Upon graduation from boot camp in December 1943, Sledge was assigned to the infantry and spent several more weeks near San Diego in infantry training. Boot camp meant a trip by rail from Atlanta to San Diego, followed by eight weeks of rigorous introductory training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot there.

However, he and many of his fellow students feared that the war would end before their graduation occurred, so they chose to deliberately flunk out of their academic program and were immediately reassigned to boot camp as enlisted men. He relates that he initially planned to complete the V-12 college training program, which would have given him a commission as an officer upon graduating from Georgia Tech. With the Old Breed begins with a brief description of Sledge’s decision to enlist in the Marine Corps from his home in Mobile, Alabama, in December 1942. First published in 1981, Sledge’s writing has enjoyed a popular resurgence in recent years after featuring prominently in the highly acclaimed HBO miniseries The Pacific. The most compelling strengths of With the Old Breed are the quality of Sledge’s observation and his written “voice”, which allow him to capture the experiences of enlisted infantrymen, warfare’s lowest common denominator, and relate them in such a way that readers can almost imagine the frustration, boredom, elation, terror, and brutality that characterized his combat experiences. In the book, Sledge covers his service with the United States Marine Corps from his enlistment in December of 1942 through two major island campaigns, and ends with the Japanese surrender in August of 1945.

Sledge, is widely considered to be the best. While a number of enlisted men’s memoirs do exist, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by Eugene B. While the Second World War has been written about as extensively as any armed conflict in human history, far more of the available literature is devoted to histories of famous campaigns, battles, generals and political leaders than to the enlisted “common man’s” experience during the war. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

With the old breed by eugene b sledge