With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa / Edition 1

by E. B. Sledge, Paul Fussell, Eugene B. Sledge

Overview

In his own book, Wartime, Paul Fussell called With the Old Breed "one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war." John Keegan referred to it in The Second World War as "one of the most arresting documents in war literature." And Studs Terkel was so fascinated with the story he interviewed its author for his book, "The Good War." What has made E.B. Sledge's memoir of his experience fighting in the South Pacific during World War II so devastatingly powerful is its sheer honest simplicity and compassion.
Now including a new introduction by Paul Fussell, With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the vitality and bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923 and raised on riding, hunting, fishing, and a respect for history and legendary heroes such as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene Bondurant Sledge (later called "Sledgehammer" by his Marine Corps buddies) joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. In those years, he passed, often painfully, from innocence to experience.
Sledge enlisted out of patriotism, idealism, and youthful courage, but once he landed on the beach at Peleliu, it was purely a struggle for survival. Based on the notes he kept on slips of paper tucked secretly away in his New Testament, he simply and directly recalls those long months, mincing no words and sparing no pain. The reality of battle meant unbearable heat, deafening gunfire, unimaginable brutality and cruelty, the stench of death, and, above all, constant fear. Sledge still has nightmares about "the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa." But, as he also tellingly reveals, the bonds of friendship formed then will never be severed.
Sledge's honesty and compassion for the other marines, even complete strangers, sets him apart as a memoirist of war. Read as sobering history or as high adventure, With the Old Breed is a moving chronicle of action and courage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195067149
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	10/28/1990
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 5.38(h) x 0.68(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

E.B. Sledge, who served in the First Marine Division in World War II, is now Professor of Biology at the University of Montevallo in Alabama.
Paul Fussell, Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of many books, including The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "With the Old Breed"
by .
Copyright © 2007 E.B. Sledge.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

It's time to move this book to a higher shelf, to that of nonfiction that is literature. With the Old Breed is a deep pleasure…a stinging reminder of the sacrifices others have made to allow us to live the life that we do. If you can make it through without welling up at half a dozen spots, you are a stronger person than I…One of the themes…is the near impossibility of communicating the experience of combat to those who have not experienced it…[Sledge] takes us as close as we are likely to get. He describes countless scenes of terror, disgust, insanity and stupidity in prose that is lucid and unadorned. When he does reach for figurative language, he is surpassingly vivid…What puts With the Old Breed across is, oddly enough, Sledge's sensitivity. He offers many small, artful portraits of men he admires. (And a few he despises.) He chronicles small kindnesses and profound acts of friendship…He is a gentle man who learns to comprehend hatred…As an adventure story, With the Old Breed has a momentum that might put some modern readers in mind of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. As a portrait of camaraderie in the face of terrible danger, it resembles the third section of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. It will make a lot of feeling slide around in you.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

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 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

From the Publisher

01/01/2016
Cold and unflinching, Sledge's account of the neglected Pacific theater takes readers through two of the most hellish battles of arguably any war and the mental journey of the author back from the brink of insanity. The American World War II counterpart to Robert Graves's classic Goodbye to All That.

Library Journal