With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

by E. B. Sledge Narrated by George Wilson

Overview

This modern classic of military history has been called "one of the most important personal accounts of war that I have ever read" by distinguished historian John Keegan. Author E.B. Sledge served with the First Marine Division during WWII, and his first-hand narrative is unsurpassed in its sincerity. Sledge's experience shows in this fascinating account of two of the most harrowing and pivotal island battles of the Pacific theater. On Peleliu and Okinawa the action was extremely fierce. Amidst oppressive heat and over land obliterated by artillery shells, the combat raged ferociously. Casualties were extreme on both sides, and by the time the Americans had broken through at Okinawa, more than 62,000 Japanese soldiers were dead. Against military policy, Sledge scribbled notes and jammed them into his copy of the New Testament. Those notes form the backbone of what Navy Times said "has been called the best World War II memoir of an enlisted man." The rich tones of narrator George Wilson enhance the drama of this frank and astonishing chronicle.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

It's time to move this book to a higher shelf, to that of nonfiction that is literature. With the Old Breed is a deep pleasure…a stinging reminder of the sacrifices others have made to allow us to live the life that we do. If you can make it through without welling up at half a dozen spots, you are a stronger person than I…One of the themes…is the near impossibility of communicating the experience of combat to those who have not experienced it…[Sledge] takes us as close as we are likely to get. He describes countless scenes of terror, disgust, insanity and stupidity in prose that is lucid and unadorned. When he does reach for figurative language, he is surpassingly vivid…What puts With the Old Breed across is, oddly enough, Sledge's sensitivity. He offers many small, artful portraits of men he admires. (And a few he despises.) He chronicles small kindnesses and profound acts of friendship…He is a gentle man who learns to comprehend hatred…As an adventure story, With the Old Breed has a momentum that might put some modern readers in mind of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. As a portrait of camaraderie in the face of terrible danger, it resembles the third section of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. It will make a lot of feeling slide around in you.

From the Publisher

Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific—the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom Hanks
 
“In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns

Library Journal

01/01/2016
Cold and unflinching, Sledge's account of the neglected Pacific theater takes readers through two of the most hellish battles of arguably any war and the mental journey of the author back from the brink of insanity. The American World War II counterpart to Robert Graves's classic Goodbye to All That.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169071443
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	04/23/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	541,418

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "With the Old Breed"
by .
Copyright © 2007 E.B. Sledge.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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