With the Old Breed - E.B. Sledge

With the Old Breed serves as an incredibly poignant compliment to both the conventional scholarship and the common knowledge surrounding war in the Pacific arena. With the Old Breed, a first hand account by Eugene B. Sledge, a marine who served in a mortar attachment, benefits from Sledge's post war wisdom and furthered education. Sledge wrote his account in retrospect, utilizing notes that he diligently kept in the free spaces of a pocket sized Bible. In this manner his account of the horror of the war naturally maintains a certain degree of calm, collected, statistical fact. Yet, the account further demonstrates Sledge's sometimes muffled raw emotion, memories and feelings that seem to simply pour from the pages. As a tool of history Sledge's account vividly illustrates why the Japanese were so difficult to defeat. Indeed, along with a description of the savage horror of combat with the Japanese, Sledge attempts to rationalize and explain the average marine mentality and why such men would engage in what modern doves would refer to as "battlefield atrocities." Sledge's account bounces back and forth from single moments that seem to exist infinitely and intensely to extended periods of time where the world and everything in it seems to exist in a persistent state of combat. He explains tactics and movements in addition to the construction of the hard earth that so many marines fought and died on. All in all, With the Old Breed, while an intimate insight into the very nature of war in the Pacific as well as a historical account of the bare facts, pushes the reader, mostly, into the staunch and bleak realization that war is utter hell.