With the old breed, at Peleliu and Okinawa
In his own book, Wartime, Paul Fussell called With the Old Breed "one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war." John Keegan referred to it in The Second World War as "one of the most arresting documents in war literature." And Studs Terkel was so fascinated with the story he interviewed its author for his book, "The Good War." What has made E.B. Sledge's memoir of his experience fighting in the South Pacific during World War II so devastatingly powerful is its sheer honest simplicity and compassion. Now including a new introduction by Paul Fussell, With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the vitality and bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923 and raised on riding, hunting, fishing, and a respect for history and legendary heroes such as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene Bondurant Sledge (later called "Sledgehammer" by his Marine Corps buddies) joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. In those years, he passed, often painfully, from innocence to experience. Sledge enlisted out of patriotism, idealism, and youthful courage, but once he landed on the beach at Peleliu, it was purely a struggle for survival. Based on the notes he kept on slips of paper tucked secretly away in his New Testament, he simply and directly recalls those long months, mincing no words and sparing no pain.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2008–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Oh boy, you fucked up now. Here are the books I read this past year that I felt were "Good", starting from the most recent :
To Kill A Mocking Bird (Insanely good)
True Grit (Insanely good)
The Little Friend (Good)
Priceless (Very good, about art theft)
The Secret History (Insanely good)
Ready Player One (Good, nerdy)
Shadow Divers (Very good, history nerd book)
Diary of Anne Frank (Very good)
Unbroken (Very good, way better than the movie)
With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Very good)
Seveneves (good, but I'm a Stephenson fanboy)
The Martian (Very good, but just watch the movie).
I read a bunch of other stuff, but that's what I found really "good" this past year.
- You sound like you're looking for something like Jones' The Art of War in the Western World:
http://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Western-World/dp/0252069668
Or just go there and follow Amazon "related" links.
Jones is of the "very broad" school of military history. It can be a little bit dry, but it certainly tries to be comprehensive: It's like Civilization in that it starts with phalanx and then moves slowly forward through the history of strategy and tactics.
You might like the works of John Keegan, another famous military historian who takes a general approach. He's got a History of Warfare that's like a lighter-weight version of Jones -- I might recommend starting with that, actually. His one-volume histories of WWI and WWII are probably decent.
Keegan is British, so it wouldn't surprise me if his histories were heavy on the Western front. If you want the actual history of WWII you need a history that's more about the Eastern Front, which is pretty much where the war in Europe was actually decided. Unfortunately, the history on that subject lags decades behind, because the surviving Germans didn't exactly want to dwell on it and the Soviets weren't exactly forthcoming. (Many of the key Soviet figures either got disappeared by Stalin or lived under the constant fear of being disappeared by Stalin.) I'm not sure what the best current general history of the Eastern Front is, but I do know that the big Western expert on the subject is David Glantz, who has spent the last twenty years digging through formerly-sealed Soviet records of enormous battles that were covered up for years. I'd probably start with:
http://www.amazon.com/Slaughterhouse-Handbook-Eastern-David-...
because I don't know any better and it comes up first on Amazon.
If you want something written by a gamer try the works of James Dunnigan, founder of SPI and author of a whole pile of famous simulation board games. I read most of his Dirty Little Secrets of World War II and it was interesting. A much breezier style than the heavy-duty military historians. And he's got books that cover contemporary military stuff as well as history.
Nobody should read about war at the 10,000 foot level without also reading about what it's actually like on the ground. Obviously, the great modern literary works on the subject are Slaughterhouse Five and, even more so, Catch-22. In the realm of nonfiction, Fussell's Wartime was interesting, but it led me to Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, which is even better: a very good book by a guy from the front lines in the Pacific who is not shy about telling you exactly what went on. Comes with an endorsement by PG! (from the last time I mentioned it on HN.)Don't read it over lunch if you're squeamish.
(I haven't actually read some of these, but my dad is a military boardgamer and military history buff. He's got several bookshelves packed with books like these.)
- Read Paul Fussell's Wartime. Or Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed - At Peleliu and Okinawa. Then you'll know why I'm happy to study war from my armchair, despite the fact that I'll never really know what combat is like.
It's also good to not know what it feels like to be high on heroin or hooked on nicotine.
- But artillery barrages don't delivery 100% of their payload in the first round. If your building is hit with the first round, yes you'll be dead. But there will be a second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. round coming and many people could get to better, more survivable locations, before those impacted. In the book "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" the author talks about being under artillery fire in an open area.
>"To be shelled by mass artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it."
It is estimated that Seoul would have 2-4 minutes of warning of an NK barrage due to the artillery shell flight time. Having 2 to 4 minutes to get anywhere other than an open area is valuable.
A NK artillery barrage on Seoul would be horrific and devastating but it wouldn't kill everyone.
> One early examination of the problem, by Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, finds that circa 1995 the KPA may have been capable of firing as many as 200,000 long-range rounds into South Korea on the first day of a conflict—and that even a short 3-to-5-minute artillery barrage into the Seoul metro area could cause as many as 7,500 civilian casualties—with the total fatalities rising much higher if North Korea continued the attack. An analysis from 2012 by Roger Cavazos finds that a North Korean artillery attack on Seoul could produce around 30,000 fatalities. And a recent study by researchers at RAND finds that an hour-long artillery barrage on Seoul would produce between 87,600 and 130,000 casualties, of which between 6,620 and 10,680 would be fatalities—with many more fatalities to come if the artillery bombardment continued. [0]
[0] https://tnsr.org/2025/06/lost-seoul-assessing-pyongyangs-oth...
