With the Old Breed

What Hacker News says

1. gullywhumperJan 2025
   EB Sledge - With the Old Breed is the account of a combat infantryman in WWII in the Pacific. It's about the fear, misery, and despair soldiers faced as they struggled to survive the horrors of war. It was the basis for HBO's The Pacific (successor to Band of Brothers).
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2. el_benhameenJun 2024
   Not from D-Day or the European theater, but “With the Old Breed” is a really well done personal account of combat in the Pacific. It was part of the source material for Ken Burns’ “The War” and for the “The Pacific” miniseries on HBO.
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3. geriksonOct 2022
   I think Fussel had a point in 1989, but after that there's been plenty of depictions of war that have been less sanitized. "The Pacific" comes to mind in TV, and "Fury" in movies, even if it's very formulaic.

   Memoirs can be raw too:

   - https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.ht...

   - https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html

   And even before 1989 novels like Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy problematized WW2.

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4. WalterBrightJan 2022
   If I could only remember them all!

   If you ask me at different times I'll give different answers, but some are just on top:

   War of the Worlds, Lord of the Rings, The Mote in God's Eye, Replay, Earth Abides, 20000 Leagues Under The Sea, 2001, Nothing Like It In The World, Reach For The Sky, Winnie The Pooh, The Last of the Mohicans, The Hunt for Red October, With the Old Breed, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, Moby Dick, Shogun, Romeo and Juliet

   I envy anyone reading these for the first time!

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5. WalterBrightJun 2021
   You bring up a good point - a third category. The hardass who pushes you to be your best. The other two:

   1. the bully who enjoys hurting others

   2. the socially inept person who means no harm

   They're very different.

   As for a hardass, there's a story about Chuck Yeager who was assigned to command an Air Force base during the Korean War. Upon arrival, he went out to the field to watch the airmen land. Afterwards, he laid into them for their sloppy landings. He got some paint and laid down two lines cross-wise across the runway, and said they were going to take off and land with the wheels touching down between the lines.

   One of the pilots told him that was impossible and unreasonable.

   Yeager then got into an airplane, took off, made a circuit and touched his wheels down dead center between the lines. He didn't get any more crap from the pilots.

   Me, I'd want to work for a hardass like that. Yeager wanted his pilots to be successful, and that means demanding perfection. I don't want a cake and ice cream commander, I'd want one who was a hardass, and keep me and my buddies alive.

   You might also want to read "With The Old Breed" by Sledge. He thought boot camp was unreasonable, the drill sergeants too harsh, etc. In his combat at Tarawa, which was horrific, he realized that what kept him alive was the hardass training he got in boot camp.

   On a gentler note, one of my profs at Caltech was demanding and a bit harsh. Other students had a bit of a negative opinion of him, but frankly I thrived in his class because of that. Working with demanding and "no excuses" people brings out the best in me.

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6. sillysaurusxJan 2021
   Regarding Guadalcanal: from page 402,

   Retention of Midway was important, but, more importantly, the Japanese were unable to accomplish any of their desired goals: to gain a necessary bastion to protect their Far Eastern frontier or to destroy the remaining U.S. fleet in a massive surface engagement. The U.S. loss of Midway could have spelled the loss of Pearl Harbor and the Hawaiian Islands. If Japan had taken them, the United States may well have been forced to sue for peace. Even without a Japanese invasion, the key position that Midway represented could well have slowed or stopped U.S. offensive moves for some time to come. It is for this reason that Midway, and not Guadalcanal (launched 7 August 1942, the first offensive of the United States against the Japanese), is included in this work. A U.S. loss at Guadalcanal in late 1942 to early 1943 would have forced a longer war and attacks at other locations. A U.S. loss at Midway, however, may have precluded any U.S. offensive into the Pacific.

   > a.) they seem more representative of what most war is like

   Yes, that's true. I'd highly recommend With The Old Breed. It's sort of the inverse of 100 Decisive Battles: a single soldier put his pen to paper and recorded everything he remembered about the Okinawa conflict, from start to finish.

   Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-Peleliu-Okinawa/dp/08914...

   epub: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/Bibliotik/W/With%20the%20Old...

   > Similarly, it'd be interesting to read war histories that focus on logistics and technological development.

   I agree! Does anyone know of something like this?

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