Please note this is not an academic review. It is simply my impression of the book.
There is that old saying that war is hell and you don’t understand it until you live it.
Most of us are lucky to never know what type of hell it really is. But we try to understand it by reading popular history books and memoirs. In the last year, I read the memoir of a Marine that fought on Peleliu and Okinawa. The book is With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge. The name may sound familiar to you. Sledge was one of the characters in HBO’s “The Pacific.” The show’s writers and producers adapted some of Sledge’s book for the miniseries.
Sledge served with Company K 3d Battalion 1st Marine Division during the Second World War. With the Old Breed is his account of the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. His intention is that the memoir serve as a voice for all of his comrades who fought in those battles[i] and is not his story. Through his first person narrative, you see how the American fighting man evolves in war: the eager, the afraid and the weary.
Sledge doesn’t shy away from the fact that he was an eager young man that wanted to be part of America’s war efforts. As a young man, he was afraid the war would be over before he got a chance to fight.[ii] Through a compromise with his parents, he entered a Marine training program that would train him to be an officer. The program, however, required academic discipline. Sledge was too focused on fighting and didn’t want to study. He let his grades slip so he could leave the training program and serve the Marines as an enlisted man.[iii] This eagerness to serve – to fight – doesn’t subside in basic training. Sledge writes they remained naïve and didn’t comprehend that they may be cannon fodder like so many before them.[iv]
Fear becomes a central theme as Sledge writes about Peleliu – his first combat campaign. Sledge introduces readers to two different types of fear: perceived pre-battle fear and real fear. As Sledge waits to land on Peleliu, he wonders about seeing another sunset.[v] Then he is concerned about performing in combat or if he will be a coward.[vi] Sledge wants to believe that God will look out for him, but he realizes that God loves all of his comrades and some of them will die and some will be maimed.[vii] Sledge is ashamed of his fear. He admits it to his officer during his time on Peleliu. He learns that it is normal to be fearful and the “first battle was the hardest because a man didn’t know what to expect.”[viii] The perceived fear goes away.
Sledge’s real fear is realized when he lands on Peleliu. On the beach he encounters enemy shelling. It was terrifying and it made Sledge feel helpless.[ix] It is a feeling that would never leave Sledge. Shelling presented Marines a double threat. It was deadly and a horrific way to die. A shell, unlike a bullet, would tear and rip a man’s body.[x] Shells also torment the mind. At Peleliu, Sledge feels the shells tortured a man “almost to the brink of sanity.”[xi] In Okinawa, Sledge watched as constant shelling pushed many seasoned Marines past that brink. Real fear isn’t limited to the feeling of helplessness and terror on a beach. For Sledge, fear is death and agony. At Peleliu, Sledge agonized over the site of a dead corpsman. He struggled to accept that it was a human being.[xii]
Weariness is the hardest element to define in Sledge’s work, but it is there. Okinawa is Sledge’s second combat experience and the reader encounters a different Sledge. The Marine still has fear, but the panic is gone. [xiii] Sledge knows what to expect. During an artillery barrage on Okinawa, Sledge could easily identify the weapons. It is something he struggled to do during combat on Peleliu.[xiv] Sledge’s weariness manifests itself in another way: The struggle to cope with stress. As a Marine, he understands that stress is “the essential factor” he has to deal with in combat, but some situations could break a man. [xv] Ultimately, Sledge and his fellow marines had to exist from moment to moment if they want to survive.[xvi] This simple existence means that details of significant events can be – and are -- forgotten. An officer briefed Sledge and some of his fellow marines on an upcoming attack against the Shuri line; it was suppose to be a breakthrough event. Sledge recalls the officer showing him and the other men – mostly privates – the map and going through the order. Sledge doesn’t remember the details of the briefing and describes his condition as “stupefaction.”[xvii] War’s weariness also affects the senses. Sledge’s use of imagery paints a scene of destruction and death: Readers see the holes, they feel the sliminess of the mud and they get a strong sense of what death smelled like. Though able to describe it in vivid details many years later, Sledge got use to this foul hell. In Okinawa, he was digging a foxhole when he began smelling rotting flesh. He kept digging until he hit a Japanese corpse. The smell overwhelmed him but he didn’t vomit – much to his surprise. He wrote “Perhaps my senses and nerves had been so dulled by constant foulness for so long that nothing could evoke any other response but to cry out and move back.”[xviii]
With the Old Breed isn’t about bravery. It isn’t about honor or duty. It isn’t really about the battles on Peleliu and Okinawa. It is about war and its hell.
[i] Sledge, E.B. With the Old Breed. (New York: Presidio Press, 1981), xii
[ii] Ibid, 5.
[iii] Ibid, 7.
[iv] Ibid, 22
[v] Ibid, 54
[vi] Ibid, 57-58
[vii] Ibid, 58
[viii] Ibid, 98-99
[ix] Ibid, 69
[x] Ibid, 79. Sledge writes that a death by a bullet had a surgical quality: “killed by a bullet seemed clean and surgical.”
[xi] Ibid
[xii] Ibid, 70
[xiii] Ibid, 227-28
[xiv] Ibid, 228
[xv] Ibid, 287. Sledge uses the example of the prolonged shelling during the Shuri stalemate to show the toll of stress. In this instance, he implies the number of combat fatigue cases had increased as well as the number of concussion cases.
[xvi] Ibid, 273
[xvii] Ibid, 303-4. Sledge said it was a pity he didn’t remember the details because it was the only time he could recall an officer briefing a group of privates; generally, he explained the NCOs relayed the orders.
[xviii] Ibid, 301-2
