SOME OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES of growing up in Montevallo, Alabama, in the 1970s are of seeing my father, Eugene B. Sledge, sitting up late at night in front of the fireplace writing on yellow legal pads. He seemed lost in thought— as if in a faraway place—and kept a small brown Bible close by, holding pieces of paper that he referred to repeatedly. As I got older, I realized he was writing the manuscript for what would become his memoir of serving in the Marines in the Pacific during World War II.
I was a teenager in 1981 when With the Old Breed was published. Acclaimed for its honesty and humility in depicting the vicious fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa, the book inspired in me a keen interest in his World War II service, and in World War II history in general.
In a conversation with my mother last fall, she reminded me that dad’s original, unedited manuscript contained a wealth of material not included in the published book. The manuscript resides in a collection of papers and artifacts he had donated to Alabama’s Auburn University shortly before his death in 2001. I contacted the archivists there, who gave me a copy of it. Then I sat down with the published book in one hand and a highlighter in the other and, line by line, went through the entire manuscript. What I found after going through all 820 pages was an untold story: not of battlefield horrors, but respect and admiration.
—Henry Sledge
In May 1945, during the battle of Okinawa, Corporal Eugene B. Sledge and his comrades in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, were advancing across some muddy hills just past the southern highlands of Shuri when they came across a group of about 20 Japanese prisoners. An army language officer ordered the prisoners to make way for the filthy, weary column of Marines as they trudged toward the sound of distant firing. Then one defiant prisoner blocked the Marines’ path, and things heated up quickly.
Sledge’s buddy, a fellow rifleman, shoved the prisoner and “sent him sprawling into the mud,” as Sledge wrote in his 1981 classic Sledge—known as “Sledgehammer” to his
