With the Old Breed

This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands Landing on the beach at Peleliu in 1944, a twenty-year-old new recruit to the US Marines, Eugene Sledge finds his patriotic idealism quickly destroyed by the sheer effort to survive. Fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa two of the fiercest and filthiest Pacific battles of WWII Sledge witnesses the dehumanising brutality displayed by both sides during the battles, and the animal hatred that each soldier has for his enemy. During temporary lapses in the fighting, conditions on the islands are such that the marines often can t wash, stay dry, dig latrines, or even find time to eat. Suffering from constant fear, fatigue, and filth, the struggle of simply living in a combat zone is utterly debilitating. Yet despite horrendous conditions Sledge finds time to keep notes folding them into his standard-issue bible which he would later turn into a book. Described as one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war, With the Old Breed tells with compassion and honesty of the cruelty, bravery and deaths of the men he fought alongside, and of his own journey from