I finally got around to reading With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, the memoirs of Marine Corp veteran Corporal Eugene “Sledgehammer” Sledge.
With The Old Breed is generally considered one of the best historical accounts of the Pacific Theater from the standpoint of a combatant. Unlike grand sweeping stories that look at the events from a high level, With The Old Breed is the exact opposite, bringing the reader down into the daily drudgery, the unforgiving rock of Peleliu and the endless mud of Okinawa.
What they ate for chow, how the battles happened, dealing with incompetent green lieutenants, and the endless fear that had to be overcome again and again. How strong men completely lost it under the strain of combat. The cruelty and viciousness of the Japs and the way some Americans returned their cruelty in kind.
It isn’t great literature, it is written by a Marine who kept his notes on little scraps of paper stuffed in his Bible. Sledge did go to great pains to try to piece together what happened from his notes as well as the bigger histories but Sledge frequently admitted that often times he had no idea where they were. It is hard to keep accurate notes when you can’t sleep for fear of Japs attacking you in your foxhole or during torrential rains or when you haven’t had enough to eat or drink for weeks.
While the war in Europe is often portrayed in an almost romantic fashion, there was nothing romantic about the Pacific. Just a desperate struggle to survive against a fanatical, unbending enemy who made the Marines pay in blood for every inch of every island. It is a miracle that anyone came back from those islands and even more shocking that they could function later in life. How someone can experience that and then go home to mow their lawn and attend PTA meetings is hard for me to understand as someone who never experienced combat.
With The Old Breed isn’t a book to help you understand the overall picture of World War II but like Band of Brothers it brings the war down from an academic exercise to one where you can get the tiniest glimpse of what life was like for those poor guys who were dropped off on tropical islands and told to kill every Jap they found.
With the stories these guys brought home, it is little wonder that growing up you never saw Japanese cars in my hometown of Toledo and my grandparents who were staunch Democrats hated Japanese people with a passion they didn’t show for anything else.
WWII. Where Whites fought bravely and capably and many died.
All for the jews. Propaganda-it just works. We don’t know why.
It just does.
Japs got the Jewing: they let Wall Street uber-Jew Bernard Baruch pick where to drop the bomb, and he went with the City with the lagest number of Christians.
Yes, a “little known” fact. “Little known” for some inscrutable reason.
And in post-war Germany, Morgenthau couldn’t get his “Plan” in place, but took the half loaf of partial genocide via the “POW camps” with no shelter, and little food and medical attention for the former Wehrmacht soldiery thus confined that resulted in large numbers of deaths. Fuck Eisenhower and the French occupation leaders for that.
Eisenhower, FDR, Churchill, hundreds of media heads and hundreds more REMF’ers and bureaucrat-butchers should have been the ones tried at Nuremberg and hung for their crimes. To say nothing about the war crimes of slaughtering 12 million German citizens in the highly unethical bombing campaigns.
Israel’s penchant for genocide being executed before even the zionists stole lands in the Palestine.
Cross the zionists and you’ll get your ass bombed into the stone age, courtesy of the red-white-and-blue.
Are you aware that the french went through their POW camps and told the german prisoners that either they would ahem “voluntarily” join the French Foreign Legion and continue fighting communists in Vietnam or they would either prosecute them or turn them over to the soviets as war criminals.
A guy I knew at work a few years ago told me that a relative of his grandfather was a soldier of the SS, who according to him, was wanted in a lot of countries for war crimes (written in his diary and after his death delivered to his family) evaded the rope by joining the French Foreign Legion.
The irony: The French wanted him for war crimes too, but the Legion never betrayed him.
It came out after his death and then the entire story was buried because it would make some countries look bad. Expect the story to come to light when they rediscover his diary. Will be around 2270 or later.
Hi Alex, You are very correct but that was the case almost always for former SS soldiers rather than vanilla Wehrmacht soldiers.
That said **** the SS, there was a reason they were wanted for war crimes and many US soldiers would shoot the bastards on sight. This wasn’t because of bad PR rather it was what they saw the SS doing.
Hint it was an SS unit that murdered captured US soldiers at the Malmedy Massacre. The SS were fanatics and every single one of them deserved a noose.
FYI many Wehrmacht soldiers shared my belief on that as well, the Wehrmacht couldn’t stand those bastards either.
Do you know that there was a difference in the Waffen SS? There were the Reiter SS (not a criminal unit according to the Nuremburg trials, may have something to do with the fact that Prince Bernhard, husband to the dutch queen, was a member). Then you have the normal Waffen SS (military) and the cocentration camp Waffen SS aka Death Head (yes, one unit at least was both military and concentration camp: the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf.
And yes, there were transfers of persons between those units.
But do you know, that the late former german chancellor Helmut Schmidt (Lieutenant in the Wehrmacht) once said that if he knew that a SS division was in position to the left or right of his unit they had a quiet night.
And on January 23rd, 1951 General Eisenhower gave a declaration of honour to german chancellor Adenauer regarding the soldiers of the Wehrmacht.
On December 3rd , 1952Adenauer gave a declaration of honour for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and on December 17th, 1952 he said that this declaration also included soldiers of the Waffen SS as long as they had fought honourably.
Speaking of bastards. Do you know what ‘your boys’ did to the Germans – after the cease fire? Have you ever heard of Dresden and Hamburg? Or even Hiroshima and Nagasaki?The kangaroo court known as Nuremberg?
Ain’t much learnin’ gettin done in the bayou is there?
It’s a really good book, well worth reading and having in the library.
It is a truly excellent book. Next read “Helmet for my Pillow” by Robert Leckie. That and “Old Breed” were the foundation for the HBO series “The Pacific”, which was also excellent.
Brit pilot talking about how it felt to be the jooz’ bitchez in WWII, and participating in the genocide of German civilians: https://m3.gab.com/media_attachments/1c/6f/5d/1c6f5db55b00342459fe34bea9fa393a.mp4
Great book. Have read it several times.
Sledge had what we now know as PTSD for many years after the war. He had nightmares for years afterwards. Writing the book decades later was his way of putting it all to rest, which it largely did, although not completely.
I read another book not too long ago, written by a Vietnam war vet about his experiences in that war. He also had PTSD, as he was in a Marine Corps line company that was involved in heavy combat with the very capable and motivated NVA for pretty much the entire time he was there.
He said something that was one of the most profound truths I have ever heard. He said the Vietnam war will never be over, not truly over, until every last combat veteran of that war, both U.S. and Vietnamese, have finally passed away. I am sure that Eugene Sledge would have agreed completely.
Conversely, my father fought in Europe and was very complimentary towards Germans. Not so the Soviets.
Gen. Patton once remarked that the German soldiers were the finest soldiers in the world. In the short story “Black Ass At The Crossroads”, Hemingway’s speaker referred to the German soldiers as “perverted boy scouts”, which meant that they were, again, great soldiers.
The Soviets were animals. Torture, skinning people alive, nailing women and girls to doors and then r@ping them to death. Psychopathic insanity. But many of the Soviet leadership were jooz of course, so you can’t expect any better from them.
Sadly, some of America’s own soldiers were often guilty of r@ping German women. War crimes that were seldom acknowledged and rarely prosecuted. Its like half the world lost their effing minds with hatred for the German people.
Cross the jooz and you’ll get your ass bombed back into the stone age. Courtesy of the red-white-and-blue.
At least someone else here reads revisionist history. Thank you for not being totally enamored with the “muh military right or wrong” hokum. A real dissident!
Red army r@ped about 2 million German women in the jooz’ genocide against Germany, 1939-1945: https://m3.gab.com/media_attachments/77/5a/1b/775a1be53ed9b10d223d6357e6195284.mp4
An excellent read. I read through most of The Commandant’s reading list (by rank), and that was one of my favorites.
I’d recommend “Storm of Steel” if you haven’t read it already.
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Classics-Storm-Steele-Penguin/dp/0141186917
Off-Topic:
What if the curly-burns imported >twenty million ILLxGxLS to dilute crime statistics?
Mestizo — count them as Northern European Heritage folk.
Pak and hindoo — count them as Northern European Heritage folk, as well.
Afghan, Arabians — Northern European.
.
Suddenly, published crime numbers by inner-city slum-trash seem tame compared to ALL! THE! WHITE! CRIMES!.
.
An aside:
Supposes legit MainStreamMedia and Real-World remotely-plausible statistics furnished by the government agents.
On second thought, disregard this post.
“With the Old Breed” is one of the finest war memoirs ever written regardless of era, and it belongs in the collection of anyone interested in the Second World War or the Marine Corps. Rather than comment on the more obvious aspects of the experiences of Sledge and his fellow Marines, I’d like to touch upon something else: How few decorations were typically worn by Sledge and his fellow Marines, even after years away from home and months of continuous combat at places most Americans couldn’t find on a map. And to flip the issue, medal inflation in today’s military.
It is astonishing to me that Sledge, who entered the Corps in 1942 and served into 1946 (including deployment to China after the war ended with Japan), left the USMC as a corporal, and without enough ribbons to make two rows on his tunic. Despite surviving experiences which literally cannot be described, and saving the lives of his comrades many times, he was never cited for bravery – and wore no decorations for valor. His combat action ribbon and his “I was there” campaign ribbons were all the evidence marking him as a combat veteran, otherwise you’d never know it.
Contrast that to many of the military personnel walking around today, including personnel who have never seen a day in combat in their lives: Many of them have so many medals, awards and ribbons they’d shame Patton – what on earth for? Giving a good power-point presentation?
There’s something very wrong with that contrast. Something that does not speak well of the present-day military. And perhaps something that speaks poorly of the system back then which refused to properly recognize such a fine Marine as Eugene Sledge.
Agree with above commenters regarding how the US allied itself with ungodly evil forces in WWII. Contrary to the propaganda we have been fed our whole lives, WWII was not the “good war”. The Greatest Generation did not save us from anything. In no way do I mean to denigrate the sacrifices our armed forces made.
But the fact is that WWII in Europe was another “brother war” like WWI, where White Christian men of different nations slaughtered each other en masse. It is just a tragedy that young American men, motivated by patriotism and good intentions, fell for the lies that started WWII.
Churchill hated Germany with a passion, and he was determined to have his war with Germany no matter what the cost in lives and treasure. Hitler greatly admired both England and America, and he tried on numerous occasions to broker a peace deal with England and her allies.
Roosevelt was also determined to get America into the war against Germany, in spite of the fact that 80% of Americans were adamantly opposed to it. When the Japanese finally attacked Pearl Harbor, after years of crippling sanctions instigated by America and England, Roosevelt used the declaration of war against Japan as a back door way of getting us into the war against Germany because Japan was loosely (mostly on paper) allied with the Axis countries of Europe.
So Churchill got his war with Germany, and Roosevelt got us in on it through the back door. None of it should ever have been allowed to happen. And as a result, we enabled the survival and expansion of the Communist Soviet Union, which killed many jtens of millions more people that the Nazis did. General George Patton himself, at the conclusion of WWII, vis a vis the Nazis vs the Soviets, was reputed to have said, “We defeated the wrong enemy”.
I once read that Churchill at first admired Germany but then his lifestyle aka debts caught up to him. He was offered a lot of money. After he received this money he changed his opinion and considered Germany to be the black hole of black holes.And his tabs for buying alcohol, parties, eating at the finest restaurants were picked up by ahem other people. Very rich people.
He was an investment, nothing more.
And he delivered.
When the polishGeneral Sikorsky got into the way that the communists Poles were the future rulers of Poland after the war, he had an accident.
Churchill delivered half of Europe to communism.
And he was not alone.
I read the summary of General retired Gerd Schultze-Rhonhofs The war that had many fathers. The british diplomats did their best to prevent any peaceful solution to the German-Polish crises.
If you only read one record of the Pacific War this should be the one. Well written and captivating account of the absolutely horrific conditions on the island of Pelelia and Okinawa. Fighting in the maggot-infested, corpse laden, mud of Okinawa was terrible. Through it all the author makes the point that war is madness and a waste of young lives. How true. All wars are banker wars.
The Southern author was a Christian and early God spoke to him and told him he would make it thru. How comforting, yet he still went thru hell on Earth.
EXCERPT:
“Suddenly, I heard a loud voice say clearly and distinctly, “You will survive the war!”
“I looked first at Hillbilly and then at the sergeant. Each returned my glance with a quizzical expression on his face in the gathering darkness. Obviously they hadn’t said anything.
“Did y’all hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?” they both inquired.
“Someone said something,” I said.
“I didn’t hear anything. How about you?” said Hillbilly, turning to the sergeant.
“No, just that machine gun off to the left.”
“Shortly the word was passed to get settled for the night. Hillbilly and the sergeant crawled back to their hole as Snafu returned to the gun pit. Like most persons, I had always been skeptical about people seeing visions and hearing voices. So I didn’t mention my experience to anyone. But I believed God spoke to me that night on that Peleliu battlefield, and I resolved to make my life amount to something after the war.”
END EXCERPT
That has to be one of the best personal accounts by any soldier of any war. Sledge was the son of a Mobile, AL doctor and more than likely could have avoided combat. He served beyond the call of duty. There are several videos of Sledge on YouTube.
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