With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

by Eugene B. Sledge

None of us would ever be the same after what we had endured. To some degree that is true, of course, of all human experience. But something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.

camp. I speak only from a personal viewpoint and make no generalizations, but for me, in the final analysis, Peleliu was: thirty days of severe, unrelenting inhuman emotional and physical stress; proof that I could trust and depend completely on the Marine on each side of me and on our leadership; proof that I could use my weapons and equipment efficiently under severe stress; and proof that the critical factor in combat stress is duration of the combat rather than the severity.

Curious, I went out to have a look. The maps were combat maps of Peleliu. I dropped them back into the trash (and have since regretted I didn’t salvage them for future historical reference). Then I found the book. It was a large hardback volume of about a thousand pages, bound in dark blue, obviously not a GI field manual or book of regulations. Always seeking good reading material, I looked at the spine of the book and read its title, Men At War by Ernest Hemingway. This is interesting history, I thought, and was puzzled as to why the lieutenant had thrown it so violently into the trash. I opened the cover. In the twilight I saw written in a bold strong hand, A. A. Haldane.

Actually, in combat our officers caught just as much hell as the enlisted men. They also were burdened

with responsibility. As one buddy (a private) said, “When the stuff hits the fan, all I have to do is what I’m told, and I can look out for just me and my buddy. Them officers all the time got to be checkin’ maps and squarin’ people away.”

My friend didn’t flinch from the painful shot. He turned slowly, shook his fist in the corpsman’s face, and said, “You sonofabitch, if you want to do some bayonet practice, I’ll meet you out on the bayonet course with fixed bayonets and no scabbards on the blades, and then see what you can do.” “Doc Arrogant” looked shocked. He was speechless when he realized that the arm he had punctured so roughly wasn’t attached to a meek replacement but to a seasoned veteran. Then my friend said, “If you ever give me another shot like that, I’ll grab you by the stacking swivel and beat you down to parade rest. I’ll whip your ass so bad you won’t even be able to make this next blitz, because they’ll hafta award you a Purple Heart when I finish with you, wise guy.” “Doc Arrogant” changed instantly into “Doc Meek.” When I stepped up for my shot, he administered it with a gentleness that would have done credit to Florence Nightingale.

We were elated and went through the chow line grinning and thanking the messmen. They were the friendliest bunch I ever saw and made us feel like adopted orphans. The sign may have been made earlier for 3d Division Marines who liked the Seabees’ food as much as we, or it may have been put up for our benefit. In any event we appreciated the good food and good treatment. It strengthened our respect for the Seabees.

“This is expected to be the costliest amphibious campaign of the war,” a lieutenant said. “We will be hitting an island about 350 miles from the Japs’ home islands, so you can expect them to fight with more determination than ever. We can expect 80 to 85 percent casualties on the beach.”

As we were leaving the house to return to our positions, Jim Dandridge, one of our replacements, stepped on what appeared to be a wooden cover over an underground rainwater cistern at the corner of the house. Jim was a big man, and the wooden planks were rotten. He fell through, sinking in above his waist. The hole wasn’t a cistern but a cesspool for the sewage from the house. Jim scrambled out bellowing like a mad bull and smelling worse. We all knew it might be weeks before we could get a change of dungarees, so it was no laughing matter to Jim. But we started kidding him unmercifully about his odd taste in swimming holes. Jim was good-natured, but he quickly had enough and chased a couple of the men back across the field to our positions. They laughed but kept out of his reach.

Not Mac. If he could, that “gentleman by the act of Congress” would locate a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate in

its mouth. It was the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war. I was ashamed that he was a Marine officer.

His devil was our savior, a beautiful blue Marine Corsair. That incredible Corsair pilot bore in right behind the Japanese as they roared out of sight over the ridge tops. The planes were moving too fast to see either pilot’s face, but I’m confident the emperor’s pilot had lost his grin when he saw that Corsair.

Being civilized men, we were duty-bound to return soon to the chaotic netherworld of shells and bullets and suffering and death.

During the course of the long fighting on Okinawa, unlike at Peleliu, we got numerous replacement lieutenants. They were wounded or killed with such regularity that we rarely knew anything about them other than a code name and saw them on their feet only once or twice. We expected heavy losses of enlisted men in combat, but our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare.

He was so appalled and depressed by the fighting of the previous day that he had concluded he couldn’t possibly survive the next day. He confided his innermost thoughts and secrets about his parents and a girl back home whom he was going to marry after the war. The poor guy wasn’t just afraid of death or injury—the idea that he might never return to those he loved so much had him in a state of near desperation.

The increasing dread of going back into action obsessed me. It became the subject of the most tortuous and persistent of all the ghastly war nightmares that have haunted me for many, many years. The dream is always the same, going back up to the lines during the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa. It remains blurred and vague, but occasionally still comes, even after the nightmares about the shock and violence of Peleliu have faded and been lifted from me like a curse.

I had heard and read that combat troops in many wars became hardened and insensitive to the sight of their own dead. I didn’t find that to be the case at all with my comrades. The sight of dead Japanese didn’t bother us in the least, but the sight of Marine dead brought forth regret, never indifference.

The whole area was pocked with shell craters and churned up by explosions. Every crater was half full of water, and many of them held a Marine corpse. The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and water, rusting weapons still in hand. Swarms of big flies hovered about them.

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. During the fighting around the Umurbrogol Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

The scene was so unreal I could barely believe it: two tired, frightened young men sitting in a hole beside a machine gun in the rain on a ridge, surrounded with mud—nothing but stinking mud, with so much decaying human flesh buried or half buried in it that there were big patches of wriggling fat maggots marking the spots where Japanese corpses lay—looking at the picture of a beautiful seminude girl. She was a pearl in a mudhole.

I was standing directly behind “Kathy,” looking along his machine-gun barrel. The tracers must have struck the man’s vertebrae or other bones and been deflected, because I clearly saw one tracer flash up into the air out of the soldier’s right shoulder and another tracer come out of the top of his left shoulder. The Japanese dropped his rifle as the slugs knocked him face down into the mud. He didn’t move.

If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade. We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much of it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity.

Snafu spoke up immediately and said, “Hell, I saw ’em go right by here, but I reckoned they was headed for the company CP.” (He didn’t mention his challenging the Japanese or firing at them.) Hank looked astonished and said, “What do you mean, Snafu?” Snafu swelled with indignation and answered, “You remember when they made me bury that Nip I shot on Peleliu when them two was headed for the CP?” “Yeah, so what?” answered Hank in a low, menacing voice. “Well, I told them then if they made me bury ’im, then by God, next time I seen a Nip headin’ for the CP I wasn’t gonna’ stop ’im!”

It was hard to believe that some of our old friends who had wanted so much to return home actually were writing us that they thought of volunteering again for overseas duty. (Some actually did.) They had had enough of war, but they had greater difficulty adjusting to civilians or to comfortable Stateside military posts. We were unable to understand their attitudes until we ourselves returned home and tried to comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect, or their coffee wasn’t hot enough, or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or bus.

It was also common throughout the campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf. They never “belonged” to the company or made any friends before they got hit.

Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the folly of the war itself: “I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.”

How long I slept I don’t know, but after a while I became aware of being lifted upward. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then I awoke fully and realized someone had picked up the stretcher. Throwing the poncho away from me, I sprang off the stretcher, spun around, and saw two clean, neatly shaven Marines looking at me in utter astonishment. Several of my grimy buddies squatting on their muddy helmets nearby began to laugh. The two strangers were graves registration men. They had picked up the stretcher thinking I was just another poncho-covered corpse. It never occurred to them that, instead, I was just a weary Marine trying to catch a nap on a comfortable stretcher who had covered himself to keep off the rain. They grinned when they realized what had happened. I accused my buddies of telling the two men to pick up my stretcher, but they only laughed and asked why my nap had ended so abruptly. I was left with an eerie feeling from the incident, but my buddies enjoyed the joke thoroughly.

“You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.” In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, “I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!” The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, “You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.” “How the hell can I dig a foxhole through a dead Nip?” I protested. Just then Duke came along the ridge and said, “What’s the matter, Sledgehammer?” I pointed to the partially exhumed corpse. Duke immediately told the NCO to have me dig in a little to the side away from the rotting remains. I thanked Duke and glared at the NCO.

The old woman closed her kimono. She reached up gently, took the muzzle of my Tommy, and slowly moved it so as to direct it between her eyes. She then released the weapon’s barrel and motioned vigorously for me to pull the trigger. Oh no, I thought, this old soul is in such agony she actually wants me to put her out of her misery. I lifted my Tommy, slung it over my shoulder, shook my head, and said “no” to her. Then I stepped back and yelled for a corpsman. “What’s up, Sledgehammer?” “There’s an old gook woman in there that’s been hit in the side real bad.” “I’ll see what I can do for her,” he said as we met about fifty yards from the hut. At that moment, a shot rang out from the hut.

If this were a novel about war, or if I were a dramatic story-teller, I would find a romantic way to end this account while looking at that fine sunset off the cliffs at the southern end of Okinawa. But that wasn’t the reality of what we faced.

The boy was dead, shot in the head by his buddy. The other man had thought his rifle was unloaded when his young friend had stood over him and placed his thumb playfully over the muzzle. “Pull the trigger. I bet it’s not loaded.” He pulled the trigger. The loaded rifle fired and set a bullet tearing up through the head of his best friend. Both had violated the cardinal rule: “Don’t point a weapon at anything you don’t intend to shoot.”

Marines and attached Naval medical personnel suffered total casualties of 20,020 killed, wounded, and missing. Japanese casualty figures are hazy. However, 107,539 enemy dead were counted on Okinawa. Approximately 10,000 enemy troops surrendered, and about 20,000 were either sealed in caves or buried by the Japanese themselves. Even lacking an exact accounting, in the final analysis the enemy garrison was, with rare exceptions, annihilated. Unfortunately, approximately 42,000 Okinawan civilians, caught between the two opposing armies, perished from artillery fire and bombing.

War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors were my comrades’ incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine Corps training taught us to kill efficiently and to try to survive. But it also taught us loyalty to each other—and love. That esprit de corps sustained us.

Until the millenium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country—as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.