With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
4. Describe at least two episodes, in detail, that indicate Sledge's attitude towards the enemy.
As a personal account, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa recounts harrowing and vivid events experienced by Eugene B. Sledge and his United States (U.S.) Marine comrades during World War II as members of the First Marine Division. As an ordinary soldier, the author elaborates on the military campaigns fought by his division, K Company’s Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment (K 3/5) at the Japanese islands of Peleliu and Okinawa. The memoir provides readers with the numerous and graphic horrors suffered by the Marines who fought these battles: finding oneself swept “into the [hellish] abyss of war” (Sledge, Preface). While the objective facts detailing the casualties and invasions of the Pacific theater are central elements of history books, firsthand memoirs provide valuable resources from a soldier’s point-of-view. Surviving the strange, alien world of the Pacific Islands, where Sledge acknowledges rarely knowing where he was as “the terrain was so unbelievably rugged, jumbled, and confusing” (Chapter 6, “Brave Men Lost”). Coupled with the intense heat and the unbearable stenches of rot, excrement, and death, Sledge also contended with the consequences of non-stop combat on Peleliu. After 15 days of nightmarish fighting on the island, Sledge’s company was under such duress that his remaining comrades “had a hollow-eyed vacant look peculiar to men under extreme stress for days and nights on end” (Chapter 5, “Ngesebus Island”). It is under these primitive circumstances that Sledge encounters the brutal Japanese enemy. While Sledge (Chapter 15, “It Was Over”), acknowledges that the Marines taught him to kill the enemy efficiently, confronting and overcoming this reality became an accelerated process borne of severe duress and the mere fact that either he killed the Japanese or the enemy would kill him. Two cumulative episodes in the Peleliu and Okinawa campaigns detail Sledge’s grim, ghoulish, and realistic attitude towards his implacable Japanese enemy whom he grew to hate profoundly. Although the language and descriptions of the events are brutal, the reader must consider that they occurred in the context of the intense war violence and the primitive psyche state of its combatants in the barbarous Pacific theater. As Sledge stated near the end of his narrative, “Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it” (“It Was Over”).
After surviving the beach landing on Peleliu, Sledge learns to confront the reality of facing enemy combatants killed in battle. For the novice fighter, it becomes a harsh lesson in assimilating the constant and continuous deaths he would face. Nevertheless, it soon became an instant, jarring process. Sledge came across his first enemy dead in the bodies of “a Japanese corpsman and two riflemen” (Chapter 4, “Assault). Killed by a fired shell, the medic lay in an open field and.”was on his back, [with] his abdominal cavity laid bare” (“Assault”). Sledge confesses he felt sickened by the sight, as he could not comprehend that the remains once represented a living human being. While the author professes shock at both enemy corpses and the casual way his comrades stripped the bodies of personal belongings, he wonders if soon the war would soon dehumanize him in a similar manner (“Assault”). Sledge soon realizes in subsequent battles that he became indifferent about “field stripping (“Assault”) dead Japanese soldiers. An example of this nonchalant attitude occurs a few days later when Sledge no longer has a problem removing personal items from Japanese corpses. While the narrator struggles in grappling with the self-defeating nature of war, Sledge removes a waterproof, green rubber-folding bag from a dead, enemy combatant to serve as a protective covering for his New Testament Bible (Chapter 4, “Heading North”).
In a more intense moment on Peleliu, Sledge’s cold indifference towards the Japanese adversary transforms into a complex of feeling cold, homicidal rage, juxtaposed with moments of futility produced by the war. The emotion of deepening hatred bursts forth towards a machine gunner laying in wait in a concrete pillbox ready to kill him combined with the sobering reality of killing a Japanese soldier before the enemy could throw a grenade at other U.S. Marines (Chapter 5, “Ngesebus Island”). Sledge grapples with feelings of shame and disgust produced by the realization of causing the death of another human being due to the misery of war, while simultaneously feeling “a strong personal hate for the machine gunner who had nearly blasted my head off my shoulders” (“Ngesebus Island”). During the assault and capture of Ngesebus Island, Sledge almost completes the cold and callous downward spiral of the “brutish existence of [men struggling] for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman's war” (“Ngesebus Island”). The author wants to experience the ultimate expression of dehumanization when he wants to extract gold teeth from many dead combatants. Only the intervention of a good friend and medic, Doc Caswell, stops Sledge from becoming more callous by warning Sledge of the unknown germs caused by harvesting enemy teeth (“Ngesebus Island”). Upon later reflection after the end of the war, Sledge realizes that his friend was trying to salvage any remaining humanity before it was too late.
In the ensuing Okinawa battles, Sledge continues to struggle with keeping that remaining humanity in his attitude towards the Japanese enemy. At the ferocious five-day engagement at Half Moon Hill, Sledge struggled with being “in the depth of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war “(Chapter12, “Half Moon Hill”). Nevertheless, after the K 3/5 captured Half Moon Hill, the U.S. Marines had to stop fleeing Japanese soldiers who had been hiding in caves situated along the hill’s ridge. Sledge’s comrades began shooting and killing the fleeing enemy before their nemesis could escape to other ridges for launching counterattacks and infiltrations. As Sledge had observation duty, he could not participate but wanted to grab an M1 Garand rifle to shoot the enemy (Chapter 12, “Half Moon Hill”). As the situation became more relaxed for the Marines, when they did not receive any return fire from the Japanese, the K 3/5 members’ response began to take on aspects of “an old-fashioned turkey shoot” (“Half Moon Hill”). Sledge understood that the shooting spree was a release from the extreme tension his troop faced after days of nonstop fighting. As the Japanese began to attack again, Sledge participates in the firing, killing more Japanese, where “instead of dying gloriously for the emperortheir lives were wasted on a muddy, stinking slope for no good reason” (“Half Moon Hill”). When his commanding officer (CO) reprimands K 3/5 members who continued shooting after the cease -fire order, including Sledge’s gunner friend, the author becomes upset. Sledge reminds his CO that U.S. soldiers’ mission was to kill “Nips” and that it did not make a difference what weapon accomplished the objective (“Half Moon Hill”). Towards the end of the Japanese resistance of Okinawa, Sledge’s description of a dead Japanese combatant is starkly different from when he saw his first deceased enemy. Instead of acknowledging the foe’s humanity, his commentary of the fallen soldier in full gear and equipment equates his body to that of a “giant squashed insect” (Chapter 15, “End of the Agony”). Tank treads mashed the body into the muddy ground. Sledge no longer views the enemy’s remains as human.
When the U.S dropped both atomic and hydrogen bombs on Japan to end the war in the Pacific, the surviving soldiers of the abyss “sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war (Chapter 15, “It was Over”). Sledge concludes his narrative by stating that “War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste (“It Was Over”). Although he found coping mechanisms for the brutal conditions of surviving Peleliu and Okinawa, Sledge fought to maintain a semblance of humanity while existing in a primitive state. For Sledge, the comradeship with fellow Marines afforded the ability to sustain his psychological survival, even through the most grueling and inhuman warfare.
Works Cited
Sledge, Eugene B. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. New York: Presidio Press, 2007. EPUB file.
