The new TV series The Pacific, which chronicles the vicious struggle of the Pacific War through the eyes of four real US marines Photo: SKY/HBO

Sid Phillips, one of the four marines whose experiences of the Pacific War have been the inspiration for the new TV drama Photo: JANE MINGAY

IT was fate, that long queue snaking out of the US Navy recruitment office in downtown Mobile, Alabama. Sid Phillips had a job to go to and couldn’t wait for hours to join his preferred service, so he and his friend Woo Brown went to the head of the line to see what they could do. The Marine recruiting sergeant spotted them immediately – there was no queue outside his office.

“Do you boys wanna kill Japs?” he asked.

It was a Monday, the morning after the surprise Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Sid and Woo had heard the news the previous afternoon, Sunday December 7 1941, in the drugstore where Woo worked on the soda fountain. A woman had come running in shouting “turn on the radio”. Every channel repeated the same sketchy details.

Woo immediately suggested they join up. The Navy was the natural choice in Mobile, an old port on the Gulf of Mexico, but here was this man asking them did they want to kill Japs, and there could be but one answer.

Sid was 17 years and three months old, and was meant to be saving money from his job to finance his way through college the following year. He needed his parents to sign his enlistment papers. His father, a schoolteacher, consented, realizing that his son would be drafted anyway. His mother, as one would expect, was reluctant. She had two brothers in the Navy already and considered that sufficient sacrifice for her family. Sid got his way, eventually, but his mother never forgave the Marine sergeant. He would cross the street when she hoved into view, her expression darkening.

On December 29 Sid and Woo boarded the train for Birmingham, Alabama, where they were to be formally sworn in. Being young and ignorant of the world, they were in high spirits. The boys – for that was what they were – sang a newly-released song, Chattanooga Choo Choo.

There would be plenty of time for Sid Phillips to reflect on his choice of the Marine Corps as he huddled in a hole filled with stinking water in the tropical hell that was Guadalcanal. He turned 18 there, in September 1942, his coming of age marked by malaria, dysentery and the constant risk of sudden death, whether by Japanese shell or bayonet.

“During the war I did wish I was in the Navy but I feel the Lord was in charge of my life,” he reflects, sitting in dim light of his kitchen.

“Psychologically, there is no way to prepare a man for the reality of combat. As soon as you know someone is trying their best to kill you it changes everything. We had no concept of war.”

Sid Phillips’s experience was anything but unique, but no less remarkable for that. Like thousands of other young Americans – some even younger than himself – he was to grow up quickly in the vicious struggle that was the Pacific War. By the age of 20 his combat career was already over. In two years he had witnessed horror enough for ten lifetimes. He had killed men and seen men, some good friends, killed.

Dr Phillips, 85 now, might have lived out his life in contented obscurity, after a happy marriage of 54 years to Mary, now dead, and a satisfying career as a family doctor in Mobile. Suddenly, though, he is famous, the raw material for the most expensive television series ever made.

Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, The Pacific follows the combat careers of four young Marines during the Pacific island-hopping campaign that culminated in the defeat of Japan. Blockbuster is the only way to describe it, a ten-part series costing $230 million, airing in Britain on Sky Movies HD from Monday. The drama capitalizes on the success of Band of Brothers, the Emmy-award-winning series chronicling the experience of the young paratroopers of Easy Company as they make their way from the landing grounds of Normandy into the heart of Nazi Germany. The Pacific focuses on four real Marines, Eugene Sledge, Robert Leckie, John Basilone and Sid Phillips. After heroic fighting on Guadalcanal, Basilone, the only Marine to win the medal of Honor and Navy Cross during the Second World War, was killed in action on the first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima. He was 28.

The other three men survived the war but Sledge and Leckie, who both wrote books about their experiences, died in 2001. Sid Phillips is one of the last men standing from that time. Of the 300 men who served in his unit, H Company, 2nd battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, only five remain.

“Most of the battles in Europe have been abundantly covered,” says Tim Van Patten, the series director. “I’m not sure why, but the Pacific has not been covered nearly so well, and the battles were long, drawn-out, horrific experiences.”

Dr Phillips spent a considerable amount of time with Hanks and Spielberg, advising on authenticity. He praises the series for its attempt to convey accurately the tribulations of a campaign characterised by mutual racial hatred and fighting of the utmost brutality, but says no re-enactment can convey the grinding torment of jungle warfare.

“Fighting in the jungle is very debilitating,” he says, in his soft Southern drawl. “Two weeks and you are a different man – the mosquitoes, the fungal infections. Awful, awful. The rain would fill up your foxhole and you would have to dry your ammunition. We were starving for much of the time, and everyone had dysentery. There was no toilet paper, nowhere to wash – except occasionally in the ocean.

“You were always digging on Guadalcanal. We were digging almost 24 hours a day. The bombardments were indescribable. I think we were the only American troops to come under battleship bombardment during the war. You had the feeling that no-one could survive. When a 14-inch naval shell lands, you feel you have been thrown off a roof. The air is sucked out of you. It would go on and on and on and on.”

And close-quarter fighting? Guadalcanal was infamous for vicious nocturnal battles between dug-in Marines and the fanatical banzai-charging Japanese. “We saw as much as we wanted,” laughs Dr Phillips, a man equipped with a mordant wit.

The Guadalcanal campaign lasted from August 1942 until February 1943 and represented the first Allied amphibious offensive against Japan following the latter’s seemingly unstoppable rampage through South-East Asia and the Pacific in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The Allied command was concerned that an airfield being constructed by the Japanese on Guadalcanal, one of the southernmost of the Solomon Islands, could be used to attack shipping routes linking Australia with the United States, and decided to seize it. The initial operation went well. Poor weather prevented the Japanese from detecting the landing of the 1st Marine Division, which swiftly secured the airstrip and renamed it Henderson Field. Stung by the surprise attack, the Japanese high command poured troops into Guadalcanal, but a series of ill-coordinated frontal attacks failed to dislodge the Americans. Nevertheless, the Marines were subjected to incessant air attack and bombardment from the sea as Allied and Japanese ships fought for control of the waters around the island.

Sid Phillips and his mortar team were right in the middle of this, as were the other three protagonists in the series.

“We did not know our navy was weak at that time,” he says. “We did not know how alone we were – which in a way was to our advantage. We were bombarded by Jap navy day and night, and air-raided twice a day. It was wild. All you could was pray and hold on. What saved us was the fierce discipline of the Marine Corps. One or two guys cracked but very few. Humour was a cure for horror. We were always cracking jokes, even during bombardments: ‘Everybody stay calm – don’t lose your head and go to pieces’. That never gets into the movies.”

Fictionalised accounts necessarily conflate events, and The Pacific is no different. “It gives the impression that we were fighting all the time, which we weren’t. And you also see a lot of people crammed together in a shot. It wasn’t like that – you were spaced apart because a bunch of people makes a target. In the series, the men are always screaming at each other. You didn’t do that.”

The waiting was part of the torment, hour upon hour spent crouched in a foxhole in the dark, listening out for the rustling in the undergrowth that might spell sudden death. “We did two hours awake, two hours asleep – swapping with your buddy in the hole. We knew the Japanese were brutal. You didn’t know where they were. Sometimes they would creep up in the jungle and shout ‘Marine you die’. We were told to keep quiet because they were doing that to discover our position, but now and then someone would shout back ‘Tojo eat shit’. The lieutenant would go mad.

“They would come in a mass in the night – right at you. First clue was them jabbering in the undergrowth and the clank of metal. You stared deep into the jungle and then they were on you – charging, shooting. You just squeezed off a round, and another and another. You were just thinking, ‘kill these bastards before they kill us’.”

Did he kill? A pause.

“Yes. Yes. There’s a lot of flash every time you fire. Almost like camera. You see their faces.”

Knowing what had happened to Allied troops captured by the Japanese, the Marines gave no quarter.

“The Japs loved to play dead, so as soon as daylight came we would shoot all the bodies in the head. There was no need to take care of their wounded because if you tried to help they would kill you – shoot you with a pistol or let off a grenade they were hiding under under their body. It was absolutely kill or be killed.”

Dr Phillip’s first ordeal in the jungle ended in December 1942 when his unit was pulled out of Guadalcanal to recuperate in Australia. He spent nine happy months in Melbourne before his division was sent to New Guinea. His final combat operation was at Cape Gloucester, at the western end of the island of New Britain. Practice dictated that after two years in the frontline Marines should be rotated back to the United States. The young Sid returned to Mobile a man.

He returned to Guadalcanal once, with a party of veterans in 1977. “We got off the plane and one of the of the guys says, ‘Gads! this place still stinks’. It did, too: damp and musty, like an old cellar.”

The war focused the young Marine’s mind. He decided that he would be a doctor. “I was determined the war was not going to ruin my life. We used to say nothing could be worse than being in the jungle, and that feeling carried me through life. Nothing was a problem after that.”

Eugene Sledge, his boyhood friend, was not so fortunate. “He had a terrible time. He couldn’t forget the loss of so many young men.”

And Ashton Holmes, the actor who plays him in The Pacific? He laughs: “He’s perfect. He’s young, handsome and debonair. He looks more like me than I do.”

A devout Christian, Dr Phillips has always trusted in Providence. His fame today is the Lord’s work, he says. The purpose? To remind the young of the horror that is war.

“Something sent me to the head of that queue. I’m sure of that.”

The Pacific begins on Easter Monday, 9pm on Sky Movies Premiere/SMPHD