With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Of all the books about the ground war in the Pacific, [this] is the closest to a masterpiece.The New York Review of BooksEugene 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 Pacificthe terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinaryinto terms we mortals can grasp.Tom HanksIn The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentiethcentury battles after its original publication in 1981. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledges acclaimed firstperson account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the wars famous 1st Marine Division3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets. By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and killand came to lovehis fellow man.In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledges. 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 ofnot the good warbut the worst war ever.Ken Burns