With The Old Breed

When one speaks of WWII all that pops up in people’s mind is Pearl Harbor and the Nazi Holocaust, but the war was much more than that. In my history test this semester we were assigned to read a WWII memoir by Eugene Sledge, nicknamed Sledgehammer by his company, called With the Old Breed. Sledge was a 60 mm mortar man on the K Company, 3^rd battalion, 5^th marines, 1st division. Sledge's memoir gives a perspective on the Pacific campaign in Peleliu and in Okinawa. His memoir is a front-line account of infantry combat in the Pacific War. It brings the reader into the island hopping, the jungle heat and rain or full frontal assault used by his enemies. Sledge wrote starkly of the brutality displayed by American and Japanese soldiers during the battles, and of the hatred that both sides harbored for each other. In Sledge's words, "this was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands." Sledge describes one instance in which he and a comrade came across the mutilated bodies of three Marines, including one Marine whose genitals had been cut off and stuffed into the corpse's mouth. He also describes the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, including the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpse and taking anything they could find. Sledge describes in detail the sheer physical struggle of living in a combat zone and the debilitating effects of constant fear, fatigue, and filth. In Okinawa marines had trouble staying dry, finding time to eat their rations, practicing basic field sanitation. It was impossible simply moving around on the pulverized coral of Peleliu and in the mud of Okinawa. If you are a fan of WWII this is a must read. I read almost 50 pages a night because I could not put it down.