- Sledge, E[ugene] B[ondurant].
With the Old Breed.
New York: Presidio Press, [1981] 2007.
ISBN 978-0-89141-906-8.
-
When the United States entered World War II after the attack on
Pearl Harbor, the author was enrolled at the Marion Military
Institute in Alabama preparing for an officer's
commission in the U.S. Army. Worried that the war might end
before he was able to do his part, in December, 1942, still a
freshman at Marion, he enrolled in a Marine Corps officer
training program. The following May, after the end of his
freshman year, he was ordered to report for Marine training at
Georgia Tech on July 1, 1943. The 180 man detachment was
scheduled to take courses year-round then, after two years,
report to Quantico to complete their officers'
training prior to commission.
This still didn't seem fast enough (and, indeed, had he stayed
with the program as envisioned, he would have missed the war),
so he and around half of his fellow trainees neglected their
studies, flunked out, and immediately joined the Marine Corps
as enlisted men. Following boot camp at a base near San Diego,
he was assigned to infantry and sent to nearby Camp Elliott
for advanced infantry training. Although all Marines are
riflemen (Sledge had qualified at the sharpshooter level
during basic training), newly-minted Marine infantrymen
were, after introduction to all of the infantry weapons,
allowed to choose the one in which they would specialise.
In most cases, they'd get their first or second choice.
Sledge got his first: the
60 mm
M2 mortar which he, as part of a crew of three, would
operate in combat in the Pacific. Mortarmen carried the
M1 carbine,
and this weapon, which fired a less powerful round than the
M1 Garand
main battle rifle used by riflemen, would be his
personal weapon throughout the war.
With the Pacific island-hopping war raging, everything was
accelerated, and on February 28th, 1944, Sledge's 46th
Replacement Battalion (the name didn't inspire confidence—they
would replace Marines killed or injured in combat,
or the lucky few rotated back to the U.S. after surviving multiple
campaigns) shipped out, landing first at New Caledonia, where they
received additional training, including practice amphibious
landings and instruction in Japanese weapons and tactics. At
the start of June, Sledge's battalion was sent to Pavuvu
island, base of the 1st Marine Division, which had just
concluded the bloody battle of
Cape
Gloucester.
On arrival, Sledge was assigned as a replacement to the 1st
Marine Division, 5th Regiment, 3rd Battalion. This unit
had a distinguished combat record dating back to the First
World War, and would have been his first choice if he'd
been given one, which he hadn't. He says, “I felt as
though I had rolled the dice and won.” This was his
first contact with what he calls the “Old Breed”:
Marines, some of whom had been in the Corps before Pearl
Harbor, who had imbibed the traditions of the “Old
Corps” and survived some of the most intense
combat of the present conflict, including Guadalcanal. Many
of these veterans had, in the argot of the time, “gone
Asiatic”: developed the eccentricities of who had seen
and lived things those just arriving in theatre never imagined,
and become marinated in deep hatred for the enemy based upon
personal experience. A glance was all it took to tell the
veterans from the replacements.
After additional training, in late August the Marines embarked
for the assault on the island of
Peleliu
in the
Palau Islands.
The tiny island, just 13 square kilometres, was held by a
Japanese garrison of 10,900, and was home to an airfield.
Capturing the island was considered essential to protect the
right flank of MacArthur's forces during the upcoming invasion
of the Philippines, and to secure the airfield which could
support the invasion. The attack on Peleliu was fixed for
15 September 1944, and it would be Sledge's first combat
experience.
From the moment of landing, resistance was fierce. Despite an
extended naval bombardment, well-dug-in Japanese defenders
engaged the Marines as they hit the beaches, and continued as
they progressed into the interior. In previous engagements
with the Japanese, they had adopted foolhardy and suicidal
tactics such as mass frontal “banzai” charges
into well-defended Marine positions. By Peleliu, however,
they had learned that this did not work, and shifted their
strategy to defence in depth, turning the entire island into
a network of defensive positions, covering one another, and
linked by tunnels for resupply and redeploying forces. They
were prepared to defend every square metre of territory to
the death, even after their supplies were cut off and there
was no hope of relief. Further, Marines were impressed by
the excellent fire discipline of the Japanese—they did
not expend ammunition firing blindly but chose their shots
carefully, and would expend scarce supplies such as mortar rounds
only on concentrations of troops or high value targets such as
tanks and artillery.
This, combined with the oppressive heat and humidity, lack of
water and food, and terror from incessant shelling by artillery
by day and attacks by Japanese infiltrators by night, made the
life of the infantry a living Hell. Sledge chronicles this from
the viewpoint of a Private First Class, not an officer or
historian after the fact. He and his comrades rarely knew
precisely where they were, where the enemy was located, how
other U.S. forces on the island were faring, or what the overall
objectives of the campaign were. There was simply a job to be
done, day by day, with their best hope being to somehow survive
it. Prior to the invasion, Marine commanders estimated the
island could be taken in four days. Rarely in the Pacific war
was a forecast so wrong. In fact, it was not until November
27th that the island was declared secured. The Japanese
demonstrated their willingness to defend to the last man. Of the
initial force of 10,900 defending the island, 10,695 were
killed. Of the 220 taken prisoner, 183 were foreign labourers,
and only 19 were Japanese soldiers and sailors. Of the Marine
and Army attackers, 2,336 were killed and 8,450 wounded. The
rate of U.S. casualties exceeded those of all other amphibious
landings in the Pacific, and the
Battle of
Peleliu is considered among the most difficult ever fought by
the Marine Corps.
Despite this, the engagement is little-known. In retrospect, it
was probably unnecessary. The garrison could have done little
to threaten MacArthur's forces and the airfield was not
required to support the Philippine campaign. There were doubts
about the necessity and wisdom of the attack before it was launched,
but momentum carried it forward. None of these matters concerned
Sledge and the other Marines in the line—they had their orders,
and they did their job, at enormous cost. Sledge's company K
landed on Peleliu with 235 men. It left with only 85 unhurt—a
64% casualty rate. Only two of its original seven officers
survived the campaign. Sledge was now a combat veteran. He may
not have considered himself one of the “Old Breed”, but
he was on the way to becoming one of them to the replacements who
arrived to replace casualties in his unit.
But for the survivors of Peleliu, the war was far from over.
While some old-timers for whom Peleliu was their third campaign
were being rotated Stateside, for the rest it was recuperation,
refitting, and preparation for the next amphibious assault: the
Japanese island of Okinawa. Unlike Peleliu, which was a tiny
dot on the map, Okinawa was a large island with an area of 1207
square kilometres and a pre-war population of around 300,000.
The island was defended by 76,000 Japanese troops and 20,000
Okinawan conscripts fighting under their orders. The invasion
of Okinawa on April 1, 1945 was the largest amphibious landing
in the Pacific war.
As before, Sledge does not present the big picture, but an
infantryman's eye view. To the astonishment of all involved,
including commanders who expected 80–85% casualties on the
beaches, the landing was essentially unopposed. The Japanese
were dug in awaiting the attack from prepared defensive
positions inland, ready to repeat the strategy at Peleliu on a
much grander scale.
After the tropical heat and horrors of Peleliu, temperate
Okinawa at first seemed a pastoral paradise afflicted with
the disease of war, but as combat was joined and the weather
worsened, troops found themselves confronted with the
infantryman's implacable, unsleeping enemy:
mud. Once again, the Japanese defended every
position to the last man. Almost all of the Japanese defenders
were killed, with the 7000 prisoners made up mostly of Okinawan
conscripts. Estimates of U.S. casualties range from 14,000 to
20,000 killed and 38,000 to 55,000 wounded. Civilian casualties
were heavy: of the original population of around 300,000
estimates of civilian deaths are from 40,000 to 150,000.
The Battle
of Okinawa was declared won on June 22, 1945. What was
envisioned as the jumping-off point for the conquest of the
Japanese home islands became, in retrospect, almost an
afterthought, as Japan surrendered less than two months after
the conclusion of the battle. The impact of the Okinawa campaign
on the war is debated to this day. Viewed as a preview of what
an invasion of the home islands would have been, it
strengthened the argument for using the atomic bomb against
Japan (or, if it didn't work, burning Japan to the ground
with round the clock raids from Okinawa airbases by B-17s
transferred from the European theatre). But none of these
strategic considerations were on the mind of Sledge and his
fellow Marines. They were glad to have survived Okinawa and
elated when, not long thereafter, the war ended and they could
look forward to going home.
This is a uniquely authentic first-hand narrative of World War
II combat by somebody who lived it. After the war, E. B.
Sledge pursued his education, eventually earning a doctorate
in biology and becoming a professor at the University of Montevallo
in Alabama, where he taught zoology, ornithology, and comparative
anatomy until his retirement in 1990. He began the memoir which
became this book in 1944. He continued to work on it after the
war and, at the urging of family, finally prepared it for
publication in 1981. The present edition includes an introduction
by Victor Davis Hanson.
September 2018 