With the Old Breed: The World War Two Pacific Classic

Now the inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFICThis was a\nbrutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war\nin the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands…Landing on the\nbeach at Peleliu in 1944 as twenty-year-old new recruit to the US\nMarines, Eugene Sledge can only try desperately to survive. At\nPeleliu and Okinawa – two of the fiercest and filthiest Pacific\nbattles of WWII – he witnesses the dehumanising brutality displayed\nby both sides and the animal hatred that each soldier has for his\nenemy.During temporary lapses in the fighting, conditions on the\nislands mean that the Marines often can’t wash, stay dry, dig\nlatrines, or even find time to eat. Suffering from constant fear,\nfatigue, and filth, the struggle of simply living in a combat zone\nis utterly debilitating.Yet despite horrendous conditions Sledge\nfinds time to keep notes that he would later turn into a book.\nDescribed as one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war, With\nthe Old Breed tells with compassion and honesty of the cruelty,\nbravery and deaths of the men he fought alongside, and of his own\njourney from patriotic innocence to batte-scarred veteran.Eugene\nSledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old\nBreed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns\nthe extremes of the war in the Pacific – the terror, the\ncamaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary – into terms we\nmortals can grasp. – Tom Hanks

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