With the Old Breed
Books | History / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General
4.5
(381)
E.B. Sledge
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “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 HanksIn 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
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More Details:
Author
E.B. Sledge
Pages
384
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
Published Date
2008-12-18
ISBN
0307549585 9780307549587
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"I read this in one of my history classes after serving in Iraq. I did not have the same experiences in war that Sledge did, however the feelings are the same no matter what time you serve in. Great book. A real take you there and put you in the mix description of war and its hellish feelings."
"After watching "The Pacific" the HBO miniseries I wanted to read the books it was based on.. the first hand accounts were even more moving than the miniseries. This book described the hell of war and its effect on the men. "
C M
Clint Mumford