With the Old Breed: At Pelelui and Okinawa

by E. B.Sledge

Published by Ebury Press 2010 Softcover. 220 x 135 mm. 323 pages. Maps.

A Very Good copy. Slight wear to covers, mark across bottom page edges, prelim pages a little browned.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is a World War II memoir by Eugene Sledge, a United States Marine. Since its first publication in 1981, With the Old Breed has been recognized as one of the best first-hand accounts of combat in the Pacific during World War II. The memoir is based on notes Sledge kept tucked away in a pocket-sized Bible he carried with him during battles. Sledge's memoir gives a firsthand and unapologetically honest perspective on the Pacific Theater of World War II. 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, the filth and malaise, the fear of potential "banzai attacks", and the hopelessness and loss of humanity that so uniquely characterized the campaign in the Pacific. Sledge wrote starkly of the brutality displayed by Japanese (and to a much lesser extent, American) 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 in detail the sheer physical struggle of living in a combat zone and the debilitating effects of constant fear, fatigue, and filth. "Fear and filth went hand-in-hand," he wrote. "It has always puzzled me that this important factor in our daily lives has received so little attention from historians and is often omitted from otherwise excellent personal memoirs by infantrymen." Marines had trouble staying dry, finding time to eat their rations, practicing basic field sanitation and simply moving around on the pulverized coral of Peleliu and in the mud of Okinawa.

SBN 13: 9780091937539