Sledgehammer

“With the Old Breed,” a grueling, grizzly memoir of island combat in the South Pacific by Eugene B. Sledge, is one of the most powerful and eloquent pieces of writing about war that I know. I first read the book about ten years ago (along with another memoir called “Pacific War Diary”), and I’m almost finished with reading it a second time. Except for “The Iliad” and Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” there is no book I know of that gives such a clear-eyed, graphic and deeply disturbing description of the terror and violence of warfare than this short, succinct and profoundly personal memoir.

This is all the more astonishing because the author, Eugene B. Sledge, was a nineteen year-old dropout from an Alabama military academy when he enlisted with the Marines in 1943. Known affectionately as “Sledgehammer” to his comrades, who ribbed him about his slight frame and boyish face, he ended up fighting in two of longest and most punishing of the Pacific island campaigns, Peleliu and Okinawa.

By the end of these campaigns most of Sledge’s original unit had been either killed or severely wounded. He was a lucky survivor. The odds should have had him torn to shreds by a Japanese machine gun or blown to bits by a mortar round. The horrible irony of Pelileu, a tiny speck of an island off the Philippines, was that in retrospect, it appears to have been an unnecessary campaign. General Douglas Macarthur thought Pelileu ought to be taken in order to better enable his reconquest of the Philippines. The Marine brass thought the battle would last at the most no more than a couple of days (Dick Cheney, anyone?).

It turned out to be the worst imaginable battle, lasting months and killing thousands of Marines, most of them teenagers like Sledge. The island itself was harsh coral and tangled undergrowth. It was impossible to dig a trench for safety, and men had to huddle in crevices for days on end, their bleeding hands and legs torn by the sharp coral. The Japanese, having installed themselves long before, knew the island perfectly, and they hid themselves away in concrete pillboxes. They were to a man determined to fight brutally until they were exterminated—which is indeed how it ended, with over 10,000 of their numbers killed and less than a hundred of their soldiers taken prisoner. Surrendering for them was simply not an option—one of the factors that ultimately led to the American decision a year later to use the atomic bomb.

Several recent movies have tried to capture the terrible mix of chaos, violence, uncertainty and panic that person-to-person combat entails. There is of course Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” the first half hour of which reenacts the Normandy invasion. More realistic is Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” which I suspect used Sledge’s book for research. Malick’s film is about raw recruits having to claw their way up the steep slopes of some obscure Pacific island straight into the face of murderous gunfire coming seemingly out of nowhere. It’s more convincing than Spielberg’s film because the soldiers are not perfect or idealized. There is no cuddly Tom Hanks, no stirring, soothing John Williams music in the background. On the contrary, at one point in “The Thin Red Line,” an eerie lull during which the camera slowly pans a scene of scattered Japanese corpses, we hear Ives’s “Unanswered Question.” You’ve never heard such meaning in that piece until you’ve seen this scene.

But no film can come close to the descriptions of fear and loathing, of inconceivable human depravity and degradation that Sledge summons in his simple prose. Perhaps the most tragic thing about warfare at such close quarters is that the soldiers, no matter how rational they may try to be, inevitably are overcome with seething hatred for their enemies. Warfare quickly becomes personal and very very ugly. The images are graphic and deeply upsetting. A Marine takes his combat knife and digs away at the open mouth of a badly wounded but still live Japanese soldier, determined to cut out a gold tooth for a souvenir. The beheaded bodies of three Americans are found rotting in the sun, their heads resting on their chests, and their severed penises stuck in their mouths.

For over a month there was no possibility of a single moment’s repose. At night the Japanese would sneak up and make sudden, shocking “banzai” charges into the foxholes of the Americans, stabbing and slashing with their bayonets and knives until they were shot to death. It was not uncommon to have a Japanese and an American locked in an animal death struggle, savagely biting each other’s ears, lips and noses, screaming and flailing away like two rabid dogs.

Soldiers couldn’t even hope to practice the bare minimum in what Sledge delicately calls personal hygiene. To the hundred-degree sun and fetid tropical humidity was added the overwhelming stench of rotting corpses and unburied piles of excrement, sometimes no more than a few feet away from where soldiers were trapped for days on end.

There are many tales of heroism and sacrifice and bonding in “With the Old Breed.” They constitute the familiar lore of battle literature, and it’s impossible not to be moved by them, especially when you realize that most of these soldiers were not even of voting age. But there is little to find joy in. Your main reaction is “how did it come to this?” And “why does this keep happening?”