Books I Like - With the Old Breed

Considered the best WWII memoir by an enlisted man, With The Old Breed by E.B. Sledge, is a masterpiece.  Eugene Sledge enlisted in the Marines as an 19-year old in 1943.  He served in the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific and saw intense combat during the Peleliu (1944) and Okinawa (1945) campaigns.  Of the more than 200 men in Company K at the start of Peleliu, Sledge was one of only 26 who were still with the company at the end of the Okinawa campaign.

After the war, Sledge attended Auburn.  A once avid hunter, he gave it up after his wartime experiences and took up bird watching as a hobby.  He had a long career in Alabama as a college professor teaching zoology and ornithology.

At the urging of his family, Sledge wrote his memoir during the 1970s and it was published in 1981.  I ran across the book in the early 1980s in the Needham, MA. Public Library.  I'd never heard of it but it was in the new books section and I had nothing else to read, so I took a chance and read it for what turned out to be the first of several times.

In the preface Sledge writes:
  

"In writing it I'm fulfilling an obligation I have long felt to my comrades in the 1st Marine Division, all of whom suffered so much for our country.  None came out unscathed.  Many gave their lives, many their heath, and some their sanity."

The prose is unadorned (and tempered with 30 years of reflection).  He just tells the events as they happen, and those events are often terrifying and horrible and moving.  Sledge's descriptions of running across the airfield at Peleliu under Japanese fire, of the protracted fighting amidst the mud and maggots in front of the Shuri Line on Okinawa, and above all, of the death of Captain Andrew Haldane, beloved commander of Company K, will stay with you forever.

In later year, as the reputation of With The Old Breed grew, Sledge was featured in the Ken Burns documentary, The War, and his story was selected by Tom Hanks and Steve Spielberg as one of the three featured narratives for their HBO series, The Pacific.  Sledge died in 2001.