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*With the Old Breed* is one of the most important first-hand accounts of infantry combat to emerge from the Second World War, and among the small number of memoirs that genuinely alter how a reader understands what modern battle does to human beings. It belongs on the shelf of any serious student of the Pacific War — and, more broadly, of anyone who wants to understand the experience of the ordinary soldier in extremis.
About the Book
First published in 1981 by Presidio Press, *With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa* is the memoir of Eugene Bondurant Sledge (November 4, 1923 – March 3, 2001), a Marine corporal who served as a 60 mm mortarman with K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division — known to its members simply as K/3/5 — during two of the bloodiest engagements of the Pacific Theatre. The book traces Sledge’s experience through the brutal assault on the coral island of Peleliu in 1944 and the grinding, months-long campaign on Okinawa in 1945.
The memoir had an unusually long gestation. By Sledge’s own account, he began writing immediately after Peleliu while resting at Pavuvu Island in 1944, and continued after his discharge from the Marine Corps in February 1946. Its raw material came from notes he had kept hidden inside a pocket-sized New Testament carried throughout both campaigns — a remarkable act of documentation under conditions designed to strip away every comfort and habit of the civilised mind. The working title passed through *A Marine Mortarman in World War II* and then *Into the Abyss* before arriving at its final form.
Sledge was not a professional writer. After the war, he studied at Auburn University and eventually became a university professor, with a particular passion for ornithology. His identity as a scientist and academic shapes the memoir in subtle ways: there is an observer’s precision to his prose, a commitment to recording what actually happened rather than what it might be comfortable to believe. The book received new introductions from literary historian Paul Fussell (1990), military historian Joseph H. Alexander (1996, Naval Institute Press edition), and Victor Davis Hanson (2007 Presidio Press edition), a lineage of scholarly endorsement that reflects the memoir’s standing in the literature of modern warfare. Studs Terkel interviewed Sledge for his landmark oral history *The Good War* (1984). The book later served as a primary source for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary *The War* (2007) and formed one of the twin pillars of the HBO miniseries *The Pacific* (2010), in which Sledge was portrayed by Joseph Mazzello. It has since been translated into Japanese, Korean, French, German, Czech, and Thai, among other languages.
What It Does Well
The memoir’s most striking achievement is its unflinching honesty about the moral corrosion that sustained combat produces. Sledge does not flinch from describing acts of brutality on both sides — the mutilation of Marine dead, the extraction of gold teeth from Japanese corpses by American soldiers, the gradual erosion of the empathy that separates soldiers from the men they were before the war. This is not sensationalism; it is testimony. Sledge himself identified the gap he was trying to fill, writing that the role of constant fear, fatigue, and filth in shaping a combat infantryman’s existence had received “so little attention from historians” and was “often omitted from otherwise excellent personal memoirs.” *With the Old Breed* addresses that omission directly and at length.
The book also succeeds as a work of humane portraiture. Literary critic and New York Times editor Dwight Garner noted that what elevates the memoir is Sledge’s sensitivity: his careful attention to small kindnesses, genuine friendships, and individual character amid collective violence. The men of K/3/5 emerge as distinct personalities rather than interchangeable fighters. Paul Fussell, whose own scholarship on the literature of war is authoritative, called it “one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war,” citing its “unashamed simplicity” as a virtue rather than a limitation.
Finally, the memoir’s origins — those clandestine notes in a pocket Bible — lend it an immediacy that reconstructed or retrospectively composed accounts rarely achieve. Sledge was writing in the field, recording details before memory could smooth them into narrative. The resulting texture is granular and visceral in ways that matter for historical understanding.
Where It Falls Short
Readers approaching *With the Old Breed* as a strategic or operational history of the Pacific War will find it wanting, and deliberately so. Sledge’s perspective is radically local — the view from a mortar pit, a shell crater, a rest camp on Pavuvu. The larger architecture of the campaigns, the command decisions, the naval and air dimensions of both Peleliu and Okinawa, are largely absent. This is not a flaw in itself, but readers seeking context will need to come to the book already oriented, or read it alongside a conventional campaign history.
The memoir’s prose is serviceable and direct rather than literary. Sledge was a scientist and a Marine, not a stylist, and the writing reflects that background. Compared to the more self-consciously literary Pacific memoirs — Robert Leckie’s *Helmet for My Pillow*, for instance, which was paired with Sledge’s book as source material for *The Pacific* — *With the Old Breed* can feel unadorned to readers who prize elegant sentences. That plainness is, as Fussell argued, part of its moral authority; but readers should know what to expect.
There is also, inevitably, the question of scope. The memoir covers two battles in one man’s service. It does not attempt to represent the Pacific War as a whole, and readers drawn in by the HBO miniseries may find the book’s tight focus more concentrated — and more demanding — than they anticipated.
Who Should Read It
*With the Old Breed* is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the Second World War’s Pacific Theatre, and more broadly for anyone who wants to understand how men endure — and are changed by — prolonged combat. It is particularly valuable for readers who have encountered the war through documentary or dramatised accounts and want to go to a primary source. Those who watched *The Pacific* and found themselves moved by Sledge’s story onscreen will discover that the source material is richer, stranger, and more morally complex than any dramatisation could capture.
Readers entirely new to the history of the Pacific War may benefit from reading a one-volume overview first; the memoir assumes a basic familiarity with the island-hopping campaign and provides little strategic scaffolding. But for readers with even a modest grounding in the period, this book rewards serious attention.
Where to Buy
*With the Old Breed* is widely available in multiple editions and is readily found on Amazon.ca, where Canadian readers can choose from paperback and other formats. An affiliate link to the current listing follows below — purchasing through it supports History Book Tales at no additional cost to the reader.
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