Home

Portfolio

Contact

War in the Pacific

By Tony Bridges

With the Old Breed
There is a growing sentiment, stemming from the arts and spreading into the sciences, that there is more to truth than facts. That history is more than mere names and dates but the stories and experiences of individuals. In today’s field of history it is important, therefore, to attain not only mastery of the facts, but a grasp of the feelings and thoughts that influenced and were influenced by the events we study. This is why it is important to supplement factual secondary sources like David Kennedy’s The American People in World War II with contemporary personal accounts, like the memoirs of E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed, whenever possible. Such a juxtaposition serves many purposes for the historian. In this particular example, Sledge supports Kennedy in several key ways. Most strikingly, it adds a human element that Kennedy, though he tries, can not afford to explore in depth in his text. It also provides supporting primary evidence for the racial hatred between the American and Japanese soldiers in the Pacific theatre, and of the horrific nature of amphibious warfare in the South and Central Pacific islands.

The human element that narratives like Sledge’s bring to history is vital. In a world in which many people do not seem to see a need for historians, here is at least one clear-cut answer: we keep the stories of people like PFC E. B. Sledge alive. We are the memory of the world, and with stories like Sledge’s we can not help but be its conscience as well. Kennedy is telling the tale of millions, and must be broad and general by the very nature of his study. Sledge, however, tells us the story of one Marine from Alabama, with a family, and friends, and personal ambitions. It is a story that people understand better than numbers and dates. Kennedy is a great resource for the academically minded, who wish to learn more about the important personalities and events of World War II. In the toolbox of the historian, Kennedy is the logos, but Sledge is the ethos and pathos. Kennedy teaches us how war was waged, but Sledge teaches us why it should never be waged again.

The personal story Sledge brings us supports Kennedy’s implicit claim that the war was miserable for the troops in the Pacific. Kennedy, as he is writing an academic resource that must cover several years and the entire war, can devote but a few pages to the horrors of amphibious combat against the Japanese, and when he does, it seems a break in the flow of his work.1 Sledge’s memoirs, however, take this as their principle theme. Therefore, where Kennedy mentions "the stench of night-soil covered fields" at Saipan, Sledge devotes page after page to the smell of Peleliu.2 Sledge expands at length on the experience of warfare, from the timeless, fearful personal world created under heavy shelling, to the unimaginable experience of rolling down a hill covered in human excrement and fat white maggots feasting on the bodies of friend and foe. These kinds of details are vital to an understanding of war, but Kennedy simply does not have the space in his work for such depth. Even if he did, he would not be able to bring the personal element that Sledge does.

While discussing the horrors of war, Sledge also provides ample evidence to support another of Kennedy’s major claims: The existence of significant racial hatred between the Japanese soldiers and American Marines. Indeed, one of Kennedy’s examples of American brutality is found firsthand in Sledge’s account: A Marine cutting the cheeks of a living, wounded Japanese soldier to get at his gold crowns.3 Even Sledge, a Marine in the front lines of some of the most ferocious fighting, recognizes that much of what he is seeing is not common to war, but is &ldquothat particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese.&rdquo4 Meetings with the Japanese were typified by racial slurs, a lack of mercy and remarkable callousness.5 Sledge also adds to the list of atrocities for which the Americans developed this racial hatred. Kennedy mentions major incidents like the Bataan Death March, but Sledge details much more personal issues, like the Japanese tendency to fire on wounded and stretcher bearers.6

For centuries, the study of history has been the study of kings and wars, of economies and politics, and later of social movements. Today, in part to ’sell’ history to broader audiences, and even more to give us a strong, personal feeling for the names and dates in our texts, memoirs and personal narratives are becoming a bigger part of history than ever before. In this excellent case, a best-selling memoir of a World War II veteran complements perfectly a text from a respected scholar to provide an understanding of the Pacific theatre that includes both the strategic and political spheres, customarily the realm of historians, and also the intimate personal sphere that is all too often overlooked.

  1. David M. Kennedy, The American People in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 392.
  2. Kennedy, 392; E. B. Sledge, With The Old Breed (New York: Presidio Press, 2007), 152-158.
  3. Sledge, 129-130.
  4. Sledge, 129.
  5. Sledge, 307, 28, 166.
  6. Sledge, 148, 386.