With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought with the 1st Division — the old breed — in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu and Okinawa, the book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page.
But Sledge wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons.
One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father’s legacy forward, and he’s written his own book — The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed — that pairs his father’s combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene’s son. Today on the show, Henry and I talk about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed, what made fighting in the Pacific uniquely hellish, and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full, honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- China Marine: An Infantryman’s Life After World War II by E.B. Sledge
- HBO series The Pacific
- Ken Burns’ The War
- AoM Article: Eugene B. Sledge Puts Your Problems Into Perspective
- AoM Article: Are You Missing the Forbidden City?
Connect With Henry Sledge
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sludge, a Marine who fought with the first division, the old breed, in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu in Okinawa. The book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page.
But Sledge wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons. One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father’s legacy forward, and he’s written his own book, The Old Breed, The Complete Story Revealed that pairs his father’s combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene’s son. Today on the show, Henry and I talked about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed, what made fighting the Pacific uniquely hellish and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/OldBreed. All right, Henry Sledge, welcome to the show.
Henry Sledge:
Thank you. Great to be here, Brett. I appreciate that.
Brett McKay:
So your father was Eugene “Sledgehammer” Sledge, who was a marine infantryman who fought in the Pacific campaign of World War II. He’s also the author of what many consider one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, and it’s called With the Old Breed. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have read this. Why did your dad write the book originally? Was this something he had planned right after the war?
Henry Sledge:
There really was no orchestrated plan to write a book. I think it began as a cathartic process on his part to deal with some of the PTSD, the emotional trauma, just the trying to assimilate to civilian life as he began to put the war behind him. I think that was part of it. And the other component to it was I think there was a desire on his part to have a written record of his experience for my brother and me. I remember him telling me that.
Brett McKay:
And the thing too is he had extensive notes to write this thing. Where did those notes come from? How did he keep them when he was fighting?
Henry Sledge:
Well, so the Marines were not allowed to keep diaries for obvious security reasons. If you saw The Pacific miniseries…?
Brett McKay:
I did.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah. So Rami Malik playing Snafu has that classic line, gives the Japs valuable intel, they find it, but that really was the crux of it. I mean, Marines were not supposed to keep diaries for security reasons, and he began to keep surreptitious notes on little pieces of paper that he kept tucked into his pocket New Testament Bible that he carried in the breast pocket of his jacket. And he also wrote some cursory notes in the first few pages of that Bible just on weather conditions and basic outline of where they were and that kind of thing. But most of the note taking was going to be on pieces of paper that he kept tucked into the Bible. And then when he got home, he took those pieces of paper and wrote down on a piece of legal paper, an outline, fleshing everything out, and then from there began to write on his legal pads with his pencil
Brett McKay:
When he started to write. How long after did it take for him to finish it?
Henry Sledge:
He started writing, I would say early seventies. I mean, my earliest memories of it are just when I was just a few years old and that process, and probably a few years after he began that he asked my mother to begin typing the manuscript. So she started typing it. He would write at night and then she would type in the days that followed. I mean, that went on through most of the mid to late seventies. It probably wasn’t until the late seventies that she talked him into like, “Hey, this is a pretty powerful story. We should look at trying to get this published.” And I think that process, and I remember it really well. I mean, I remember the day that we got the letter from Presidio saying that they would publish it, and that was around 1980 because it actually came out in 1981.
Brett McKay:
So yeah, it was about a 10-year process.
Henry Sledge:
And the thing is, Brett, I mean, he would work on it furiously for several days at a time at night, and then he’d take a break and may not touch it for a month or two months. And I mean, as my brother and I got older and as a family, we’re doing things because at that time, he’s in his early fifties or mid to late forties and just life gets in the way of everything. So I mean, he’s being a husband, being a dad, he was very involved in our lives on a day-to-day basis. We had a close relationship. And so we would hit stretches where he wouldn’t even work on it for months at a time and then pick it back up and dive back into it.
Brett McKay:
Your dad’s writing is really good, it’s really compelling. But he wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor, and his writing wasn’t flowery. It was more matter of fact. How would you describe your dad’s writing style?
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, his writing, I would term it like this. He was a scientist. He had PhD biology, biochemistry. He wrote like a scientist, no flowery, elegant prose, nothing pedantic. I mean, it was straight ahead, unblinking factual.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, you can tell that he’s got this scientific biological mind when he writes, because the way he describes things, it’s almost like you’re reading a field report from a field biologist. I mean, there was one, here’s a quote he’s talking about. He’s just seen the dead bodies on Peleliu. Yeah, he said this, “it was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed to bloated, to maggot infested rotting to partially exposed bones like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.” And then he’d also, when he described dead bodies, he would compare them. Well, it looks like the intestines of a squirrel that I would hunt as a boy.
Henry Sledge:
Yes, that’s exactly right. And I literally turned as you were reading that, I mean, I know that book so intimately. Well, I got pretty much right here to the part where you were reading from. But not only that, he talks about cans of C rations and K ration boxes open and unopened, lay around our gun pit along with discarded grenade and mortar shell canisters scattered about the area or discarded us helmets, packs, ponchos, jackets, web cartridge belts, leggings, boondockers ammo, boxes of every type and crates the discarded articles of clothing and the inevitable bottle of blood plasma bore mute testimony that a marine had been hit there. And what I was saying about that was that writing is just knowing my father. . . . he’s not just seeing this and observing these things. He feels the anguish of seeing the blood of fellow Marines.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, that’s one thing I noticed throughout the book is he doesn’t flinch away from the brutality of war. And he describes it in great detail, but at the same time, he brings his humanity to it and he talks about the moral and spiritual damage that it’s doing to the men who are in these battles.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, always. There was always that angle of it to him because I mean, look, that was one of the extraordinary things about the kind of guy that my father was. I mean, honestly, he was a very peaceable guy who wanted to enjoy his life and go to college and do the things that a young man would be doing. And fighting on some more torn island in the middle of the Pacific was not what he wanted to be doing, but he wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps. He wanted to be a part of that. He knew that everybody was going to have to go fight somewhere, and he wanted to be with what he thought was the finest outfit out there, which was the Marines and all of those things. Just that bear testimony to his character,
Brett McKay:
And as you said, the process of writing this book, it seemed like it helped him process that trauma that a lot of soldiers came home with.
Henry Sledge:
I do think it was a cathartic process for him. I really do. I remember when With the Old Breed came out and we got our first copies, and I remember reading it, of course, I had read some of the typewritten pages that my mother had typed in the years leading up to its publication, but I remember really well, I remember reading where in the introduction, I think it was in the introduction or some of the early parts of it, he said, the nightmares no longer wake me in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and in a cold sweat. But I’ll tell you this, I recall very well when my brother and I were young, my mother sat us down and she said, listen, if you boys need us in the middle of the night, come to my side of the bed. Don’t go to your father’s side of the bed and whatever you do, don’t touch him.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, because he was still dealing with it.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah. I mean, he was still dealing with it. I mean, look, man, that’s heavy stuff. I mean, this is a guy we’re talking in the mid 1970s here. This is a guy who’s in his fifties at this point with a couple of boys and being a husband and a dad and trying to put all this behind him.
Brett McKay:
And his war experience had happened in his early twenties.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, well, I mean, he was 20 years old in Peleliu. He turned 21 on Peleliu. And he was 22 in Okinawa.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. There was another antidote you put in your book about your experience with your dad’s dealing with that trauma, that PTSD of the war. I think you were a kid and you got a toy Tommy gun.
Henry Sledge:
Oh yeah, the plastic Tommy gun. I know right where you were going. Growing up in the seventies, my brother and I would go down to the dime store and we’d get the little plastic army helmets, and I was fascinated by the Thompson sub machine gun. I just loved that weapon as a kid when I would see it on movies and things like that. And I remember buying one just the cheap little plastic Tommy gun, and it had the little clacker in it. When you pull the trigger, it would clack like that, man. I would run around with that thing out in the woods and pretend I’d watch Hogan’s Heroes in the afternoon and then run around with that thing after that. Pretend like we were playing World War II or something. I mean, I was just a kid, and I think I was like eight or nine, maybe 10 years old, and I got the not so bright idea to hide in our cupboard in the kitchen.
We had a pantry cupboard. It was really tall. It was about five feet tall and eight, nine years old, I was a really small kid, and I got the idea to get in that thing and hide and close the door and jump out and scare him when he walked in the kitchen. And so I did one night and I heard him coming down the hall kind of whistling to himself. He always did. And he walked through the kitchen and as he did, I pushed open the door and jumped out at that thing and was squeezing a little trigger on it. And he spun around and I don’t know that he ever said a word. He did not lose his temper. He did not lose his cool. But he spun around and looked at me like he’d never looked at me before.
And he picked me up as the Marines used to say, grab me by the stack and swivel, which is where you grab somebody by the collar. And he grabbed me and my dad was not a big man, 5’ 9”, 155 pounds or so. But he grabbed me and he picked me up and pushed me against that cupboard door. And then he let me down and he took me into the bedroom and took his belt off and gave me a whipping. And people would be horrified at that now. But I mean, that was not an uncommon thing for those of us growing up back in those days. But the interesting thing about it was like he did not lose control. He did not lose his cool. That was a very calculated response to what I had done, and he was trying to instill in me, don’t ever do that to a combat veteran.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And what’s interesting though, besides being startled at night and being freaked out by his 8-year-old son who jumps out with a toy Tommy gun, you describe your dad. You never got the impression, you say this, that you were living with someone who was mentally ill or just disturbed. He was like you said, a very controlled, calm guy.
Henry Sledge:
Absolutely. I mean, he would stress out about things. You could see that. But look, this goes to the heart of, I mean, this is a great point you bring up, Brett, because a big part of why I do what I do is people who’ve read With the Old Breed, people who’ve seen The Pacific, people who maybe saw the Ken Burns The War in 2007. You watch those things and you see this young man come home from this crucible of savagery, which was his experience on Peleliu and Okinawa, and you see this guy come home and you see him have the nightmares, and you get a sense of him struggling to assimilate back into civilian life. One thing I felt like they did not, the war was excellent by Ken Burns, but my mother and I talked about it afterward. And one thing that they didn’t do there, and they didn’t do it in the Pacific either, because there just wasn’t time.
They really didn’t convey the point adequately that okay, yeah, he struggled when he came home, but he struggled successfully. And so I feel like I can bear testimony to the fact that he was a classic All-American father. He would never forget the Marines he served with. He would never forget his time in the Marine Corps. He would never forget his pride in the Marine Corps or his pride in our country for that matter. But at the same time, he deplored the idea of sending young men into combat, but he waged whatever struggles he had internally, he waged them successfully because I mean, look, he and my mother had, they were married almost 50 years by the time he passed away, and they had a fantastic marriage. Not to say that it was perfect, no marriage is, but they had a very strong, we had a great family life.
It wasn’t perfect, nothing is, but I never felt like, well, I’ll say it like this. My father did a great job of compartmentalizing the angst, and he was determined to be a productive, cheerful member of society. And he was, I’ve got to know many of his students in later years, some of whom were young Marines and soldiers coming home from Vietnam. And I mean, his students called him Uncle Eugene. I mean, so he was a very light, he had a fantastic sense of humor, a very lively sense of humor. And he was very highly thought of professionally, very highly thought of in Montevallo in our town growing up where I grew up. And so yeah, Sledgehammer may have had his struggles, but he did it right.
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s talk more about your dad and his history and how he ended up as a Marine. So your dad’s family had a military tradition. His father served in World War I when the war broke out. Your father was at a military school? Military institute. Was it Marion Military Institute?
Henry Sledge:
Yes, Marion Military Institute.
Brett McKay:
And so, I mean, he was on track. He could have been an officer. His family was nudging him to be an officer, but your dad decided not to do that. Can you tell us the story of why he chose to intentionally flunk out of the officer candidate program and enlist as a private in the Marines?
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, I mean, I can answer the question very easily. The impetuousness of youth, he and a very large portion of the detachment in his officer training and the V12 program that he was enrolled in at Georgia Tech after the war broke out. They were scared that the war was going to be over before they got into it. And he didn’t want to live with that feeling of, I almost got there, but I just didn’t quite get there and do what I was meant to do. And you know what bears pointing out? I mean, this is a really powerful thing. I think it’s a very significant thing about when you talk about Eugene Sledge and the kind of guy that he was. I mean, look, my grandfather was a very influential man in mobile back in the 1930s. He was very well thought of, and he had a certain amount of influence.
And other marines that my dad served with pointed this out to me. I mean, a lot of these guys came from hard scrabble backgrounds. They came from, I mean, I’m just going to say dirt poor backgrounds, lacking a lot of formal education. I mean, that was a fact with a lot of those guys back then. And that wasn’t the case with my father. I mean, he actually had some college behind him, and he came from a family that you could say in certain ways was well to do and to absolutely purposefully insert himself into the world. He inserted himself in the Marine Corps. I think it’s a powerful thing. And I mean, one of his fellow marines told me, I went to visit this guy years ago, and he said, that was one thing I always admired about your dad. We all knew he probably could have escaped the path that he chose, but there he was shoulder to shoulder with us and he was a damn good Marine. He did everything he was ever asked or told to do.
Brett McKay:
So you’d say it was just useful impetuosity, just sort of that thumos that drive to see action.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, absolutely. And as he said, I mean, if we only knew what I mean, he talks about in the troop train, clacking along the rails to headed to San Diego because he actually went through basic in San Diego, not at Paris Island, which was not the usual thing for a young man east of the Mississippi. But he did go to San Diego and he talks about how all these guys are on the troop train headed west, and they’re all singing songs and jousting with each other and cutting up. And he said, we were like boys headed off to a summer camp. And he said, God, if we had only known what lay ahead, I’m reminded of All Quiet on the Western Front because that young man, this young German kid and his school buddies, I mean, they can’t wait to enlist and get into the fight. And then you see well into the book, what a horrible thing it is. And they understand that then.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, your dad in the beginning of the book, spends a good deal of time talking about his bootcamp training as an infantryman. What was that like?
Henry Sledge:
Well, the training, he felt like the instructors were all very thorough and professional and did a good job and tried to do the best they could to prepare these guys for what lay ahead now to speak on a more personal level. The training was rigorous. It was hard. Nothing about it was easy. Their drill instructor was Corporal Dougherty, and Corporal Dougherty was not a big man. My father described him as probably five 10, not an ounce of fat on him, absolute rock, hard physique, and phenomenal shape, just these mean green eyes, the way he would look at you, very intimidating guy, even though he wasn’t that big. But the man obviously was a professional at what he did, and that was taking these guys and stealing them into guys who were going to take positions and rifle companies across the Pacific. And I think that my father had a really mature attitude about the training they were going through because he understood.
Well, he really reflected on, and it was some great material that got edited out with the old breed that I was so thankful to be able to use in my book, because he talked about when they got back on Pavuvu after Peleliu, he reflected, he had some brilliant writing about the very thing you asked about and talking about how the Marine Corps training was tough. It was brutal, but it had to be because what they were going to experience was brutal. And he had just come off that at Peleliu, and he understood that he probably could not have survived that experience had it not been for their training.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I thought that was interesting, those unpublished parts of the manuscript that you put in your book where he talked about that a lot. He was grateful for the training. A lot of the Marines, they carped about it, but he realized no part of the reason why I’m still alive when luck is a big part of it. But the training was also a big part.
Henry Sledge:
And I mean, he writes that very articulately and no small wonder that the Marine Corps views his book with such high regard.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about your dad’s combat experience in the Pacific. His first assignment we’ve been talking about this was to help secure the island of Peleliu. I imagine a lot of people listening right now have probably never heard of this island. They might’ve heard about Iwo Jima or Midway. Why is Peleliu often overlooked by Americans?
Henry Sledge:
Well, Peleliu was a tiny, tiny little aol, two miles by six miles on the western edge of the Pacific. And the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked? Is because it could have been bypassed. And at the time, MacArthur was proceeding along a southwesterly axis to get back to the Philippines, and then Chester Nimitz and the US Navy and Marines were driving through the Central Pacific. So we had this two tiered approach in subjugating Japanese forces. It was determined originally that Peleliu was needed to neutralize the airfield there so that Japanese air assets, Japanese air power could not threaten MacArthur’s, right? Flank is he proceeded towards the Philippines. As it turned out, they didn’t need to do that because all Japanese air power had been knocked out by US Navy carrier Task force raids in early 1944, and Peleliu wasn’t invaded until September, 1944.
Now, Admiral Halsey had a foretelling of this because as his task force pilots are coming back, as those Hellcat pilots are coming back from their strikes throughout the Palau Islands, his pilots are telling him, look, we’re not encountering any aerial opposition. It’s all been done away with, and we’re destroying a lot of airplanes on the ground. And so he sat down and thought about it. He met with other officers, and he went to Nimitz and said, I fear another Toro. I don’t think that we need to hit Lou. My guys are not seeing any aerial resistance, and I think this is going to be a lot worse than we think it could be. Chester Nimitz, for reasons he never really disclosed because he passed away in 1965, chose to not stop the invasion armada and to proceed with invading Peleliu. But the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked us?
Because it could have been bypassed. And that was such a tragedy because going into it, general Puris, who was the first marine division commander, had this inexplicably optimistic view of the coming battle that, look, it’s going to be rough but fast. It’s going to be like Tarawa three days, maybe four. It might only take two. Every time I think about that, it just makes my blood run cold because you realize what they got into with the challenging topography, not to mention the heat and humidity. I mean, that was going to be part of every battle in the Pacific. But the absolute meat grinder that it turned into that they did not originally think it would be. I mean, a lot of the news correspondents didn’t even go ashore at Peal Lu because they thought, well, there’s no point. I mean, it’s going to be over in a day and a half or two days or three. And so you only had a handful of correspondents who actually won ashore. So it was an amalgamation of several things as to why Pew wasn’t so well known. That caused a lot of bitterness for my father and a lot of the guys who were there and lost good buddies there. I remember in the 1970s, pew was frequently referred to as the forgotten battle. I will say this, I don’t think Peleliu is quite so forgotten anymore.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So I think thanks to movies like Saving Private Ryan Band of Brothers, I think a lot of people are familiar with what fighting was like in Europe. All wars, brutal. We’ve had Alex Kershaw on the podcast, the World War II historian. Yeah, absolutely. He talked about, he says, the battles in Europe or the war in Europe, it was brutal, but there was a certain romanticism about it because soldiers are fighting amongst these old cathedrals in rural European farms with stone fences fighting the Pacific was not like that at all. And your father did an excellent job capturing the hellishness of war fighting in the Pacific. What was Peleliu like? Give us a look into what it was like fighting there.
Henry Sledge:
Well, Peleliu, the northern part of the island was called the . . . known colloquially to the Marines who had to fight there as bloody nose ridge. And in fact, it was a series of ridges. The coral high ground was obfuscated by vegetation before it had all been blasted off by our pre landing naval and aerial bombardment, but it was very topographically challenging terrain. You had a complex system of ridges and ravines and box canyons and blind canyons, and all of that was pockmarked with caves. I mean, I’ve seen the number of 500 caves that pockmarked like Swiss cheese. The Japanese were absolute masters of using every aspect of their terrain to their advantage as a force multiplier, if you will. And Peleliu offered some tragic opportunities for that. But the parts of the island that weren’t just complete coral were jungle scrub growth, but it was terribly hot seven degrees off the equator on D-Day. It was 115 degrees in the shade. And so you had that aspect of it.
Brett McKay:
I want to talk about the coral, cause I think a lot of people think, oh, Pacific Islands, it’s going to be like Tahiti with these edenic beaches, but these beaches were just mostly coral. What made fighting on coral so brutal?
Henry Sledge:
Well, the northern landing beach, and I’ve walked that entire landing beach at Peal Loop where my father went as shore on Orange Beach too, which was a southern sector of the approximately 2200 yard long beach. It actually was pretty flat and sandy, it had a gentle slope to it, but once you got inland, you were in the scrub growth. But then they quickly got into the coral now up on what they call White Beach, which was where the first marine regimen, my father was in the Fifth Marine regimen, but the first marine regiment landed on White Beach, which was a little bit north of where my father landed. I walked to that area, and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, Brett. It was sharp coral outcroppings all the way out into the water. There is no sandy beach on White Beach. And so for the first Marines, the first marine regiment, when I say first Marines, I’m referring to them as soon as they debarked from their landing craft, as soon as they got out of their amphibious tractors, they’re immediately getting cut by this coral if they have to die for cover, which they did because the Japanese had heavily impregnated that or heavily fortified that part of the landing beach.
But I remember my dad telling me they had entrenching tools, but he said it almost felt like there was no point in it because really on Peleliu, you really couldn’t dig in unquote dig in and dig a nice deep hole in soft earth like you could on Okinawa in 1945 plu. He said, there were so many times on PLU we couldn’t dig in. I mean, we might could take shelter in a shell crater, but half the time you just pile logs and rocks around you for any kind of protection, any sort of protection from flying fragments. But digging in was just almost an impossibility because of that hard coral.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And then your dad talks about the coral, it made fighting hard and it made digging foxholes hard, but it also made field sanitation pretty much impossible.
Henry Sledge:
Correct, because he talked about when a man had to defecate, usually he just did it in like an ammo can or a C ration can. There was nowhere to bury it, so they just threw it off into some underbrush or something like that. And imagine after 15, 20, 30 days of that, not to mention the dead and rotting enemy bodies, and of course the marines tried to pull their guys out and get ’em back to a secure area as quickly as they could, but still, you had this unbelievable proliferation of human waste. I mean, it’s disgusting to talk about, but look, these were things that my dad wrote about and talked about so much because to him, you have to understand this, and this is a lot of what drove him to write with the old breeded. He wanted people to understand. You’ve seen war movies and you think combat is something glorious and something romantic. And he said there’s nothing romantic or glorious about it. It’s dealing with blowflies that have become engorged on human blood. It’s dealing with rotting corpses. It’s the smell of unburied human waste. I mean, that’s what a battlefield was to him.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I mean, the environment was just completely so. It was hot, humid, he talked about it just smelled all the time. That was a challenge dealing with that. You’re dealing with not only the blowflies, there’s maggots, and he describes the maggots and the festering bodies. The land crabs were another thing you had to deal with all the time.
Henry Sledge:
Absolutely. I mean, he talked about how at night you could just hear the land crabs crawling around in the undergrowth. Of course, it sounded like Japanese soldiers crawling around, which they did. They infiltrated their lines at night to great effect. They did it every night and they were really good at it. And of course, in addition to everything that you just said, you deal with the fact of lack of clean drinking water and the inability to get a good night’s sleep because the Japanese were infiltrating every night to purposefully keep the Marines awake and the soldiers, because the army was there too, of course, to purposefully keep these guys awake, to keep them from getting any sleep. And of course, that just compounds everything to an exponential degree.
Brett McKay:
Okay. I mean, the environment itself, that was an enemy. It was a brutal enemy, but we haven’t talked about the human enemy or not that much, that your father and the other Marines were sent to fight on Peleliu, and that was the Japanese. What were the Japanese like to fight?
Henry Sledge:
Well, the Japanese were fiercely brave, dedicated and horrifically effective and brutal soldiers. They were absolute masters at exploiting their terrain. As I’ve already said, at a place like Peleliu, they had untold opportunities to do that. My father always thought it was ironic, I would say funny, but he didn’t think it was funny. But I remember in the seventies, people had this perception that anything made in Japan was cheap. I remember him telling me that. He said, we didn’t think of their weapons as cheap. They felt pretty effective to us. Their 70 mountain, 70 millimeter fuel gun that they used was horrifically effective. Their mortars were horrifically effective, and the Japanese exercised superb fire discipline. They would purposefully wait for a marine to be wounded. They employed snipers to horrific effect. A sniper might fire around to wound a marine knowing full well that two other Marines are going to come out and try to drag him back in, and then they would open fire on those guys.
I remember my father saying, I can hear him say it. I’m going to say Japanese. That’s not the way he put it, but he said The Japanese opened up on stretcher teams absolutely without mercy, and that was something that he said it would just make you weep in fury to see a wounded marine and four of his buddies going out, or two of his buddies going out to try to bring him back in. And then those guys getting cut down, and he said It would make you absolutely weep to see that and make you hate your enemy. And so you had this fierce preternatural hatred between the Americans and the Japanese just as much on their part as our part. It was completely mutual, but they were certainly a skilled enemy and an enemy to be feared.
Brett McKay:
How did fighting the Japanese compare to fighting the Germans?
Henry Sledge:
I remember my father telling me in the seventies and eighties as I was growing up, and we would have our conversations about all this, the Germans were very professional, and he said, I would’ve hated to fight ’em. But most of the time they would bed down at night and get their sleep. He said the Japanese would not do that. They would attack all day and fight all night through infiltration. And then the other angle to this is there were many cases where the Germans surrendered when they realized that they had to the Japanese, I’m not going to say that they never surrendered because obviously by the time Okinawa rolled around, it did happen. But very rarely, it was very rare that the Japanese would surrender. And on Peleliu they had to fight to the last man pretty much Okinawa. They did begin to surrender, but even that was not a codified course of action that was going to be a more piecemeal ad hoc type situation where individual Japanese has realized that the jig is up. There’s no point in continuing this, and they would give themselves up. But even then, that was rare. And so you have this human conflict that is just the absolute depths of human savagery, and it just was an absolute war of bitter hatred. And my father spoke of it. He thought of it, he wrote of it because to him it was just such a component of what they were dealing with.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I mean, let’s talk about that. I mean, what sorts of savagery did your father see and write about?
Henry Sledge:
Well, I mean, so he saw many cases where the Japanese had defiled marine corpses, and I won’t say how, I don’t want to put the listeners through the grotesque descriptions that you can read it in his book. There was a good bit of that. And so of course, Marines always tried to remove their dead because they knew the Japanese would just do terrible things to the bodies, and even worse to a man if they captured him, they knew that to be captured was absolutely not an option. On Guadal Canal, you had an incident called the Get Gee patrol, which is where a couple of Japanese were taken prisoner by the Marines in the early stages of the battle. And these guys said that some of their buddies were down the river and wanted to surrender, and that if the Marines would go out and send out a rescue party, they would surrender.
And so our intelligence officers always wanted to pick up surrender Japanese if that was an option, because it was a source of intel. It was a source of knowledge and factual data. And so the Marines sent out a patrol under the command of Colonel Frank gge to bring these guys in, and they ended up being ambushed and killed to the last minute. I can’t remember. I’m not a Gua Canal expert. I’ve read a lot about it, but I have buddies who that’s their area of specialty, but the get gee patrol was slaughtered. Well, I think one guy survived and he was able to swim back along the beach and get out of there and get back to the marine lines. But when he came back and began to get the word back to his guys of what happened, then we began to understand this is going to be a different kind war.
This is not a war where you can hold your hands up and surrender and say, that’s it. I’m done. Not to mention, we haven’t even talked about the Philippines. We haven’t even talked about what was going on to our army, to the soldiers in the Army divisions who’d surrendered in the Philippines being marched north via the Batan death march up to Camp O’Donnell and the starvation and the torture that they were encountering. And so these were things that we were not prepared to deal with, but we learned very quickly that they were going to be things that we had to face. And when my father was going through his initial training on Pavuvu, when he first got out to the Pacific Theater, he talks about how he was on a working party one day loading coconuts, and he and the buddies he’s working with, and the guys he was working with had been at Cape Gloucester.
They were combat veterans, and they had not just gotten out into the theater of war like he had, and they come across another Marine who was working in an area close to them, and they start talking. And this guy was the survivor of the Get Gee patrol. And the guy says goodbye to his buddies, and he walks off, and my dad’s like, who was that guy? And his buddies tell him, he’s a lucky son of a bitch. That’s what he is. He was on that Get Gee patrol. And they proceed to tell my father the story of it. And news travels fast, man. People talk. And I mean, these marines were speaking to each other and getting the word out that, look, you cannot surrender. That is not an option.
Brett McKay:
And what’s interesting, your father describes how when these marines were seeing the brutality with which the Japanese soldiers were treating the corpses of the Marines, there was this temptation from the Marines to do the same to retaliate and do the same thing. And your father even describes, he had moments where he was like, yeah, I want to maybe do something to this Japanese dead body. I’m just so angry at them. But he didn’t, he was able to kind of resist that pull. How do you think your father was able to do that and other marines?
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, so one of the things you’re referring to is a lot of Japanese soldiers in World War II had gold teeth, and it became a practice among a lot of Marines to, if they saw a Japanese corpse that had gold teeth, they would take those gold teeth. And it was commonly done. Of course, the Japanese were doing even worse things to the bodies of our guys when they could get to ’em. But yeah, that actually is a pretty powerful passage where he starts to do that one day. And Doc Caswell, who’s the corpsman and K company of my dad’s unit, puts his hand on my dad’s shoulder and says, sledgehammer, what are you doing? What are you getting ready to do? And my dad says, well, I just saw this J’s got gold teeth. I thought I might try to take one or two of ’em.
And Doc, because I always call the corpsman doc, he says, you don’t want to do that, don’t do that. And my father says, well, okay. I mean why? And Doc says, well, think of the germs. Think of the germs. What would your old man think about that? My dad said, well, my old man’s a doctor. He might think it’s kind of interesting, but Doc Cael says, you don’t want to do that. And so my father said, okay, well, how about I just cut off his collar insignia instead? And so he did that. But my dad was a very intelligent young man, and he reflected on it, and he said, I realized Doc Cael was not concerned about me being exposed to germs. He just didn’t want to see me lose that last vestige of civility.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, lose that last part of his humanity. I mean, for some Marines, it even got worse. Your father described, I mean, there’s one story. One guy took a hand from a dead.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah, that was at the end of Peleliu. And that guy was almost ostracized by the other Marines because their NC was like, get rid of that thing. I’m going to write you. I’ll put you on report if you don’t.
Brett McKay:
But it just goes to show this type of fighting they were doing, the environment they were in, I mean, it could cause significant spiritual and emotional damage to these guys.
Henry Sledge:
It causes this complete degradation and breakdown of decency. And that was something that my father wanted to make people understand is that the guys doing this, these are nice young, these are nice kids.
Brett McKay:
And they were kids. Some of them were literally kids. They were 17 years old,
Henry Sledge:
17, 18. These are nice kids, but they have been dehumanized. And if I can find it, Brett, man, they’re such a powerful passage. Basically, it’s a paragraph where he just really sums up the awfulness of an experience like Peleliu. In the last line in that paragraph, he says, Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. And that is such a powerful line right there.
Brett McKay:
And your dad did such a great job describing that while on Peleliu, I mean, just complete brutality, harsh fighting conditions. But your dad and a lot of the other Marines lost a mentor, captain AK Haldane on Peleliu, and this really hit your dad hard, and it was sort of a turning point for him in his well experience. How did AK die and how did his loss of leadership change the way your father viewed the rest of the war?
Henry Sledge:
Well, yeah. Captain Halane, his codename, ak, they called him ak. He was such a well thought of officer. He was their company commander. He was K company’s commander. He was killed on October 7th, 1944 by a sniper on Hill one 40 on Pew. And my father said it was the worst grief I suffered during the entire war. AK Captain Halane represented stability and security in a world gone mad. I mean, that’s exactly the way he says it, because even though Captain Halane was like 27 years old, he had been at Guac Canal, he’d been at Cape Gloucester. He was incredibly well thought of and just a very cool headed, excellent company commander. And his men loved him and would’ve done anything for him. And the thought of him that he would be killed like that, my father wrote about how that never occurred to us that we could lose him. And it enraged them all that he was killed by a sniper, but that is how he died. And yeah, captain Halane was just so well thought of, and to lose him, it just was he represented, like I said, stability and security, and they never conceived that he would be killed.
Brett McKay:
Did it change what your dad thought his chances of survival were? It’s like, well, if this guy could go, I could go just as easily.
Henry Sledge:
Absolutely. And I mean, certainly by the time they get to Okinawa, he’s seen so many good Marines get hit or killed. And he said, the arithmetic of chance, I mean, you felt like every day you were running out of even more luck if you had any left at all.
Brett McKay:
So even though the brass thought Peleliu could be taken in a few days, the first Marine Division fought on the island for about a month, a little over a month. They suffered over 6,500 casualties, including 1000 deaths. And as you mentioned, Peleliu could have been bypassed. Correct. Which your father had some bitterness about. After Peleliu, he fought on Okinawa for 82 days, on and off the front lines, mostly on the front lines. And Okinawa had its own nightmares conditions, constant rain, mud, maggots, everything was moldering. He called it Hell’s own cesspool. Sledge, despite being in the thick of two of the worst battles in history, never received a high level valor award like the Silver Star. Why is that? And what was the culture in his battalion regarding medals? Well,
Henry Sledge:
I remember him telling me about a conversation that he had with Captain Stanley many years after, because he and Stumpy got to know each other well and had many conversations when he was riding with the old breed in the late seventies before it got published in 1981. And he asked Stuy that. He asked Captain Stanley that he’s like, why is it that you never recommended anybody for a valor award, bronze star, silver star? And he said that Stumpy told him, he said, because sledgehammer, I didn’t want to pick one guy out and recommend him for a bronze star or silver star, a medal of honor because I felt like every one of you guys deserve something.
Brett McKay:
And then your dad recast the story where he had a fellow Marine just tell him, Hey, you know what sledge you did? And that to him represented the highest honor that he could get.
Henry Sledge:
Yeah. So that was when it’s after Peleliu, they’ve gotten back to Pavuvu, which is where they were in the Russell Islands where the first Marine Division rested, refitted and trained and staged out for both Peleliu and later Okinawa. And he describes this scene where it’s late one afternoon, kind of twilight, and he and his bunkmates, he and his tent mates, I should say, are in their tent. One guy’s over in the corner and on his rack, snoozing away very softly, can hear him snoozing after the day’s training. And my dad’s lying there in the twilight, and he is starting to get sleepy, and he is resting his head on his arm on the pillow of his rack. And then he hears the other Marine say, you know something sledgehammer, my dad says what? And he says, I really had my eye on you coming into the unit before pew.
I had my doubts about you being a doctor’s kid and coming from a rich family and having been to college and all that. And he said, I got to tell you, man, I kept my eye on you on pew, and you did okay by God. You did okay. And my dad wrote about how his chest literally burst with pride, he said, and he said, many men were awarded silver stars and bronze stars deservedly, but he said those words from a veteran who had been at Cape Gloucester and Guadalcanal, those words meant more to me. That seal of approval from a fellow Marine meant more to him than any medal he could have ever been awarded.
Brett McKay:
When Eugene returned home in 1946, he like hundreds of thousands of American men, brought the abyss of war home with him. What was his transition to civilian life like?
Henry Sledge:
Well, it was a painful process. He writes about that in great detail in his second book, China Marine. I explore it quite a bit from, obviously I wasn’t born until 20 years later, 19 years later. But I know from having talked to my mother and hearing family stories, it was a slow process. He dealt with a lot of nightmares he dealt with. I remember asking him when I was a kid, I said, dad, when you came home from World War ii after surviving that, I would think you would’ve just felt like you could conquer anything. And he said, to be honest with you, I did a lot of sitting around staring at the wall, just trying to mentally put my head back together. My grandfather was, and I write about this in my forthcoming second book. I talk about my grandfather a little bit, and what an intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man that he was.
And my father credited my grandfather with really being a bridge back to sanity because he said, pop. That was what everybody in the family called my grandfather. He said, pop was an incredibly well thought of one of the finest physicians in the state of Alabama and professionally very well thought of and accomplished. But he just understood because he had treated shellshock victims in World War I, and he understood what these young men had been through, and he was a shield for my dad because my grandmother didn’t understand it. And she would come in, they show this in the last episode of the Pacific. They show it really well when they show the kid play on my dad sitting under a tree and the lady playing, my grandmother comes out and says, oh, Eugene, you look like a gangster with those glasses on. And she hands ’em a glass of iced tea and then starts talking about, Eugene, you have to get a plan for the future.
You need to be doing something. And they film that scene exactly the way we told them. Those conversations went. And my father said in those instances to my grandmother, my plan is to do nothing for a while. And then my grandfather would come out and just like he did in the Pacific in that last episode, and he comes out and he says, Mary Frank, what are you doing? Leave the boy alone. You have no idea what men like him have been through. Go on, leave him alone. And that is exactly the way that happened. And I remember us talking to the producers about that and how my grandfather would do that and shoo her away, and she’d start grumbling and mumbling and muttering and walk away in a huff. And then my grandfather would just tell my father, you have nothing to prove to anybody in this world.
Brett McKay:
When someone reads your dad’s book, what lessons do you hope they walk away with? When they’re finished,
Henry Sledge:
They learn something about what it really means to send young men into combat. I mean, look, I’ve always said this, Brett. I mean, I’m passionate about World War II history, and so I enjoy reading about everything concerning every battle across the Pacific. And not only that, but in Europe as well. And I enjoy reading about the tanks, the weapons, the airplanes, all of those things, the hardware, the logistics, all of it, the strategic planning, all of those things interest me greatly. But to really understand what it’s all about, you have to go beneath the rim of the helmet, and you have to understand what goes through a young man’s head when he is under heavy fire and experiencing prolonged close combat and the emotional toll that that takes on a human being. And with my Father’s book, it helps you understand that. It helps you understand that beneath the rim of the helmet perspective, and I mean, my book explores that as well. I mean, because it has not only my perspective of seeing how as a father, and of course, I was born in 1965, so I’m growing up in the 1970s and eighties, how his marine experience, how his World War II experience informed the choices he made as a husband to my mom and then as a father to my brother and me.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. What do you think people listening to this show can learn from how your father carried himself after the war?
Henry Sledge:
Well, the last thing he says in With the Old Breed, the last thing he says, if the country is good enough to live in it’s worth fighting for, is the troops used to say with privilege goes responsibility. Certainly, he delved deeply into the whole matter of Peleliu was tragic, unrelenting, horror and suffering and waste, unnecessary waste. Okinawa was its own hell. He saw so many good friends maimed and killed. Everybody suffered in their own way. Even the ones who came home physically intact as he did suffered, they bore that cost for the rest of their lives. But he regarded having been a Marine and having served the way he did as a great honor, and he carried that with him, I think, for the rest of his life. I mean, I remember the leather belt that he wore every day, okay. With his ll being corduroys, if he was wearing blue jeans, he wore the same damn leather belt every day. It had an EGA on it, which of course is the Marine Eagle Globe and Anchor. It was a really small, it was one of his collar EGAs, and he had that through one of the holes in his belt.
Brett McKay:
One of the lessons I took away after reading your dad’s book is just gratitude for the comfort and privilege that I have. I mean, he talks about when he is in Okinawa, he had marched two straight weeks with sore slimy feet trapped in wet socks. Then when he finally had a chance to dry out, remove them, pieces of dead skin were peeling off with his socks. And he says it was the kind of experience that would make a man sincerely grateful for the rest of his life, for clean dry socks, a simple condition as dry socks seemed a luxury. And he talked about too, that he hopes people in America who read this book would be grateful for the things they have. And he talked about he struggled to comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect or their coffee wasn’t hot enough. Or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or a bus. And I’m living here in the 2026 and I can get things delivered to my doorstep from Amazon the next day, and I get upset because, oh, I asked for next day delivery and it’s going to be two days. It’s just like, man, when I’m thinking of that, I got to think about Eugene’s Sledge and just how lucky I am and quit complaining about all the inconveniences. So it’s just gratitude. And I’m wondering if we can end this. If you can read a passage in the preface of the book where he talks about why he published With the Old Breed.
Henry Sledge:
“In writing. I’m fulfilling an obligation. I have long felt to my comrades in the first Marine Division, all of whom suffered so much for our country, none came out unscathed. Many gave their lives many of their health and sown their sanity. All who survived will long remember the horror. They would rather forget, but they suffered and they did their duty. So a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such a high cost. We owe those Marines a profound debt of gratitude.”
Brett McKay:
Yeah. When I finished this book, I felt that gratitude.
Henry Sledge:
Exactly. I mean, as he said to me, Brett, I, and I heard that when I was a kid, I complained, of course I did like every kid, and he would say, I’m just happy I got dry socks. But he also, when we would have deeper conversations about all this, and we did that many times, he said to me, he said, people who have not been under shell fire cannot imagine what that is like.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Well, Henry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your father, his book and your book and the work you’re doing around your dad’s legacy?
Henry Sledge:
Well, I speak a lot about my dad. I go to a lot of historical events. I don’t have a website. I’m on Facebook, William Henry Sledge. I’m on Instagram, I think I’m at HSledgehammer on Instagram. I don’t do a lot of posting on there. Both his book With the Old Breed and then my book, The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed in the subtitle of my book as a father, a son, and how World War II and the Pacific shaped their lives. Both of those books are on Amazon, and of course any bookstore is going to have his book and my book, his second book was called China Marine. It was about his time in China and then coming home, it dealt with that. And then I’m working on, my second book will release in November and it’s going to be called The Things That Remain: The Artifacts of Eugene B Sledge, and it will be a coffee table photo book of a lot of the artifacts of uniform items and things like that of my dad’s that I have.
And some of those things are in museums as well. His Bible that he kept notes in that form the basis of his book with Reed, that Bible, it’s currently at the World War II Museum in New Orleans, but it is going to be in the Library of Congress in Washington DC. They have asked for it, so it will be there. But I do everything I can to perpetuate my father’s legacy. I mean, I just feel a passion for, it’s not just that I feel a passionate interest in World War II history, but it’s, I know how people Marines especially, but really combat veterans of all stripes. I know what my dad’s writing has meant to them because I’ve met so many of them who’ve told me that. And that just drives me forward to do what I do. I mean, look, I’ve been to my dad’s gravestone in Mobile, Alabama.
Brett and my wife and I were just down there back in March and a local veterans unit did a 25th anniversary or commemoration of his passing. And his gravestone is forever covered with challenge coins and tokens of respect. And I mean, Marines have gone and left their medals there. I’ve seen little toy airplanes left by children there. I mean, the tokens of respect, it’s overwhelming really to stand there and look at that. And when I see that, I mean, here’s a guy who died in 2001 and people from all over the world traveled to pay their respects to his growth. I mean, I look at that and that just tells me there’s a guy who did it.
Brett McKay:
Well, Henry Sledge, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Henry Sledge:
It’s been an honor to be here, Brett. Thank you.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Henry Sledge. He’s the son of Eugene Sledge who wrote With the Old Breed. Henry’s got his own book out called The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed. It’s available on amazon.com. And make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/OldBreed. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
