With the old breed was written by Eugen B. Sledge It is a great story about the Pacific theater through the eyes of a newly trained marine mortor man in the 1st division in the battles of Tarawa and Okinawa It i a very good book and would highly recommend it it is an old book and i dont know how much it is now it sarts out slow but it get very visual and if there is some military lingo you dont know it says at the bottom what they are talking about, with mlitary maps and such it is a great book and not to long.
I recently got “With The Old Breed” but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I’m really looking forward to it.
i also have purchased it but havent gotten around to reading it just yet, the new band of brothers follow-up mini-series “the pacific” will draw heavily from this book
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is a highly recommended work. I’ve a request in for it via ILL. Should arrive at the local library next week. I’m looking forward to reading it.
JT
Read it. ASAP.
It’s got to be the best personal account of USMC, or US anybody in the island hopping campaign, war in the Pacific, or war generally. Close to William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness, but Manchester wasn’t strictly autobiographical and used literary devices to increase his impact. Sledge, unvarnished, is better.
It suffers from some improbabilities in being an accurate record (You won’t find any rude words beginning with f in it, which would be a first for any military unit), but the author is a God fearing man who endured and, by great good fortune, survived some of the worst campaigns in the Pacific.
Apart from being sanitized in some odd respects, it gives you the sense of hitting bodies with your trenching tool and vomiting after sliding down muddy slopes of slimy maggot ridden corpses.
Like some great WWI writing, it gives every reason why we shouldn’t go to war and why, in war, many humans aren’t, and some are more so.
check this google book link out, talks a bit about the author. There’s more stuff on the google.com/books if you punch in the title and author…
Read it, LOVED IT!! Up there with The Forgotten Soldier a must read for any WW2 buff
I started to read this book after the series is over, i think the book so far is better than the tv series. Very enjoyable and i am one of those people who hates reading novels.
Very much so.
I found the Sledge character in the TV series unrecognisable from the man whose experiences were recorded in the book.
The next book on my list is the one written by Robert Leckie, i am pretty sure its just as good!
which one? he wrote a lot of books on the pacific campaign.
Personally, I found this book hard work. It went into the most anal detail about things which I didn’t find interesting and frankly didn’t ever seem to “get going”. I gave up reading it three quarters of the way through. I think it’s been over-hyped but nonethless it seems to have been a good seller so maybe it’s just me. Sorry folks.
I didn’t find that at all. If you want mundane detail, get “Strong Men Armed” by Robert Leckie, it’s 500 pages of tactics and statistics. Sledge’s book is pretty universally lauded for being a readable account. Must just not be your style. I read the book in three sittings and couldn’t put it down.
Same here, I couldn’t put it down either. I thought it was very well done. A good story of one man’s experience in war.
I just watched the DVD of Pacific which is based on Eugene Sledge’s experience in the Old Breed and it was really excellent - maybe I’m going to have to give the book another try!
One word: Outstandin’ Marine!
That’s two words, and they don’t contribute much to the discussion.
You’ve been posting a few of these sorts of comments, but it would be better if you offered more considered and better explained opinions.
With the Old Breed is by far one of the best war books (probably one of the best books in general, too) I’ve ever read. Sledge was traumatized from the war - Notice the copyright date…the first printing came out in 1981, WAY after most of the other WWII books because it took him so long to write down and publish everything that he went through. He kept detailed records in a bible throughout the war, which is how he was able to write such a detailed book decades later. Honestly, when I read this book, I told my girlfriend this book should be required reading for everyone in school. Why read ancient stuff like Julius Caeser when you could read something that is much more exciting and much more relevant to today’s world? 
To respond to the person who mentioned about the cursing, Sledge doesn’t actually write curses in the book but he does mention that Marines cursed. Would it really add much to just see curse words written throughout the book, especially when Sledge describes the horrible things that he experienced and saw.
I wouldn’t say that the character in The Pacific was much different but The Pacific glossed, changed or didn’t mention a lot of the episodes in the book…The show was much less graphic than a lot of what Sledge described and I really wish The Pacific spent more time about Sledge’s role at Okinawa.
I also read China Marine, the sequel to With the Old Breed. It was pretty good but not nearly as good as With the Old Breed. In that book, I wish more time was spent on any kind of PTSD issues that Sledge had…it does mention it at the end but I would have liked to have read more about his struggle with the repurcussions of the war.