With the Old Breed

[Sublime]

I know its based in the Pacific, and is probably old news. I had never actually read this fine book by Eugene Sledge, but if anyone hasnt I highly recommend it. Gives an excellent view of front line combat in WW2, specifically in the Pacific on Pelelieu and Okinawa. The author was in a Marine 60mm mortar crew, and has a fantastic (and honest) memory with lots of little details that really enrich the book. Those guys sure had a tough duty.

[Phantom Captain]

Love the book.

It's actually one of my favorite war/combat books of all time. The way Eugene writes is just so immediate and he notices everything.

I too HIGHLY recommend it.

[rocketman]

The book HBO based parts of "The Pacific" on. Great series. Would like to read the book too.

[Gen Von Television]

...and it goes back to back with 'Helmet for My Pillow' by Robert Lackie, as good as Sledge's.

[Canada Guy]

We read it as part of my Military Book Club and really enjoyed it. That and "The Forgotten Soldier" are 2 of my favourite memoirs.

I just ordered "Panzer Gunner" and have high hopes.

[Pak40]

Yes, "With the old bread" is an excellent book. One of the best and most detailed 1st person memoirs that I've ever read. And if you have any doubts about the accuracy and lethality of the 60mm mortar in CMBN then you need to read this.

[Vinnart]

Great book, and a must read IMO. The guys in the pacific do not get enough recognition. They had it tougher than the ETO. Could you imagine going through Pelelieu? 115 degree weather, no water, and having to fight too. I bitch my AC in the car broke. Certainly puts things in perspective. God bless those brave heroes.

[Erwin]

...And slipping down muddy hills that have been rained on for weeks, right through maggoty decomposing bodies that can't be buried...

That was one of the fun parts I don't recall making it into "The Pacific". Shame that show was not a patch on BOB. The Pacific writers just weren't able to create good memorable characters that were easily distinguishable from each other.

[Gen Von Television]

...And slipping down muddy hills that have been rained on for weeks, right through maggoty decomposing bodies that can't be buried...

That was one of the fun parts I don't recall making it into "The Pacific".

Erwin, really? What series did you see!?

I clearly remember Snafu throwing pebbles in the open top of a head of a Japanese Soldier's corpse (a scene so well defined from the book), or when Sledge swish down in the mud and ends up in a morass of decomposing corpses under the monsoon rains, and this was happening after they had to dig their mortars' positions where they found other corpses deep down in the mud...

BoB is special for the fact that you follow the men of E Co / 506 / 101 through all the war, and it is based on the memories of those Veterans, while The Pacific is based mainly on the two books (Helmet For My Pillow and With The Old Breed) written by two Marines who were not in the same unit: I watched again The Pacific after a while, and it is excellent, though definitely different from BoB. Both are top notch in my scale.

[Erwin]

Ok, I musta gone to kitchen for a snack during those bits...

[John Kettler]

Erwin,

And aren't you grateful now you did?!

Sublime,

If you want more on Pelelieu , may I suggest CORAL COMES HIGH by George P. Hunt? You can read it free here. http://archive.org/details/coralcomeshigh006108mbp

Also, the USMC official history of WW II is available here: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/index.html

Should keep you busy for a bit!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Erwin]

The books were very descriptive and I have a good imagination, so I was duly horrified at what those guys in the Pacific went through before the TV series.

The books made the European Theater (West Front at least) look like a walk in the park.

[Gen Von Television]

It is actually a good point of reflection: ETO or PTO were IMO both hell on Earth for humankind for the simple fact that in war you are ordered to do something you are always thought never to do in a moral and healthy life (killing fellow human beings, destroying properties, etc.).

The Nazi and their obsession for the Race and ideology started a ruthless eradication of everyone they deemed as sub-human, hiding in between what they were actually seeking as an expansion of their power on other Nations, their true agenda. So they were the evil masters in upholding and bloody teaching this approach to war, even to their enemies.

The Nippon Empire was nevertheless ruthless, but essentially started the war not on race but just as an imperial war, to expand their dominions allegedly proclaiming to free the Asians from the Colonizing powers (again such hypocrisy!): needless to say they failed to actually conquer the Asian people they invaded because of their ultimate sense of being a superior race.

If in the ETO still there were some common war rules accepted on both sides, not so was happening on the Eastern front at least for ideological reasons when they failed to prove to the German soldiers that the Slavic were actually different from the Aryans (both belonging to Indo European cultures), and far less in the PTO where two different cultures met: i.e. the Japanese soldiers when heading out to war were granted a solemn funeral. No one was expected to come back unless Victorious, and so transformed into a kind of Mythological Hero. Surrender was not contemplated in their moral code or as a war rule. Instead was suicide.

And so their adversaries on the battlefields had to learn and adapt to this pitiless war of no quarter given or accepted. This general philosophical approach to war of course had many exceptions on any front by any combatant nation, but still makes the more evident difference when you look back to history.

[Sublime]

Kettler - thanks. Pelelieu has always fascinated me for some reason. I really am getting interested in the PTO - I always have been but it never held the same fascination the Ost Front did.

The fighting in N. Africa, Italy, and Western Europe was hell though. Just of a different type than in the Pacific. Im sure in some ways it may have been tougher in the PTO, and others in the ETO. For every story of chivalry or not having a rough time in Western Europe, you hear plenty more about the horror in the East.

The PTO fighting also ended in 45. Besides Japanese soldiers coming out of hiding in ones and twos, sometimes 30 years after the war ended (!)

However, Germans were in Soviet captivity until 1955, which is awful when you think about it - the rest of the world had completely moved on.

Also I remember the loose figure of 1.5 million Germans died in Soviet captivity

All that being said, the real people who got a break, if you can call it that, was the US civilian population. If nothing else because we didnt have a land war fought here - watching the excellent series the World at War, and the figures it gave for war dead, it mentioned 500.000 German civilians were thought to have been killed in the last few months of the war, in the land fighting. Truly an awful event, to all concerned.

[PanzerMiller]

I read both books (Old Breed, Helmet) earlier this year, after many years of knowing about them but focusing instead on wading through Glantz's ETO books. Sledge's book is incredible...his descriptions of the horrors on the Shuri Line will stay with anyone for a long time. I also recently got a copy of The Pacific but haven't yet watched it...really looking forward to it...

And all this with a 20-year Marine Corps Captain -- veteran of Guadalcanal, Okinawa, and the Chosin Reservoir -- as my father. He never talked about his experiences, and his memories died with him this past January. Strange (though not that surprising) that I have to read books and watch HBO miniseries to learn about this stuff...

[Gen Von Television]

I've also read Ambrose's son The Pacific book, and it's not bad at all: it adds two more characters to the story line, besides the three you'll see in the series.

Another book I highly recommend about the PTO is Manchester's Goodbye Darkness: he himself a Marine Veteran travels back to the old battlefields of the Pacific war, and intermingles his own memories with relevant historical aspects of each main battle. A must read IMO.

[TheBlackHand]

As a Marine, I can tell you that "With The Old Breed" has a special place in my heart. If I were to teach a military history class, it would be required reading (and it is for many, if not most).

I enjoyed The Pacific, for the most part. However, I think it tried to do too much. It suffers in comparison to BOB because the storyline is rather fractured, whereas BOB is much more linear and easy to follow/relate to. The characters in BOB are much more likeable. I thought The Pacific was too maudlin in places, making the "characters" (these were real people) seem sad and pouty . . . but that's Spielberg (I don't hate the guy for it, as some folks do, it's just his style.)

The battle scenes in The Pacific were exactly as I had imagined them after reading so many books on the subject. They were truly brutal . . . but as with any film or print depiction of war . . . they only provide a glimpse at what it is actually like to be in the middle of something like that (the deafening sounds, concussion, shock and SMELL are something no book or screen will ever adequately display).

I specifically remember reading about the tense atmosphere inside an amtrack, inside an LST, waiting to be launched . . . imagining that . . . and then seeing it so well portrayed in the series. Impressive. On a similar note, I've never read a better description of the tenseness of the leadup to the Normandy jump than in David Kenyon Webster's "Parachute Infantry". (As you probably know, Webster served in Easy Co. 506th and his writing & character make up a good part of BOB.)

The series also did a great job of showing what a mess the Okinawa battles were. How anyone could watch the series and miss the muck and mire throughout is perplexing.

William Manchester's "Goodbye Darkness" is a great read too. If I were teaching that class, I'd have them read only the last chapter. Everything is so well summed up in that read. It's all anyone needs to know about what made "The Greatest Generation" great.

[Gen Von Television]

Indeed that was the problem with The Pacific series: if BoB was based on a single book where many of the E/506 men told their shared war experiences, The Pacific is based on two excellent writings that only briefly cross each other during the war; I also believe Hugh Ambrose's 'The Pacific' was used to kind of give structure to the time line and battles, and adding more details particularly about Basilone and Phillips. In the book's cast you can also read about Lt. Shofner and Ens. Michael experiences.

If I used the term 'characters' of course I didn't mean to refer to fictitious personae: Julius Caesar is a character in Shakespeare's tragedy too...

Webster's Parachute Infantry is another excellent reading and if you like more of the 101st troopers' personal memories, all the four of Donald R. Burgett's writings may become mandatory text books in your class.

[Michael Emrys]

I enjoyed The Pacific, for the most part. However, I think it tried to do too much. It suffers in comparison to BOB because the storyline is rather fractured, whereas BOB is much more linear and easy to follow/relate to. The characters in BOB are much more likeable.

I think you put your finger on something. BoB was made from an Ambrose book and I think Ambrose has a tendency to bend the truth too far in an effort to make the American soldiers more ennobled than they might actually have been. Not suggesting that they do not deserve our respect; they were given an almost impossible job to do and they suffered greatly in the performance of it. But I think that is enough. We shouldn't demand on top of that that they also be gilded lilies.

The battle scenes in The Pacific were exactly as I had imagined them after reading so many books on the subject. They were truly brutal . . . but as with any film or print depiction of war . . . they only provide a glimpse at what it is actually like to be in the middle of something like that (the deafening sounds, concussion, shock and SMELL are something no book or screen will ever adequately display).

The fighting in the Pacific, especially in places like Okinawa, was fully as brutal as anything on the Eastern Front, and Sledge does convey that as well as can be done in a book, I think. It doesn't make for pleasant reading and I think one can understand why so many of the vets who survived it carried deep scars on their psyches for the rest of their lives.

Michael

[Lee_Vincent]

Incredible book, have recommended it to many friends who are not especially interested in WW2 and they always say it really affects them.

[gunnergoz]

I'm not so sure that BOB was "made from an Ambrose book" as much as it's inception was inspired by it and there is no doubt that the book was influential. However, once they got going towards actual production, I think other source material, including considerable input from actual 506th veterans, was used as well...probably for the better.

[umlaut]

I enjoyed The Pacific, for the most part. However, I think it tried to do too much. It suffers in comparison to BOB because the storyline is rather fractured, whereas BOB is much more linear and easy to follow/relate to. The characters in BOB are much more likeable. I thought The Pacific was too maudlin in places, making the "characters" (these were real people) seem sad and pouty

I must say I totally disagree with you on this part. When I watched BOB I was actually quite surprised that the "characters" weren´t developed more. Most of them are "only soldiers", we don´t know anything about their lifes before they joined. And I actually found it hard to distinguish between many of them.

Identification is one of the ground rules of film storytelling and it really puzzled me that a master filmmaker like Spielberg had seemingly neclected that part (I am certain he did so for a good reason, I just can´t figure out why).

In "The Pacific" we get to know "the characters" much more closely - and thus identify with them - and to me that makes the story of the series much more compelling. Even though I am actually not very interested in the PTO at all. When I watched "The Pacific" I was happy to see, that the producers seemed to have learned from their "mistakes" in BOB.

[Gen Von Television]

Identification is one of the ground rules of film storytelling and it really puzzled me that a master filmmaker like Spielberg had seemingly neclected that part (I am certain he did so for a good reason, I just can´t figure out why).

Good points I actually share to some extent.

The Military system is build to erase any individuality and make you function as a part of a mechanism, that is why you're given to wear uniforms, you're then trained to act upon orders even if this will make your own existence at a risk, supposedly to make the whole moving and progressing in the right direction.

I believe the apparent uniformity of the soldiers depicted in BoB was an effective way to show this contrasting aspect of the soldiers' life; even so after sometime the 'real' characters will emerge no matter what and if this is true for any Army I'm not so sure, but indeed for the WWII US Army of Citizen Soldiers was undoubtedly a fact.

I remember I've read in one of those books as we are told that a soldier would clearly distinguish each of his comrade even in the dim light of dawn by the way the helmet was tilted on his head, or the way he carried his weapons...

[Michael Emrys]

I remember I've read in one of those books as we are told that a soldier would clearly distinguish each of his comrade even in the dim light of dawn by the way the helmet was tilted on his head, or the way he carried his weapons...

I am nearsighted, but for several years did not wear glasses. Nevertheless, I could infallibly recognize a friend a block away by the way he or she walked. The human visual system is capable of amazingly subtle things at times.

But even more amazing, I am given to understand that hawks and eagles can spot small animals like rabbits or prairie dogs from miles away.

Michael