"Eugene 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 Pacific--the terror, the camaraderie, the
banal and the extraordinary--into terms we mortals can grasp."--Tom
Hanks
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old
Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles.
Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history,
The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge's acclaimed first-person 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 war's famous 1st Marine Division--3rd 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 kill--and came to love--his fellow man.
"In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more
honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge's. 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 of--not the 'good war'--but the
worst war ever."--Ken Burns
