THE American Second World War and the British Second World War were very different experiences. Before their joint invasion of continental Europe in June 1944 the two countries were largely engaged in separate theatres. Even after D-Day the United States continued to fight on two fronts. Their first and last enemy was the Empire of Japan.

The difference has been reflected for over 60 years in the literature, film and buzzwords from the war on either side of the Atlantic. For our own Dunkirk, El Alamein and Battle Of Britain, the Americans have Bataan, Iwo Jima and Midway. Most of the great British war movies told stories of the Atlantic sea battles, North Africa or the skies over East Anglia in the summer of 1940. The Americans looked east, to vicious, unsparing conflicts on inhospitable outcrops a thousand miles from anywhere, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Sergeant Ryan and the TV series it inspired, Band of Brothers, were not of course unique in replaying the American role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe. But Spielberg was probably going to have to follow them with a look at his country’s main concern: the war that stretched from aircraft carriers duelling like mythical monsters in the Coral Sea to the atom bomb dropping on Nagasaki three years later.

Spielberg and his partner in the enterprise, Tom Hanks, began in 2003 to think of applying the Band of Brothers concept to the war in the Pacific. Spielberg knew that the American historian Stephen Ambrose, who had written a successful book on the Normandy landings, was also looking at the Pacific.

The film-maker suggested a collaboration. Stephen Ambrose was too ill to participate and passed the project on to his son Hugh. Hugh Ambrose was subsequently hired by Spielberg to help develop the storyline of The Pacific. Having immersed himself in the subject matter he felt able to produce his own, parallel, literary treatment. So he wrote it.

The Pacific is therefore more the book of the film than the book which inspired the film, or rather the TV series which will be broadcast next month. It is different from most other books-of-the-film because it is, in its own right, extremely good.

The Band of Brothers formula is to tell the story of a military campaign through the experiences of a handful of fighting men. In covering the 11 months between the D-Day invasions and the fall of Berlin, the original Band of Brothers was following a relatively short and linear narrative.

The war in the Pacific was not like that. It was fought for 44 months on land, sea and air over millions of square miles. It involved two superpowers: one an imperial hereditary theocracy; the other a secular republican democracy. The war in Europe was contested chiefly between Europeans, even if many of them had transplanted to America. The war in the Pacific was fought by men who had almost nothing in common but their humanity, and who consequently felt enabled to deny even that.

The characters chosen by Ambrose to tell his story overlap but are not synonymous with the men in the Spielberg/Hanks TV series, which is largely based on two established Pacific war memoirs, EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed and Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow.

Sledge and Leckie both feature in the book, but Ambrose included in his five-strong central cast two men who you will not see on television. One was an aviator and the other a US marine who escaped from a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the Philippines and became involved in resistance guerrilla movements.