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.
