HBO's miniseries 'The Pacific' will look back at a time veterans like Jack Cole, 83, will never forget. (left photo, HBO; right photo, Damon Higgins / The Post)

Sometimes he could see the body. Sometimes he could smell the body. Sometimes he first heard the flies.

And when he located a fellow, fallen Marine on Iwo Jima, rifleman Jack Cole and another boy — really, they were boys; Cole had turned 18 only a month earlier — would lift them onto “stretchers so badly soiled they could no longer be used to transport wounded men,” he says.

“You know what a Jackson Pollock painting looks like?”

They worked without gloves, face masks or body bags, loading the corpses onto a truck, stacking them in two layers.

Cole, now 83 and a part-time Boca Raton resident, served 31 days on Iwo Jima — that desolate speck of Pacific island, all black sand, craggy hills, sulfur pits, and caves, tunnels and pillboxes concealing the enemy.

This is how the retired manufacturing engineer now measures the results of that assault, which lasted 37 days in February and March of 1945:

“If you took their 21,000 dead, if you took the 6,000 or 7,000 dead that we had, if you laid them out on Iwo Jima … you could make a carpet of bodies that would be almost 15 feet wide and about 3 miles long, and you could walk from one end of the island to the other on those bodies, without touching the soil.

“That’s what happened there.”

***

What happened there — and on Guadalcanal and Peleliu and Okinawa — is the subject of The Pacific, a 10-part miniseries that begins on March 14 at 9 on HBO. Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who also collaborated on the WWII epics Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, the miniseries dramatizes the Pacific campaign through the real-life stories of three Marines.

Overall, nearly 100,000 Americans died in the Pacific theater, between the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. More than 1.5 million members of the Japanese military perished, and estimates of the Japanese civilian toll range from 500,000 to 2 million.

A five-star treatment of the war waged in the Pacific is long overdue, says Donald Mates of Palm Beach, an 84-year-old Marine vet who saw limited action on Guam before suffering severe wounds on Iwo Jima.

“You turn on the History Channel, you turn on the Discovery Channel, you turn on The Learning Channel, you turn on the Military Channel, and the first thing you’re going to see is the 101st Airborne,” the division that served in Europe and was popularized in Band of Brothers, says Mates. “The next thing you’re going to see is Patton. And then on down the line, if they’ve got time, they’ll throw in a picture of Iwo Jima.”

Mates understands why D-Day and Dachau might attract more attention from documentary makers and feature film directors — “You had crazy Hitler, you had the problem with him knocking off all the Jews and just unheard-of things.”

But he says the fighting in the Pacific “was a lot tougher than Europe.”

Half a world away from home, Americans faced an enemy that would rather commit suicide than surrender.

“We had to defeat the Japanese,” says Martin Davidson, who participated in the invasions of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, Guam and Iwo Jima with the 3rd Marine Division. “It took a lot of doing from island to island.”

Overshadowed by Europe and comparatively underfunded, servicemen and women in the Pacific faced enormous obstacles. There was the often-unforgiving terrain — so foreign to what they were used to — and there was the weather. The 35-day battle in 1944 on the island of Peleliu, for example, was often fought in temperatures above 100 degrees.

Davidson, now 93 and a seasonal South Palm Beach resident, was stationed on Guadalcanal for roughly six months of heat and rain. “It rained continuously,” he says, “so much so that at one time the water came in under my tent, and my shoes started to float away.

“That was our life — living and working in the rain. It was always damp. You never really got comfortable. But you did what you had to do.”

Educated at Harvard, Davidson left a sales job in New York City to join the Marines as an officer. His assignment: platoon leader in a communications group whose duties included laying telephone wires across, and between, landing beaches.

“Don’t forget: All of us were plain civilians not that long before,” Davidson says. “And then we suddenly became military people. And how good or how bad or how in-between we were was up to the individual. And some were better than others.

“You know what I’m most proud of? My men thought I was a good officer.”

Near the front door of Davidson’s condo hangs a plaque given to him by several of his men at a 1996 reunion. On it, a poem written in tribute to Davidson reads, in part: “Protecting us from hazard’s call/We hardly saw the war at all.”

Davidson himself is more pragmatic than poetic. “You were lucky or you weren’t lucky,” he says. “That’s the way it was.”

And then he remembers this story…

One evening toward dusk on Iwo Jima, a young American approached Davidson’s foxhole.

“He was in a different division in a different area, and he said, ‘My brother is in your platoon. We haven’t seen each other in two years. Where can I find him?’

“I said, ‘He’s in a foxhole up on the hill there,’ and I told him where to go.

“So these two boys visited for awhile that evening, and then this young man went back to his outfit.

“The following morning I got a call from the chaplain of this boy’s division. He was killed. So I had to tell my boy that his brother was killed that night.

“He went out of his mind. I had to get people to hold him and watch him…

“So, what else can I tell you?”

***

Sam Saldano only reluctantly talks about his war experiences and doesn’t advertise his three years of service in the Marines.

“It’s something that’s in here,” he says, touching a closed fist to his chest. “I have hats and things, but I don’t wear them. It’s here. In the heart.”

Part of the 4th Marine Division, Saldano landed on Iwo Jima at 9:05 a.m. Feb. 19, 1945, in the first hours of the invasion.

“Hit the beach and as I come up off the beach, the first thing I saw was a Japanese soldier who was in an oil barrel of some sort. Someone had flamed him, so he was cooking at the time,” says the 86-year-old West Palm Beach resident.

“On the way up, a machine gun opened up on me. He followed me for awhile, so I went this way and that way and back that way, and I finally got around it. … You ran a few feet and you dove into another hole.”

At one point, the Marine sharing a hole with Saldano “gave me his weapon and said, ‘I’ll be right back.’

“He never came back.”

Saldano narrowly escaped death his second day on Iwo when a shell exploded near him, killing a squad leader. Later, he was diving for cover “and a shell came up behind me and threw me, and rang my bell to an extent that at that point any voice I heard was like being underwater.”

He spent the next week in an army hospital on Saipan, and later, six months in a Pearl Harbor hospital, a recalcitrant ear infection rendering him deaf at one point.

Saldano still feels somewhat guilty that he was unable to continue fighting alongside his comrades, but finally says, “I’m proud of what I did. I felt like I did what I could do.

“But I don’t want to be thought of, or considered, a hero. I’m not. I was just there, one of the masses,” says Saldano, who adds this: “Two minutes on that beach was too much.”

***

In the years since he helped collect bodies on Iwo Jima, Jack Cole has become an amateur historian, a student of war.

He feels that the Marines who landed on Iwo Jima were shortchanged by inadequate bombardment of the island prior to their landing and incomplete maps that didn’t show, among other unwelcome surprises, the 16 miles of tunnels dug by the Japanese.

“Guys getting killed on the beach the first few days never saw the enemy. They never got off the beach.”

He left Iwo without any wounds — at least not the visible kind.

“You don’t spend your days, all day, every day, with dead bodies, retching over them, without your thought process being changed in some respects.”

But he quickly dismisses any thanks for his service.

“Everybody did what was expected of them,” Cole says. “And if they survived, they were lucky.”

***

Something of a celebrity in veterans circles, Donald Mates has amassed several awards for his military service: the Purple Heart, Marine Combat Ribbon, Presidential Unit Citation, American Defense Medal, among others. Last summer, a national foundation honored him at its annual Night of Heroes gala, citing his “valorous service at Iwo Jima where he suffered wounds which remind him daily of that brutal experience.”

Collectors regularly seek his autograph, and “every time I go to speak, I spend half my time there being filmed. Everybody’s a documentary maker now, and they’re all trying to jump on the wagon.”

Mates does have a particularly horrific story. As part of a reconnaissance company (“just this side of a guarantee that you’ll get wounded”), Mates and seven others in the 3rd Marine Division volunteered for a nighttime patrol to find where the Japanese were launching deadly spigot mortars from.

Their observation post, a series of four foxholes, was roughly 250 feet ahead of the front lines, and at midnight, they were overrun by the Japanese, wielding rifles, bayonets, hand grenades and mines strapped to their bodies. The battle continued for the next five hours.

Machine-gun fire fractured Mates’ foot, and a hand grenade went off between his legs, breaking both and causing considerable tissue damage.

Gangrene developed in his left leg, but Mates was allergic to the penicillin he was given and fell into a 10-day coma.

He spent the next 18 months in naval hospitals and, over the course of 30 years, underwent several operations to remove shrapnel and strengthen his limbs so he’d no longer need leg braces.

Iwo’s volcanic ash continues to occasionally rise to the surface of Mates’ skin, a reminder of what he survived. But he fears that the war is fading from our collective memory, that Iwo “is really just a footnote in history. The only people who come to hear me speak are old widows, children, grandchildren, historians and there’s a whole crew of history buffs.”

If he could speak to all Americans, what would he want them to know about the war in the Pacific?

He begins to cry but quickly composes himself, reaching for a folder on his coffee table — “Let me show you something.”

He flips through several pages until he finds a printout from the Chester County (Pa.) Hall of Heroes Web site, featuring a portrait of a sad-faced young man born in 1920.

“Here. Warren Garret. He was on patrol with me. … Warren Garret, he was bayoneted to death. He had a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son. And he was the old man of the outfit. He was 24 years old.”

Mates continues the grim roll call of his eight-man patrol and what happened to them one terrible night 65 years ago on an 8-square-mile Pacific island.

“Bill Reed. He was the corporal in charge of the patrol. He was shot.

“Joe McClosky. He just disappeared. Just disappeared. To this day, I don’t know for a fact that they found his body.

“Warren Nietzel — he was wounded horribly.

“Jimmy Trimble died the most violent death you could ever believe.”

Here, his voice breaks again: “I just don’t want them forgotten.

“They paid the ultimate.”

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