E.B. Sledge has written what might be the finest memoir of combat in World War II, and perhaps any war. In honest, straightforward prose the author recounts in sometimes surreal detail the savage fighting between men of the 1st Marine Division and Japanese soldiers on the islands of Peleliu and Okanawa. The Old Breed was the basis for the HBO mini-series The Pacific by Steven Spielberg. As gritty as many of the scenes in that production were, they pale against the impact of the book, with its smells, sounds, emotions, and overlayed scenes of heartbreaking beauty and unimaginable horror :

“As daylight waned, I looked out to our front through the drizzling rain falling through the still, foul air. A wisp of smoke rose straight up from the pack of the Japanese soldier ‘Kathy’ had killed. The tracers had set something on fire. The thin finger of smoke rose high and then spread out abruptly to form a disc that appeared to rest on the column. So delicate and unreal, the smoke stood there in the stagnant, fetid air like a marker over the corpse. Everything out there was motionless, only death and desolation among the enemy bodies.”

By the time of the battle of Peleliu, the Japanese had for the most part abandoned the use of the banzai charge and adopted the tactic of fighting from heavily fortified mutually supported fixed positions that were near impervious to naval and air bombardment. Fighting was up-close, personal, and without quarter. An avid hunter before the war, the author abandoned that activity upon his return. Amidst the tropical beauty of the Pacific he had witnessed enough “youthful human wreckage” to ever kill again.