'An Invention of Hell'

“H-hour, 0800. Long jets of red flame mixed with thick black smoke rushed out of the muzzles of the huge battleships’ 16-inch guns with a noise like a thunderclap. The giant shells tore through the air toward the island, roaring like locomotives. 

“‘Boy, it must cost a fortune to fire them 16-inch babies,’ said a buddy near me.

 

“‘Screw the expense,’ growled another.”

 

It’s the morning of September 15, 1944, off the coast of Peleliu, an island in the Palau archipelago in the western Pacific, some five hundred miles east of the Philippines. Eugene Sledge (1923-2001) was a twenty-three-year-old mortarman, stretcher bearer and, like all Marines, a rifleman, from Alabama serving with the 1st Marine Division. The passage above opens Chapter Four, “Assault into Hell,” of With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), the finest World War II memoir I have read. Here Sledge describes the landing craft hitting the beach and his own awkward lurch ashore:

 

“At that instant a burst of machine-gun fire with white-hot tracers snapped through the air at eye level, almost grazing my face. I pulled my head back like a turtle, lost my balance, and fell awkwardly down onto the sand in a tangle of ammo bag, pack, helmet, carbine, gas mask, cartridge belt, and flopping canteens. ‘Get off the beach! Get off the beach!’ raced through my mind.”

 

Without straining after “fine prose,” With the Old Breed remains eminently quotable:

 

“To be under a barrage or prolonged shelling simply magnified all the terrible physical and emotional effects of one shell. To me, artillery was an invention of hell.”

 

“Through the haze I saw Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit. I then looked neither right nor left but just straight to my front. The farther we went, the worse it got.”

 

“To be shelled by massed 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.”

 

A recurrent theme in the book is the impossibility of someone like myself, who never experienced combat, ever understanding it. He describes the savagery of the fighting with the Japanese and the esprit de corps among his fellow Marines. Sledge writes:

 

“To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”

 

The Battle of Peleliu would drag on until November 27. The 1^st Marine Division would suffer more than 6,500 casualties. Sledge was never wounded. The following year, in the final months of the war, he took part in the eighty-two-day Battle of Okinawa. His memoir was originally published by Presidio Press. With an introduction by Paul Fussell, the book was republished by Oxford University Press in 1990. Fussell writes:

 

“The book is devoid of the literary expediencies and suavities that may occasion skepticism or disgust in more artistically self-conscious war memoirs. Sledge is so little an author in the pejorative sense that his eye seems never to wander from his subject to contemplate the literary effect he’s creating. His style is like windowglass: you don’t pause to notice it—you look through it to the actuality it discloses. It is this honesty, simplicity, and modesty that give Sledge’s book its extraordinary power.”

 

Sledge’s innate humility and his reverence for the men he served with lend the book an utterly convincing objectivity. He recounts acts of heroism but no phony Hollywood-style heroics. He never tries too hard. There’s no grandstanding, no phony rah-rah patriotism. His loyalty is to his fellow Marines.