E.B Sledge in his book China Marine retells the experiences of an American soldier, a veteran of the Pacific Theater of World War II as part of the First Marine Division’s occupation duty of China after the war was over. In China Marine, Sledge in the form of a memoir retells some of the most memorable experiences he had in northern China. The book is much more than just a simple story of an American serviceman living in China but it is also a description of life for the Chinese people living in the aftermath of World War II. Sledge’s descriptions of city life in post war Beijing and how he and the Chinese people were able to come to terms with life in peacetime.
The book begins with Sledge retelling the events following the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the events towards the end of the fighting in the Pacific. Sledge and his other Marines stationed in Okinawa had heard that President Truman had dropped the Atomic bomb but still no one actually believed that it would actually lead to the Japanese surrendering. One of Sledge’s tent mates said
The Nips won’t surrender. We’ll have to go back into the islands and wipe ‘em all out just like Pelelieu. Even if they did surrender in Tokypo, we’ll have to fight them for years until every last one is knocked off. (Sledge 2)
So it was naturally quite a relief when the news came that the Japanese had surrendered and that the United States wouldn’t have to invade the Japanese home islands and have to fight the Japanese to the last man, like they had feared. The life of the men on Okinawa at this stage was much less about war and even the boredom of camp duty than actually trying to speculate where they would go next. A rumor even surfaced that Sledge’s First Marine Division was going to Tokyo “as conquering heroes” but most of the men just wanted to go home. (Sledge 8) The uncertainty of the life of a soldier even when he is not in combat is probably the most stressful thing and the early part of this book highlight’s very well the feelings of Sledge and the other men in his unit concerning what could have become of them if the Japanese had not surrendered. They were fairly skeptical of what would happen to them if they were going to be the spearhead of an Allied invasion of Japan and were very relieved when they Japanese surrendered.
They next learned that instead of invading Japan they would actually be sent to Peiping (Beijing) in Northern China as part of an Allied occupation force there. Sledge next describes the scenes when he and the men in his company were on the train going to Beijing where they saw a “desolate landscape” that was “divided into small agricultural fields now lying fallow. An occasional house constructed of dirt bricks with a tile roof” they also saw what Sledge described a field filled with small domed mounds that turned out to be a cemetery. (Sledge 18) The book here goes much further than the usual story that one could expect to be written by an average American GI and instead it actually gives some texture and explanation of the landscape and how the people in rural China were living in the aftermath of a war that had hurt them as much as anyone else. Sledge in this sense is tapping into a different form of writing not just a traditional memoir but something else entirely which taps into the genre of orientalist travelogues or diaries. Sledge’s experiences as a Marine in northern China after World War II maybe unique in one way or another but it actually taps into a timeless tradition of westerners who had to write down their experiences of their travels in the “orient”.
This continues later in the book when Sledge describes the experience of being in the English legation, the embassy, as though he living in the nineteenth century and that place seemed to be “haunted by the spirit of Rudyard Kipling.” (Sledge 24) He also brings up the Boxer Rebellion and how American Marines were among the troops that were able to break the siege of the English legation in Beijing in that important event in Chinese history. There is yet another passage where Sledge describes a scene he witnessed in Beijing. “I saw jugglers, tinsmiths, chinaware repairmen, pedicurists peddler and various other individuals who combined to make Peiping’s street scenes the most fascinating one can imagine. (Sledge 51) Sledge also talks about how life moved at a slower pace and that outside of the Western part of town the lack of technology probably led the city to being on the whole less advanced and more relaxed. (Sledge 51) This is a trope of Orientalist writing which Sledge fully captured in his book.
Eugene Sledge set out to write a book about his life on occupation duty in post-World War II Beijing and in doing so he tapped into the most famous tropes of Western literature ever. The travelogue of a Western trying to explain how life in the orient, in this case China was different because the people were diverse, backwards, moved at a slower pace and lived calmly because of the “pleasure and diversion their rich ancient culture afforded them.” (Sledge 51) I think on this merit alone China Marine is an interesting book and one that is worth reading and thinking about. Sledge a World War II veteran of the Pacific Theater in this book was able to take on the anthropologist’s eye and take a critical look at the world that he was put it in. This is valuable insight and it proves that no matter what your background if you are willing to think about the place you currently are, its people, history and context you can possibly have some sort of insight that can be studied and be relevant to future generations and I think that Sledge was successful in doing that in writing a book about his experiences in China after the war.
Works Cited
Sledge, Eugene Bondurant, and Stephen E. Ambrose. China Marine: An Infantryman's Life After World War II. Oxford University Press, 2003.
