Eugene Sledge wrote "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" "Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man.
“In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns
My last conversation with my father before his death was about this book. I had purchased it for him and sent it to him. During a visit, I asked him if he'd read it [he was a veteran of the Pacific war in WWII]. He pulled the book out from a stack beside him and he said he'd read "every word." That it was the best book he'd ever read about the War and he wished he'd written it. He wept.
What followed was the most he ever shared with me about the War. Here are some quotes from Sledge's book:
“As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.”
― Eugene B. Sledge With the Old Breed
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“In writing I am 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 health, and some their sanity. All who survived will long remember the horror they would rather forget. But they suffered and they did their duty so a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such high cost. We owe those Marines a profound debt of gratitude.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
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“I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
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“Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy, the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
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“None of us would ever be the same after what we had endured. To some degree that is true, of course, of all human experience. But something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war's savagery will ever stop blundering and sending other to endure it.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
My father and my relationship was "troubled" you might say. Our last conversation helped me in the years since his death to forgive him for many things, understanding what he was carrying.
I asked him in our conversation "How old were you then?" And he said "19."
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