With the old breed

[Tsword]

With the old breed was written by Eugen B. Sledge It is a great story about the Pacific theater through the eyes of a newly trained marine mortor man in the 1st division in the battles of Tarawa and Okinawa It i a very good book and would highly recommend it it is an old book and i dont know how much it is now it sarts out slow but it get very visual and if there is some military lingo you dont know it says at the bottom what they are talking about, with mlitary maps and such it is a great book and not to long.

[jrbentley]

I recently got "With The Old Breed" but I haven't had a chance to read it yet, I'm really looking forward to it.

[overlord644]

i also have purchased it but havent gotten around to reading it just yet, the new band of brothers follow-up mini-series "the pacific" will draw heavily from this book

[jacobtowne]

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is a highly recommended work. I've a request in for it via ILL. Should arrive at the local library next week. I'm looking forward to reading it.

JT

[Rising Sun*]

Read it. ASAP.

It's got to be the best personal account of USMC, or US anybody in the island hopping campaign, war in the Pacific, or war generally. Close to William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness, but Manchester wasn't strictly autobiographical and used literary devices to increase his impact. Sledge, unvarnished, is better.

It suffers from some improbabilities in being an accurate record (You won't find any rude words beginning with f in it, which would be a first for any military unit), but the author is a God fearing man who endured and, by great good fortune, survived some of the worst campaigns in the Pacific.

Apart from being sanitized in some odd respects, it gives you the sense of hitting bodies with your trenching tool and vomiting after sliding down muddy slopes of slimy maggot ridden corpses.

Like some great WWI writing, it gives every reason why we shouldn't go to war and why, in war, many humans aren't, and some are more so.

[the_librarian]

check this google book link out, talks a bit about the author. There's more stuff on the google.com/books if you punch in the title and author....

http://www.google.com/books?id=oS0pgHi4Z5UC