With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [2]
I want to thank my publisher, Col. Robert V Kane, USA (Ret.), and Adele Horwitz, Editor in Chief of Presidio Press,who saw in my verbose original manuscript a story that should be told.
This book could not have been written without the benefit of Marine Corps historical material. My requests for help were rapidly and efficiently granted in every instance. For this I want to thank Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Simmons, USMC (Ret.), Director of Marine Corps History and Museums Be-nis Frank; Ralph Donnelly; and Henry I. Shaw.
For their help and encouragement I express my gratitude to Brig. Gen. Walter McIlhenny, USMC (Ret.); Lt. Col. John A. Crown, USMC (Ret.); Brig. Gen. Austin Shofner, USMC (Ret.); Capt. John A. Moran, USMC (Ret.); and Maj. Allan Bevilacqua, USMC (Ret.).
M. Sgt. Robert F. Fleischauer, USMC (Ret.), is due recognition and thanks for his fine work on the maps and sketches.
I thank Mrs. Hilda Van Landingham for typing the first draft of the Okinawa portion. Mary Francis Tipton, Reference Librarian at the University of Montevallo, merits my deepest appreciation for her help. Dr. Lucille Griffith, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Montevallo, was one of the first people to suggest this account be published. Her faith in it is redeemed, and I thank her.
My heartiest thanks to my old K/⅗ buddies who have assisted so much in verifying company casualty figures, countless other details, and photograph identification: Ted (Tex) Barrow, Henry A. Boyes, Valton Burgin, Jessie Crumbacker, Art Dimick, John Hedge, T. L. Hudson, William Leyden, Sterling Mace, Tom Matheny, Jim McEney, Vincent Santos, George Sarrett, Thomas (Stumpy) Stanley. If I have omitted any names, I apologize. Any errors in the manuscript are solely mine.
I appreciate the cooperation and understanding of my sons John and Henry and their patience with a father who was often preoccupied with past events.
A grant from the University of Montevallo Faculty Research Committee aided in the preparation of the manuscript.
E.B.S.
INTRODUCTION
By Victor Davis Hanson
Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one's responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one's country—as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it's good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.
So E. B. Sledge ends his memoir of the horrors of the Marines’ fighting in late 1944 and spring 1945 against the imperial Japanese on Peleliu and Okinawa. We should recall these concluding thoughts about patriotic duty because With the Old Breed has now achieved the status of a military classic—in part on the perception of Sledge's blanket condemnation of the brutality and senselessness of war itself.
Although there are horrors aplenty in the graphic accounts of the 1st Marine Division's ordeal in these two invasions, his message is still not so darkly condemnatory. The real power of Sledge's memoir is not just found in his melancholy. Even in his frequent despair over the depravity seen everywhere around him, there is an overriding sense of tragedy: until the nature of man himself changes, reluctant men such as E. B. Sledge will be asked to do things that civilization should not otherwise ask of its own—but must if it is to survive barbarity.
Who, in fact, was Eugene Bondurant Sledge—a previously unknown retired professor who late in life published his first book, originally intended only as a private memoir for his family? Yet within two decades of publication that draft became acknowledged as the finest literary account to emerge about the Pacific war.
Despite the still growing acclaim given With the Old Breed—first published more than twenty years earlier by the Presidio Press of Novato, California—the death of Sledge at seventy-seven, in March 2001, garnered little national attention. After his retirement, Sledge had remained a mostly private person who rarely entered the public