Remember “the Old Breed”

“Everything my life had been before and has been after pales in the light of that awesome moment when my amtrac started in amid a thunderous bombardment toward the flaming, smoke-shrouded beach for the assault on Peleliu.”

Over the next agonizing year and a half, through Peleliu and later Okinawa, he documented his life in notes tucked into a pocket-sized Bible that, decades later, formed his legendary war memoir “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.”

Published in 1981, it remains a gripping, eloquent account of the horrors of combat on the front lines, redefining the war memoir as literature, and forever altering our understanding of the Pacific campaign.

On August 2, 2025—nearly 80 years to the day of WWII’s conclusion—the Sledge Bible was donated to the Library of Congress. It coincides with the arrival of “The Old Breed… The Complete Story Revealed,” written by his son Henry Sledge ’88. Taken together, the two books show the effects of war, and how a family still deals with the consequences long after it ends.

Into the Abyss

“The suspense was almost more than I could bear,” wrote Eugene. “Waiting is a major part of war, but I never experienced any more supremely agonizing suspense than the excruciating torture of those moments before we received the signal to begin the assault on Peleliu.”

The Japanese defenders were locked in a fight to the death and refused to surrender. Every step forward became more treacherous. Under a relentless heat, among the ridges and hills, the violence of close-quarter combat was inescapable. They risked their lives to evacuate the wounded. Death was everywhere.

“As I looked at the [blood] stains on the coral,” Eugene wrote in his book, “I recalled some of the eloquent phrases and politicians and newsmen about how ‘gallant’ it is for a man to ‘shed his blood for his country’ and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefitted.”

On October 30, after a month-and-a-half of excruciating combat and appalling conditions, the Marines took Peleliu. Almost half of the nearly 3,000 Marines who fought died. The Japanese lost 10,900 soldiers, with only 19 taken prisoner.

The Japanese had honeycombed the island into a fortress of attack points and tunnels and waited to inflict heavy casualties. Beneath heavy rain and endless enemy bombardment, K Company pushed south through enemy lines to Half Moon Hill. A once-green valley, it was now a barren hellscape. Eugene called it “the worst area I ever saw on a battlefield.”

“I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war […] Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool,” Eugene wrote.

Late on June 21, 1945, high command declared Okinawa secure. Sledgehammer had been on the island for 82 days, during which nearly 40,000 U.S. men were killed or wounded. More than 26,000 additionally suffered what was termed neuropsychiatric “non-combat” injuries.

“We received the news with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. We thought the Japanese would never surrender,” wrote Eugene. “Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead… Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy, the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.”

Some of Us Had to Do the Killing

Though Eugene had escaped the war without physical injury, his psychological trauma made adjusting to civilian life all the more arduous. Making things worse, civilians who were bored by the war—or, worse, thought it easy— only embittered veterans. While registering for classes at Auburn in 1946, flummoxed by his lack of practical education, a student worker wondered aloud if the Marine Corps taught him anything.

As Sledgehammer chronicles in “China Marine,” his second, posthumous work, he said, “in a loud, calm voice ‘Lady, there was a killing war. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill [Japanese] and try to survive. Now, if that don’t fit into any academic course, I’m sorry. But some of us had to do the killing—and most of my buddies got killed or wounded.”

Despite his harrowing experience, Eugene earned from Auburn a degree in business administration (1949) and a Master of Science in botany (1955). After receiving a doctorate in biology and biochemistry from the University of Florida in 1960, he became an acclaimed biology professor and researcher at the University of Montevallo for nearly three decades.

He told them stories—like something funny a buddy had done on Pavuvu—but none of the disturbing memories that plagued him. Years later, knowing what he does now, Henry is grateful they spoke about it at all.

“Fortunately, my dad was the kind of guy who compartmentalized the really bad stuff. He could see what interested me, and he would tell a story to feed that,” said Henry. “He told me this incredible story—one day he and his buddies were on a patrol, and they hear airplane engines roaring and this thudding gunfire from great altitude. They look up and it’s five marine Corsairs in an aerial dogfight with Japanese Zeros. I got him to tell that story more than once.”

Surviving the War

With the benefit of time, research and a scholarly eye for detail, he is able to make sense of the chaos and atrocities around him. Describing the heavy artillery fire on Peleliu, he writes it was “by far the most terrifying of all combat experiences. Each time it left me feeling more forlorn and helpless, more fatalistic, and with less confidence that I could escape the dreadful law of averages that inexorably reduced our numbers.”

Arriving in 1981, “With the Old Breed” was swiftly recognized as an instant classic of the war memoir genre, inspiring countless other books and serving as inspiration for the 2010 HBO series “The Pacific.”

“Eugene Sledge was incredibly perceptive,” said David Burke ’10, an adjunct history instructor at Auburn and author of “Atomic Testing in Mississippi.” “The myriad details that he incorporates—belts of machine gun ammunition draped over stumps, the amounts of garbage caused by combat, or the propensity for maggots to exist everywhere—it changes the perception of the battlefield.”

Part of the book’s enduring legacy is its brutal honesty. The frontlines are often pure confusion, the death random, indiscriminate and always tragic. Sledgehammer feels himself drastically changing, with no way to stop it. The book’s sincerity makes it an exception to the genre at that time, said Burke.

Originally written for his family, Eugene was talked into publishing the book by his wife Jeanne. It has since become a touchstone for civilians and veterans alike to comprehend the war and emotionally process it—perhaps its most enduring legacy.

“This is a benchmark work amongst other war narratives. It probably helped a lot of individuals write their own memoirs. I’m surprised [the bible] is only now going into the Library of Congress,” said Burke.

Legacy and Testament

“You can’t sit down with my dad,” said Henry. “I wish you could, but he’s gone, and most of the guys like him are gone. The best you’re going to get is me at this point. We owe it to the guys who didn’t make it home from World War II to keep carrying the memory and the legacies forward. This is my passion, and [this] involvement with my dad’s legacy is what really gets me excited.”

In June, Henry published “The Old Breed… the Complete Story Revealed,” a companion piece that adapts his own memories with his previously unpublished material from his father’s original manuscript.

“The Old Breed” includes omitted anecdotes, observations and occurrences that add dimension to the final, spartan text of “With the Old Breed.” An excised section on how ammunition was crated underscores being in knee-deep Okinawan mud under shell fire.

Researching the original 820-page manuscript housed in the Auburn University Archives was a revelation for Henry, too. Some of stories his father told him—including the aerial dogfight between the Corsairs and Japanese Zeros—is recolored by the knowledge that an Okinawan family was watching it with him.

“[A] little girl was teaching him to count in Japanese, and he taught her to count to 10 in English,” said Henry. “They’re having this interplay when they become aware of that dogfight. As each Zero gets shot down, he’s counting, and he [wrote], ‘I could tell by the way they were reacting they weren’t real happy about all the Japanese planes getting shot down.’”

More than just new information “The Old Breed,” looks at how veterans balance their trauma and family life, and Henry hopes it can serve as a blueprint for furthering connections between combat veterans, an issue that remains urgent.

Though Eugene passed away in 2001, “With the Old Breed” lives on as a reminder of the sacrifice made by so many in World War II. All these years later, it remains a critical text to understanding the effects of combat trauma.

Fittingly, on August 2, 2025, the Sledge Bible—itself a survivor of Peleliu and Okinawa—was formally donated to the Library of Congress, where it will exist forever alongside other national artifacts as part of our collective history.

“In the Library of Congress, you’ve got hand-drawn maps from George Washington, you’ve got Lewis and Clark’s journals, you’ve got these supremely iconic American artifacts that are part of the fabric of our culture,” said Henry. “To know that it could be enshrined in the pantheon of American culture, I think that’s a fitting tribute to Sledgehammer.”

By Derek Herscovici ’14