The Pacific War, told entirely through combat footage shot by American cameramen and captured Japanese film, opens with the surrender of General Jonathan Wainwright at Corregidor in 1942 and the Bataan Death March that followed. From there the film tracks Australia bracing for invasion, the naval battle in the Coral Sea, the ground fighting on Guadalcanal, and the air assault that destroyed a Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea. Marines take Iwo Jima; Army, Navy, and Marine forces together take Okinawa; the campaign to retake the Philippines gets extended treatment, matching the Army Pictorial Service's own footage against Japanese newsreels of the same battles. Produced by the Army Pictorial Service with the Army Air Forces and Navy, and distributed by Warner Bros. for the War Activities Committee, the film was built for wartime audiences and it shows: plain narration, minimal editorializing, footage doing the persuading. It ends where the war did, with the formal surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay in September 1945.