E. B. Sledge · 1981 · sea
E.B. Sledge's memoir of the Pacific war, among the most unsparing accounts of combat ever written. As a young Marine mortarman, Sledge ships out from the United States to the Pacific and into two of the war's worst battles, the coral hell of Peleliu and the mud and slaughter of Okinawa. The route follows him across the ocean from California to the edge of Japan.
- 1San Diego
A college boy from Mobile quits officer training on purpose because he wants to fight, trains as a sixty-millimetre mortarman, and ships west to a division that has already done Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester.
- 2Pavuvu
The division's rest camp in the Russells: rotting coconuts, land crabs, mud and rats, and no rest in it - and the veterans of the old breed making clear what a replacement is worth until he has been shot at.
- 3Peleliu
Predicted at three days and taking two months. Coral that cannot be dug, heat over a hundred, the Umurbrogol ridges, and casualties above sixty per cent in his regiment - and the corpse he nearly takes gold teeth from.
- 4Pavuvu
They come back to the same coconut island to rest and refit, and the replacements arrive to fill the gaps - and Sledge, who went out a replacement himself, is now one of the men the new ones are measuring themselves against.
- 5Okinawa
Eighty-two days from April 1945: Half Moon Hill, Shuri, and rain that turned the ground to a slurry of mud and maggots and the dead - the passage most readers remember, and the one Sledge said he could not write for thirty years.
- 6Peiping
The war ends and the division is sent to north China for occupation duty - and a mortarman who has spent two years among the unburied dead spends his last months in service watching a civilisation get on with itself.
- 7Mobile
Home to Alabama, where he could not settle to anything for years - and the notes he made in his pocket Bible on Peleliu became, thirty-six years later, the book Paul Fussell called one of the finest memoirs of any war.