With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and OkinawaNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “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 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 |
Contents
3 | |
Foreword by Capt Thomas J Stanley | 175 |
Into the Abyss | 226 |
Of Shock and Shells | 243 |
Of Mud and Maggots | 259 |
Breakthrough | 283 |
Beyond Shuri | 306 |
End of the Agony | 330 |
A Roll of Honor | 345 |
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Common terms and phrases
1st Marine Division 5th Marines American ammo amtrac army artillery asked attack battalion battle beach began buddy called carried casualties combat commander coral cover dead deck didn't Division draw enemy face feet felt field fighting finally fire foxhole front gear grenades ground guys hand head heard heavy held hell helmet Higgins boats hole infantry island Japanese killed knew landing later looked machine guns Marine Corps mortar moved never night officer Okinawa orders pack passed Pavuvu Peleliu position rain rations rear regiment replacements returned ridge rifle road rock seemed seen shells ship shot side slope Snafu soldier started stopped stretcher tanks thing thought told took troops turned unit veteran watch weapons wounded yards yelled