New Releases by E. B. Sledge

In one volume, three unforgettable memoirs that capture the brutality, fear, and heroism of the American land, air, and sea war in the Pacific. “Every generation is a secret society,” former Marine pilot Samuel Hynes wrote. “The secret that my generation—the one that came of age during the Second World War—shared was simply the war itself.” This volume brings together the powerful memoirs of three Americans who came of age fighting in the Pacific and who survived to tell their stories. Remarkable literary achievements that capture history with the immediacy of lived experience, all three—presented here in an illustrated collector’s edition—are classics of the modern literature of war. In With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) Marine veteran E. B. Sledge bears unflinching witness to the horror, fear, and degradation of prolonged close-quarters combat. A mortarman serving in a front-line rifle company, Sledge survived thirty days of nightmarish fighting on the remote coral island of Peleliu, where heat, thirst, filth, and fear and hatred of the Japanese “eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.” On Okinawa he faced an even greater test of endurance amid deep mud, driving rain, and incessant shelling, as men “fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.” Written with precision and clarity, Sledge’s memoir is a haunting testament to his struggle to hold on to decency and sanity, and a moving tribute to the esprit de corps of the U.S. Marines. Flights of Passage (1988) is Samuel Hynes’ evocative and elegiac memoir of his “fairly ordinary flying war.” A “true believer in the religion of flight,” he writes with lyricism, candor, and humor about the joys and dangers of his stateside training as a dive-bomber pilot, the beauty and excitement he experienced flying in combat over the Ryukyu Islands, and his wartime education in the realities of friendship, sex, love, and sudden, random death. Alvin Kernan enlisted in the Navy in 1941 at age seventeen to escape life on a failing Wyoming ranch. Crossing the Line (1994, revised 2007) is a vividly written account of his remarkable service on three aircraft carriers, first as an aviation ordnanceman and then as an air gunner. A perceptive and thoughtful observer of the sailor’s life at sea and on shore, Kernan witnessed the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack and the launching of the Doolittle Raid, armed planes at Midway, survived the sinking of the Hornet, and flew on the final mission of the fighter ace Butch O’Hare. With thirty-two pages of photographs and endpaper maps.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific—the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom Hanks In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation. An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division—3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man. “In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns

Originally published: Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c2002.