With the Old Breed is a harrowing, visceral account of a US Marine’s combat experience fighting the Japanese in Peleliu and Okinawa in 1945. Together with Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, it provided the material for HBO’s acclaimed 2010 television series The Pacific. Excellent though the latter was, the book offers much more. The savagery of the combat is well captured by the series, but Sledge reflects on something more subtle: how men struggle to maintain their humanity in a world where all decent human values have been abandoned.
First published in 1981, With the Old Breed is based on notes Sledge kept in his pocket Bible through 1944-1945. Even the best military memoirs should come with a caution: while offering a raw, unfiltered, and essentially true account of frontline combat, the details of action, times, and places may not always match regimental histories and other accounts. This is not true of Sledge’s memoir. Unusually, he intersperses his contemporaneous account with substantial italicised summaries of key campaign events, the fruit of his subsequent research (he became a university professor after the war). This, plus the introduction and forewords by marine officers who served with Sledge, and a two-page bibliography, sets it apart from more colourful accounts like Frank Richards’ Old Soldiers Never Die (see MHM 143, December 2024/January 2025).
Inhuman horrors
Sledge is enrolled in officer training but, together with many of his peers, abandons it in favour of direct entry as a private in the Marines. The training is harsh and uncompromising, but it is recalled with some affection and gratitude: the recruits are becoming part of one of the finest fighting forces in the world, and no detail is spared in preparing them for the gruelling tasks ahead. Sledge ends up as a mortar man, serving in a 60mm mortar section. ‘The Old Breed’ of the title refers to the veterans who had completed pre-War training and served in battles like Guadalcanal. The importance of training and teamwork is a recurrent theme in the book, and Sledge recalls near the end of the Okinawa campaign the slaughter of green replacements who have had just a few weeks rifle-training and can’t even arm and throw a grenade.
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