Just finished reading for the second time; With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene B. Sledge. This book was one of the two books that was used as source material for the Pacific series of HBO. The other is Robert Leckie's Helmet for my pillow. After seeing the series I wanted to read the books to delve further into the experience that these men had fighting the war in the Pacific.
Eugene B. Sledge, from Mobile Alabama, served primarily as a mortar man in King Company, 5 Marines of the 1st Marine Division. Occasionally, he would serve the dangerous job of being a stretcher bearer and rifleman. This book details his experience from boot camp to the two campaigns he underwent as a member of the 1st Marine Division. This book was initially supposed to be a personal account of the war for his family, but his wife Jeanne suggested that it could be of interest to other people, and so a personal memoir was born.
The two campaigns Eugene Sledge participated in were at Peleliu and Okinawa. Both campaigns were assessed to be the most bloodiest and most difficult campaigns of the Pacific War owing to the brutality with which the two sides vengefully fought each other that resulted in a lot of wounded and killed. The men who fought there also endured the most physical of hardships brought about by the awful weather and terrain.
If we look at it further, this could primarily be because the tide had turned in the Pacific in favor of the Allies. The US Industrial might was churning at full speed, materially and technologically they have become more superior than Imperial Japan. The Pacific War turned into a war of attrition, where for every defeat, he who could not replace the men and material they lost was destined to lose the war. Japan lacked the industrial capacity (it was said that it was 10:1 in favor of the US) and the raw materials to continue building war materials.
But despite the technical superiority in man and materials you would think that the ensuing conflict would have made the final periods of the war more easier, it didn't. One reason is that because the tables were turned, the Americans were now on the offensive and the Japanese the defensive. Sun Tzu's The Art of War always said never to fight a desperate foe, because these men knew that they had nothing to lose. The Japanese of World War II could have added another paragraph to Sun Tzu's book on fighting against fanatical men, and that was men who believed that they fought for a god would gladly pay with their lives for a lost cause rather than be captured or surrender.
The Battle of Peleliu holds the distinction of being the battle where the Japanese had changed their tactics. Long gone were the fatalistic Banzai charges that sought to overwhelm defenders by sheer mass of numbers. Instead what they employed were mutually defensive and well hidden positions in hollowed caves. They took advantage of terrain and built tunnels to interconnect their defenses. The most important weapon of all was the mindset ingrained and accepted by every Japanese soldier, that they knew that they weren't going to win, but they just had to make the Allies pay a higher price in blood for every Japanese soldier killed. This was to whittle done the resolve of the Allies and the general public with the carnage so that when the time for the invasion of Japan would come (Allied command were estimating 1 million soldiers would be lost during the invasion of Japan) the Allies would offer a brokered peace instead where in Japan could keep some of its conquered lands.
It was at Peleliu that King Company lost its beloved Company Commander, Capt Andrew "Ack Ack" Haldane. Eugene B. Sledge talks highly of the man and details it further in his book. But proof of how well loved he was can be seen in the opening pages of this book, where Sledge dedicates the book to the memory of his fallen commander and to the men of the 1st Marine Division. Capt Haldane got shot by a sniper when he poked his head out of cover while trying to ascertain the enemy's position. In the tv series, there was one scene in Pavuvu when K Company had returned from the Battle of Peleliu, where an officer is seen throwing personal effects in disgust into a trashbin and Sledge coming over to see what it was and seeing in it a book by Hemingway that belonged to Capt. Haldane and also throwing it away in a bout of sadness. I always wondered if this was a true account or just "dramatic effect" added in by the director, turns out that this scene really did happen.
The strength of the book lies in the graphic details that Eugene Sledge was able to describe the deplorable conditions of the battlefield, the brutality and bestiality of the fighting. Most especially the barbarism that the Imperial Japanese leaders ordered their soldiers to employ that offered no quarter, a stark contrast to how they fought during World War I. One narrative in particular that I can't seem to forget was the way Sledge described the Japanese soldier's practice of desecrating corpses. In one instance, he saw some dead marine bodies lying by the road. Despite being dead already, this did not stop some Japanese soldiers from skewering and chopping up the already lifeless bodies and stuffing some of the body parts into the corpses' mouths as an insult. Even medics and stretcher bearers were not spared from withering fire as wearing a medic badge attracted more fire. You can just imagine how these intense acts of barbarism inflamed further the already scalding hatred the Marines had for the Japanese. Sun Tzu always warned about the dangers of fighting an inflamed enemy; the Japanese not only avoided them, they created them with these deplorable acts.
Another thing I learned from this book was the way weather and climate bore down on the spirit of a man in combat and added greatly to his misery and fatigue. In Peleliu it was the intense heat, the lack of a natural source of water and the hard coral ground that prevented a man from digging a proper hole to protect himself from the intense bombardment and machine gun fire. In Okinawa it was the incessant rain and mud. Then there were also the corpses and rotting flesh that brought the maggots and flies. Because of the rains and the intense bombardment that made roads impassable, it was impossible to move the corpses to the rear echelon areas for proper care. All of this, combined with the length of stay of a soldier in the forward area, under intense fire and shelling, could break a man down.
After reading this book, it reinforced my belief in the brutality of war. In times of war all norms are lost and men will have no recourse but to rely on instinct and raw animalism in order to survive. It reinforces your sense of responsibility and duty, to elect leaders that will guarantee that events like these will never happen again in our lifetime.
