With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [3]
Even with his perfect Marine name, E. B. Sledge might have seemed an unlikely combat veteran. Born the son of a prominent local physician in Mobile, Alabama, the articulate, slight, and shy Sledge spent only a year at Marion Military Institute, and then enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology—before choosing instead to leave the officers’ training program to enlist in late 1943 in the U.S. Marine Corps as a private. This early intimate experience with officer training, together with the subsequent decision to prefer service with the enlisted corps, colors much of the narrative of With the Old Breed. Sledge repeatedly takes stock of officers, and both the worst and best men in the Corps prove to be its second lieutenants and captains.
After the defeat of Japan, Sledge served in the American occupying force in China; his account of that tour was published posthumously as China Marine. Sledge later remarked he found the return to civilian life difficult after Peleliu and Okinawa, as did many veterans of island fighting in the Pacific who could not “comprehend people who griped because America wasn't perfect, or their coffee wasn't hot enough, or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or bus.” Yet Sledge adjusted well enough to graduate in 1949 with his B.S. degree. By 1960 he had completed his Ph.D. in zoology and settled on an academic career; at thirty-nine he joined the University of Montevallo, where he taught microbiology and ornithology until his retirement.
His scholarly expertise and precision of thought and language, gained from nearly thirty years as a teacher and scientist, perhaps explain much of the force of With the Old Breed. The narrative is peppered with wide-ranging empirical observations of his new surroundings—and philosophical shrugs about the incongruity of it all: “There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seemed so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man.”
The look back at the savagery of Peleliu and Okinawa— based on old battle notes he had once kept on slips of paper in his copy of the New Testament—is presented with the care of a clinician. Sledge's language is modest; there is no bombast. The resulting autopsy of battle is eerie, almost dreamlike. Dispassionate understatement accentuates rather than sanitizes the barbarity. Sledge describes a dead Japanese medical corpsman torn apart by American shelling thusly: “The corpsman was on his back, his abdominal cavity laid bare. I stared in horror, shocked at the glistening viscera bespecked with fine coral dust. This can't have been a human being, I agonized. It looked more like the guts of one of the many rabbits or squirrels I had cleaned on hunting trips as a boy. I felt sick as I stared at the corpses.”
We readers are dumbfounded by the first few pages—how can such a decent man have endured such an inferno, emerged apparently whole, and now decades later brought us back to these awful islands to write so logically about such abject horrors? On the eve of the invasion of Peleliu, the ever curious Sledge matter-of-factly asks an intelligent-looking but doomed Marine what he plans to do after the war, and then he describes the reply, “ ‘I want to be a brain surgeon. The human brain is an incredible thing; it fascinates me,’ he replied. But he didn't survive Peleliu to realize his ambition.”
The Pacific ground theater of World War II from Guadalcanal to Okinawa that nearly consumed Sledge, as it did thousands of American youths, was no dream, but a nightmare unlike any other fighting in the nation's wartime history. It was an existential struggle of annihilation. And the killing was fueled by political, cultural—and racial—odium in which no quarter was asked or given: “A brutish, primitive hatred,” Sledge reminds us decades later, “as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands.”
The sheer distances across the