier. Snafu comes over and puts him out of his misery... then says to Sledge, "It makes it easier." It's hard to tell if he was joking or not.
- The real event, as documented in Sledge's nonfiction book, "With The Old Breed" was even more nightmareish. The Marine, on finding it so difficult to dig the still living man's teeth out, slashed both of his cheeks wide open to make his hunt easier. Sledge and the other Marines were disgusted (mutilating corpses postmortem is one thing, torturing the poor bastard while he's still alive and conscious is something else entirely) by this man's conduct and said so, only to be rebuffed. As the Japanese soldier sputtered and coughed his own blood, the Marine kept digging. Only then did someone put the man out of his misery, finally fed up with the situation.
- The fact that Japanese soldiers routinely tortured Allied prisoners was not seen as a justification.
- Let's just say Snafu in general.
- Peleliu as a whole: some marines have described it as the most horrific battle they fought in the entire war.
- Which only makes it worse when it is explained in the next chapter that the battle was all for nothing: General MacArthur decided not to use Peleliu as his staging ground for the eventual invasion of the Philippines. It was just six by two miles of hell and death, and in the end it was completely pointless.
- To paint a picture of how terrible the fighting on Peleliu was and how high the casualty rate, all four of Leckie's main group (himself, Runner, Hoosier, and Chuckler) have been together since Guadalcanal. None of them have been wounded at this point - and all four of them are taken out as casualties from Peleliu, making the casualty rate for their little group of friends 100%.
- At one point after Captain Ack-Ack's death, Sledge and his platoon march through the blasted landscape of Bloody Nose Ridge. As he marches he comes across really nice things such as the burnt and bloody remains of dead Japanese as well as the corpses of dead Marines wrapped under a poncho. In Sledge's book, in the latter part of the battle he would encounter corpses of dead Marines who were chopped up, beheaded and had their severed privates stuffed on their mouth!.
- A similar incident of the above is depicted in the very first episode in Guadalcanal. Needless to say Leckie and the others aren't keen in taking prisoners after this.
- The Iwo Jima landings. In contrast to the other islands shown, which at least had trees and bushes still growing in several areas, this island has no vegetation whatsoever. What's more, there are Japanese positions in just about every other place the Marines look, and almost no cover on the island whatsoever. The Scenery Gorn, specifically the remains of one of the Japanese airfields in the background, doesn't help at all.
- Every single second of Part 9; watching it, it's easy to see why so many men came back with post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Okinawa is the definition of this: constant rain to the point the ground got so muddy corpses began to sink underneath so all you could see was a skeletal hand with maggots eating it. The island had the highest casualties of the Pacific War on both sides. Even the civilians inhabiting Okinawa were not only caught in the crossfire, but were used as human shields by the desperate Japanese.
- Sledge falling into a watery, maggot-filled machine-gun nest with a rotten corpse deserves special mention.
- Anything involving Okinawan civilians.
- The woman and her baby. Dear god, the woman and her baby.
