With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

by E.B. Sledge

Victor Davis Hanson

“Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific—the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom Hanks

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.

An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division—3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.

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

• ISBN10: 0891419063
• ISBN13: 9780891419068
• Publish Date: 1 May 2007
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Presidio Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780891419068

Reviews

[readingwithwrin]

Sledge very real view of what happened during the pacific battles during WWII is one of the most truthful ones I have ever read. He doesn't sugar coat anything and he tells it exactly as he saw it at the time. He tells the losses and the hardships that the men faced all while fighting and just trying to survive day by day until the war was over and they could go home. While brutal and tough to read at times it was also very eye-opening and made you feel like you were getting to see what they had to deal with.

His view on everything is one WWII is one I found refreshing and shocking to read. We typically see things sugar-coated or exaggerated when it comes to media. His account of what they faced doesn't feel like those other forms of media we get. It was one that showed what the Old Breed was about and what made WWII so different from any wars we've had since.
With the Old Breed has made me more interested in learning about the battles fought in the pacific during WWII and I can't wait to read his other book, China Marine.


See reviews first on my blog