Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father s legacy forward, and he s written his own book, The Old Breed: The Complete Story of My Father's War Experience. Today, on the show, I talk about why his dad, Eugene Sledge, was uniquely hellish, and how he managed to come home and live a full honorable life.
00:03:25.060Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father's legacy forward, and he's written
00:03:28.160his own book, The Old Breed, The Complete Story Revealed, that pairs his father's combat
00:03:32.240experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene's son.
00:03:37.140Today on the show, Henry and I talk about why his dad wrote with The Old Breed, what
00:03:40.800made fighting the Pacific uniquely hellish, and how Eugene managed to come home and live
00:03:44.400a full honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days. After the show
00:03:49.220is over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash oldbreed. All right, Henry Sledge, welcome to the
00:04:09.000show. Thank you. Great to be here, Brett. I appreciate that. So your father was Eugene
00:04:14.700Sledgehammer Sledge, who was a Marine infantryman who fought in the Pacific campaign of World War
00:04:20.800II. He's also the author of what many consider one of the greatest war memoirs ever written,
00:04:27.400and it's called With the Old Breed. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have read this.
00:04:31.880Why did your dad write the book originally? Was this something he had planned right after the war?
00:04:36.420There really was no orchestrated plan to write a book. I think it began as a cathartic process on his part to deal with some of the PTSD, the emotional trauma, just the trying to re-assimilate to civilian life as he began to put the war behind him.
00:04:57.560I think that was part of it. And the other component to it was, I think there was a desire
00:05:03.200on his part to have a written record of his experience for my brother and me. And, you know,
00:05:09.840I remember him telling me that. And the thing too, is he had extensive notes
00:05:14.120to write this thing. Where did those notes come from? How did he keep them when he was
00:05:18.380fighting? Well, so the Marines were not allowed to keep diaries for obvious security reasons.
00:05:26.360you know if you saw the Pacific miniseries did you see the Pacific I did yeah so you know Rami0.94
00:05:32.340Malek playing snafu has that classic line gives the Japs valuable intel they find it but that0.95
00:05:39.360really was the crooks of it I mean Marines were not supposed to keep diaries for for security0.90
00:05:44.320reasons and he began to keep surreptitious notes on little pieces of paper that he kept tucked into
00:05:51.280his pocket New Testament Bible that he carried in the breast pocket of his dungaree jacket.
00:05:57.380And he also wrote some cursory notes in the first few pages of that Bible, just on weather
00:06:03.800conditions and a basic outline of where they were and that kind of thing. But most of the note
00:06:10.540taking was going to be on pieces of paper that he kept tucked into the Bible. And then when he got
00:06:14.960home, he took those pieces of paper and wrote down on a piece of legal paper, an outline,
00:06:22.020fleshing everything out. And then from there began to write on his legal pads with his pencil.
00:06:29.440When he started to write, how long after did it take for him to finish it?
00:06:33.520He started writing, I would say early seventies. I mean, my earliest memories of it are just,
00:06:38.940you know, when I was just a few years old and that process, you know, and probably a few years
00:06:44.620after he began that, he asked my mother to begin typing the manuscript. So she started typing it.
00:06:50.580He would write at night and then she would type, you know, in the days that followed. I mean,
00:06:55.940that went on through most of the mid to late seventies. It probably wasn't until the late
00:07:01.620seventies that she talked him into, you know, like, Hey, this is a pretty powerful story.
00:07:07.380We should look at trying to get this published. And I think that process, and I remember it
00:07:13.380really well i mean i remember the day that we got the letter from presidio saying that they would
00:07:18.860publish it and that was around 1980 you know because it actually came out in 1981 so yeah
00:07:25.280it's about a 10-year process yeah it was and you know the thing is brett i mean he would work on
00:07:30.280it furiously for several days at a time at night you know and then he'd take a break and may not
00:07:37.860touch it for a month or two months and i mean you know as my brother and i got older and you know
00:07:43.240as a family, we're doing things and just, you know, because at that time he's in his early fifties
00:07:49.020and, or mid to late forties and, and just, you know, life gets in the way of everything. Right.
00:07:55.100So, I mean, he's being a husband, being a dad, he was very involved in our lives on a day-to-day
00:07:59.740basis. Um, we had a close relationship and so we would hit stretches where he wouldn't even work
00:08:05.660on it for months at a time and then pick it back up and dive back into it. Your dad's writing is
00:08:11.600really good. It's really compelling, but he wasn't a professional writer. He was a biology professor
00:08:15.860and his writing wasn't flowery. It was more matter of fact. How would you describe your dad's
00:08:22.740writing style? Yeah, I would agree. I mean, his writing, I would term it like this. He was a
00:08:30.160scientist. He had a PhD, biology, biochemistry. He wrote like a scientist, no flowery, elegant
00:08:38.480prose nothing pedantic i mean he just it was straight ahead unblinking factual yeah you can
00:08:46.960tell that he's got this scientific biological mind when he writes because the way he describes
00:08:52.080things it's almost like you're reading a field report from a field biologist i mean there was
00:08:57.040one here's a quote he's talking about he's seen uh just the dead bodies on pillow yeah he said
00:09:04.660this it was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed to bloated to maggot
00:09:10.640infested rotting to partially exposed bones like some biological clock marking the inexorable
00:09:16.700passage of time yep and then he'd also just when he described dead bodies he would compare them
00:09:23.080like well it looks like the intestines of a squirrel that i would hunt as a boy yes that's
00:09:28.860exactly right and i'm like i literally turned as you were reading that i mean i i know that book
00:09:34.660so intimately, Will. I got pretty much right here to the part where you were reading from.
00:09:40.680But not only that, you know, like he talks about cans of C-rations and K-ration boxes,
00:09:45.620open and unopened, lay around our gun pit, along with discarded grenade and mortar shell canisters
00:09:50.540scattered about the area, or discarded U.S. helmets, packs, ponchos, dungaree jackets,
00:09:55.360web cartridge belts, leggings, boondockers, ammo boxes of every type, and crates. The discarded
00:10:01.220articles of clothing and the inevitable bottle of blood plasma bore mute testimony that a Marine
00:10:05.760had been hit there. And what I was saying about that was, you know, that writing is like just
00:10:14.720knowing my father the way I did. That is Eugene Sledge. That is Sledgehammer telling you that
00:10:20.860he's not just seeing this and observing these things. He feels the anguish of seeing the blood
00:10:26.560of fellow Marines. Yeah. That's one thing I noticed throughout the book is he doesn't flinch
00:10:32.840away from the brutality of war and he describes it in great detail, but at the same time he brings
00:10:39.540his humanity to it. And he talks about the moral and spiritual damage that it's doing to the men
00:10:47.440who are in these battles. Yeah. Always. There was always that angle of it to him because I mean,
00:10:52.920look, you know, that was one of the extraordinary things about the kind of guy that my father was.
00:10:58.360I mean, honestly, he was a very peaceable guy who wanted to enjoy his life and go to college and do
00:11:05.780the things that a young man would be doing. And fighting on some war-torn island in the middle
00:11:10.540of the Pacific was not what he wanted to be doing, but he wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps. He
00:11:15.400wanted to be a part of that. He knew that everybody was going to have to go fight somewhere, and he
00:11:20.160wanted to be with what he thought was the finest outfit out there, which was the Marines. And all
00:11:25.780of those things just that bear testimony to his character. Yeah. And as you said, the process of
00:11:32.280writing this book, it seemed like it helped him process that trauma that a lot of soldiers came
00:11:39.920home with. I do think it was a cathartic process for him. I really do. I remember when With the
00:11:47.020Breed came out and we got our first copies and I remember reading it. Of course, I had read some
00:11:52.960of the typewritten pages that my mother had typed in the years leading up to its publication, but
00:11:58.540I remember really well, I remember reading where in the introduction, I think it was in the
00:12:03.900introduction or some of the early parts of it, he said, you know, the nightmares no longer wake me
00:12:09.860in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and in a cold sweat. But I will tell you this,
00:12:14.680I recall very well when my brother and I were young, my mother sat us down and she said, listen, if you boys need us in the middle of the night, come to my side of the bed.
00:12:26.480Don't go to your father's side of the bed and whatever you do, don't touch him.
00:12:30.340Yeah, because he was still dealing with it.
00:12:32.540Yeah, I mean, he was still dealing with it.
00:12:33.980I mean, look, man, that's heavy stuff, you know?
00:12:37.280I mean, this is a guy, we're talking in the mid-1970s here.
00:12:41.180This is a guy who's in his 50s at this point, you know, with a couple of boys and being a husband and a dad and trying to put all this behind him.
00:12:48.840And his war experience had happened in his early 20s.
00:12:52.000Yeah, well, I mean, he was 20 years old in Peleliu.
00:12:54.220He turned 21 on Peleliu, and he was 22 in Okinawa.
00:12:58.220Yeah, there was another antidote you put in your book about your experience with, you know, your dad's dealing with that trauma and that PTSD of the war.
00:13:05.920I think you were a kid and you got like a toy Tommy gun.
00:13:12.400You know, growing up in the 70s, my brother and I would go down to the dime store and we'd get the little, you know, the little plastic army helmets.
00:13:20.320And like, I was fascinated by the Thompson submachine gun.
00:13:23.820I just loved that weapon as a kid when I would see it on movies and things like that.
00:13:28.520And I remember buying one, just the cheap little plastic Tommy gun.
00:18:35.820He could have, you know, been an officer.
00:18:37.220His family was nudging him to be an officer, but your dad decided not to do that.
00:18:42.060Can you tell us the story of why he chose to intentionally flunk out of the Officer
00:18:46.680Candidate Program and enlist as a private in the Marines?
00:18:49.940Yeah, I mean, I can answer the question very easily.
00:18:53.020Youthful impetuosity, you know, the impetuousness of youth.
00:18:56.200You know, he and a very large portion of the detachment and his officer training in the V-12 program that he was enrolled in at Georgia Tech after the war broke out, you know, they were scared that the war was going to be over before they got into it.
00:19:08.920And he didn't want to live with that feeling of, you know, I almost got there, but I just didn't quite get there and do what I was meant to do.
00:19:18.500And, you know, it bears pointing out, I mean, this is a really powerful thing.
00:19:22.000And I think it's a very significant thing about when you talk about Eugene Sledge and the kind of guy that he was.
00:19:27.620I mean, look, my grandfather was a very influential man in Mobile back in the 1930s.
00:19:33.660He was very well thought of, and he had a certain amount of influence.
00:19:37.860And other Marines that my dad served with pointed this out to me.
00:19:40.740I mean, a lot of these guys came from hardscrabble backgrounds.
00:19:45.120They came from, I mean, I'm just going to say dirt poor backgrounds, lacking a lot of formal education.
00:19:53.060I mean, that was a fact with a lot of those guys back then, you know, and that wasn't the case with my father.
00:19:59.800I mean, he actually had some college behind him and he came from a family that you could say in certain ways was well to do.
00:20:06.260And to absolutely purposefully insert himself into the world he inserted himself in, enlist
00:20:14.320in the Marine Corps, I think it's a powerful thing.
00:20:17.840And I mean, one of his fellow Marines told me, I went to visit this guy years ago, and
00:20:23.580he said, that was one thing I always admired about your dad.
00:20:26.260You know, we all knew he probably could have escaped the path that he chose, but there
00:20:31.760he was shoulder to shoulder with us.0.97
00:23:35.560And I mean, he writes that very articulately and, you know, no small wonder that the Marine
00:23:40.960Corps views his book with such high regard.
00:23:44.560Let's talk about your dad's combat experience in the Pacific.
00:23:47.880His first assignment, we've been talking about this, was to help secure the island of Peleliu.
00:23:52.260I imagine a lot of people listening right now have probably never heard of this island.
00:23:57.280They might have heard about Iwo Jima, Midway.
00:24:00.540Why is Peleliu often overlooked by Americans?
00:24:04.760Well, Peleliu was a tiny, tiny little atoll, two miles by six miles on the western edge of the Pacific.
00:24:12.280And the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked, is because it could have been bypassed.
00:24:18.340And at the time, you know, MacArthur was proceeding along a southwesterly axis to get back to the Philippines.
00:24:26.060And then Chester Nimitz and the U.S. Navy and Marines were driving through the Central Pacific.0.56
00:24:32.060So we kind of had this two-tiered approach in subjugating Japanese forces.0.65
00:24:37.320It was determined originally that Peleliu was needed to neutralize the airfield there so that Japanese air assets,
00:24:45.140Japanese air power could not threaten MacArthur's right flank as he proceeded towards the Philippines.
00:24:51.060As it turned out, they didn't need to do that because all Japanese air power had been knocked
00:24:56.560out by U.S. Navy carrier task force raids in early 1944, and Peleliu wasn't invaded until
00:25:03.520September 1944. Now, Admiral Halsey had a foretelling of this because as his task force
00:25:11.740pilots are coming back, as those Hellcat pilots are coming back from their strikes throughout the
00:25:16.720Palau Islands, his pilots are telling him, look, we're not encountering any aerial opposition.
00:25:21.700It's all been done away with. And we're destroying a lot of airplanes on the ground. And so he sat
00:25:27.940down and thought about it. He met with other officers and he went to Nimitz and said, I fear
00:25:32.860another Tarawa. I don't think that we need to hit Peleliu. My guys are not seeing any aerial
00:25:37.820resistance. And I think this is going to be a lot worse than we think it could be.
00:25:42.680Chester Nimitz, for reasons he never really disclosed because he passed away in 1965,
00:25:47.340chose to not stop the invasion of Armada and to proceed with invading Peleliu. But the short
00:25:53.460answer to your question, why is it overlooked, is because it could have been bypassed. And that
00:25:58.220was such a tragedy because going into it, General Rupertis, who was the 1st Marine Division
00:26:03.200commander had this inexplicably optimistic view of the coming battle that, look, it's going to
00:26:09.400be rough, but fast. It's going to be like Tarawa, you know, three days, maybe four, it might only
00:26:14.280take two. And every time I think about that, it just makes my blood run cold because you realize
00:26:21.460what they got into with the challenging topography, not to mention the heat and humidity. I mean,
00:26:28.160that was going to be part of every battle in the Pacific, but the absolute meat grinder that it
00:26:32.960turned into that they did not originally think it would be. I mean, a lot of the news correspondents
00:26:38.740didn't even go ashore at Peleliu because they thought, well, there's no point. I mean, it's
00:26:42.820going to be over in like a day and a half or two days or three, you know, and so you only had a
00:26:47.760handful of correspondents who actually went ashore. So, you know, it was an amalgamation of
00:26:53.140several things as to why Peleliu wasn't so well known. I mean, and that was, you know, that caused
00:26:57.780a lot of bitterness for my father and a lot of the guys who were there and lost good buddies there.
00:27:01.580i remember in the 1970s pellele was frequently referred to as the forgotten battle i will say
00:27:07.180this i don't think pellele was quite so forgotten anymore yeah so i think thanks to movies like
00:27:13.440saving private ryan band of brothers i think a lot of people are familiar with what fighting
00:27:18.580was like in europe all wars brutal we've had alex kershaw on the podcast the world war ii historian
00:27:24.620yeah absolutely he talks about he says the battles in europe the war in europe it was brutal but
00:27:29.380there was a certain romanticism about it because, you know, soldiers are fighting amongst these old
00:27:33.040cathedrals and rural European farms with stone fences. Fighting the Pacific was not like that
00:27:40.240at all. And your father did an excellent job capturing the hellishness of war fighting the
00:27:45.960Pacific. What was Peleliu like? Give us a look into what it was like fighting there.0.98
00:27:51.460Well, Peleliu, the northern part of the island was called the Umer Brogel, known colloquially
00:27:56.900to the Marines who had to fight there, is bloody nose ridge.
00:28:00.920And in fact, it was a series of ridges.
00:28:03.440The coral high ground was obfuscated by vegetation before it had all been blasted off by our
00:28:10.220pre-landing naval and aerial bombardment.
00:28:13.320But it was very topographically challenging terrain.
00:28:17.740You had a complex system of ridges and ravines and box canyons and blind canyons.
00:28:25.960And all of that was pockmarked with caves. I mean, I've seen the number of, you know, 500 caves that pockmarked like Swiss cheese. You know, the Japanese were absolute masters of using every aspect of their terrain to their advantage as a force multiplier, if you will.
00:28:45.720And Peleliu offered some tragic opportunities for that, but the parts of the island that weren't just complete coral were, you know, jungle scrub growth, but it was terribly hot, seven degrees off the equator.0.98
00:29:00.500On D-Day, it was 115 degrees in the shade, and so you had that aspect of it.
00:29:08.080I want to talk about the coral, because I think a lot of people think, oh, Pacific Islands,
00:29:12.460it's going to be like Tahiti with these Edenic beaches.
00:29:15.140But these beaches were just mostly coral.
00:29:17.180What made fighting on coral so brutal?
00:29:19.340Well, the Northern Landing Beach, and I've walked that entire landing beach at Peleliu,
00:29:24.640where my father went ashore on Orange Beach 2, which was a southern sector of the approximately
00:29:30.1202,200-yard-long beach, it actually was pretty flat and sandy.
00:29:34.800You know, it had a gentle slope to it.
00:29:36.120But once you got inland, you were in the scrub growth, but then they quickly got into the coral.
00:29:40.860Now, up on what they call White Beach, which was where the 1st Marine Regiment, my father was in the 5th Marine Regiment,
00:29:46.440but the 1st Marine Regiment landed on White Beach, which was a little bit north of where my father landed.
00:29:52.820I walked to that area, and I've never seen anything like it in my life, Brett.
00:29:57.300It was sharp coral outcroppings all the way out into the water.
00:30:01.220There is no sandy beach on White Beach.
00:30:03.540And so for the First Marines, the First Marine Regiment, when I say First Marines, I'm referring to them, as soon as they debarked from their landing craft, you know, as soon as they got out of their amphibious tractors, they're immediately getting cut by this coral if they have to dive for cover, which they did because the Japanese had heavily impregnated that or heavily fortified that part of the landing beach.
00:30:26.960But I remember my dad telling me, you know, they had entrenching tools, but he said it almost felt like there was no point in it because really on Peleliu, you really couldn't dig in, you know, quote unquote, dig in and, you know, dig a nice deep hole in soft earth like you could on Okinawa in 1945.
00:30:45.060Peleliu, he said there were so many times on Peleliu, we couldn't dig in.
00:30:48.360I mean, we might can take shelter in a shell crater, but half the time you just pile logs and rocks around you for any kind of protection.
00:30:56.700you know, any sort of protection from flying fragments, but digging in was just almost an
00:31:01.600impossibility because of that hard coral. Yeah. And then your dad talks about the coral. It made
00:31:08.220fighting hard and it made digging, you know, foxholes hard, but it also made field sanitation
00:31:14.740pretty much impossible. Correct. Because, you know, he talked about when a man had to defecate,
00:31:20.720usually he just did it in a, like an ammo can or a sea ration can. There was nowhere to bury it.
00:31:26.380So they just threw it off into some underbrush or something like that.
00:31:29.720And imagine after 15, 20, 30 days of that, not to mention the dead and rotting enemy
00:31:37.040bodies, and of course the Marines tried to pull their guys out and get them back to a
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00:39:12.880But he said, you know, the Japanese opened up on stretcher teams absolutely without mercy.
00:39:17.380And that was something that he said would just make you weep in fury to see, you know, a wounded Marine and four of his buddies going out or two of his buddies going out to try to bring him back in.
00:40:16.040You know, they would attack all day and fight all night through infiltration.
00:40:20.080And then the other angle to this is there were many cases where the Germans surrendered when they realized that they had to.
00:40:28.540The Japanese, I'm not going to say that they never surrendered because obviously by the time Okinawa rolled around, it did happen.
00:40:35.160But very rarely, it was very rare that the Japanese would surrender.
00:40:40.020And on Peleliu, they had to fight them to the last man pretty much.
00:40:43.980Okinawa, they did begin to surrender, but even that was not a codified, systematic course of action.0.71
00:40:52.380That was going to be a more piecemeal, ad hoc type situation where individual Japanese just realized that the jig is up, there's no point in continuing this, and they would give themselves up.
00:42:06.460which is where a couple of Japanese were taken prisoner by the Marines in the early stages of
00:42:13.680the battle. And these guys said that some of their buddies were down the river and wanted to
00:42:20.180surrender, and that if the Marines would go out and send out a rescue party, they would surrender.
00:42:25.180And so our intelligence officers always wanted to pick up surrendered Japanese if that was an
00:42:30.800option, because it was a source of intel, right? It was a source of knowledge and factual data.
00:42:34.840And so the Marines sent out a patrol under the command of Colonel Frank Getge to bring these guys in, and they ended up being ambushed and killed to the last minute.
00:44:42.420And what's interesting, your father describes how when these Marines were seeing the brutality with which the Japanese soldiers were treating the corpses of the Marines,
00:44:52.560there was this temptation from the marines to do the same to retaliate and do the same thing
00:44:57.340and your father even describes like he had moments where he's like yeah i want to maybe do something
00:45:02.120to this japanese dead body because i'm just so angry at them but he didn't he was able to kind
00:45:07.380of resist that pull how do you think your father was able to do that no the marines weren't yeah
00:45:11.640so one of the things you're referring to is a lot of japanese soldiers in world war ii had gold teeth
00:45:16.440and it became a practice among a lot of Marines to, you know, if they saw a Japanese corpse that
00:45:24.220had gold teeth, they would harvest, they would take those gold teeth. And it was commonly done.
00:45:30.660Of course, the Japanese were doing even worse things to the bodies of our guys when they could1.00
00:45:35.120get to them. But yeah, that actually is a pretty powerful passage where he starts to do that one0.96
00:45:43.560day and doc caswell who's the corpsman in k company of my dad's unit puts his hand on my
00:45:50.820dad's shoulder and says sledgehammer what are you doing what are you getting ready to do and
00:45:54.080my dad says well i just saw this this japs got gold teeth i thought i might try to take one or
00:45:59.740two of them and doc caswell because i always call the corpsman doc he says you don't want to do that
00:46:05.640don't do that and my father says well okay i mean you know why and doc caswell says well think of
00:46:13.000the germs. Think of the germs. You know, what would your old man think about that? And my dad
00:46:16.680said, well, my old man's a doctor. He might think it's kind of interesting. But Doc Caswell says,
00:46:20.900just, you don't want to do that. And so my father said, okay, well, you know, how about I just cut
00:46:24.940off his collar insignia instead? And so he did that. But, you know, my dad was a very intelligent
00:46:30.060young man and he reflected on it. And he said, I realized Doc Caswell was not concerned about me
00:46:35.500being exposed to germs he just didn't want to see me lose that last vestige of civility yeah
00:46:44.300lose that last part of his humanity because i mean for some marines it even got worse your
00:46:49.180father described i mean there's one story one guy took a hand from it yeah that was at the end of
00:46:54.620pelelu yeah and that guy was was you know almost ostracized by the other marines because like the
00:47:01.380their ncl was like what get rid of that thing i'm gonna write you i'll put you on report if you
00:47:06.680don't yeah but it just goes to show i mean this type of fighting they were doing the the environment
00:47:11.280they were in i mean it could cause significant spiritual and emotional damage to these guys
00:47:18.620it causes this complete degradation and breakdown of decency and that was something that my father
00:47:24.200wanted to to make people understand is that you know the guys doing this these are nice young
00:47:31.080these are nice kids yeah and they were kids some of them were like literally kids they were 17 years
00:47:35.080old 17 18 these are nice kids but they have been dehumanized and if i can find it brett this is
00:47:42.060if i can i mean there's such a powerful passage basically it's it's a paragraph where he just
00:47:48.840really kind of sums up the awfulness of an experience like pelelu in the last line in that
00:47:55.000that paragraph he says pelelu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all yeah
00:48:03.460and that is such a powerful line right there yeah your dad just did a great job describing that
00:48:10.620while on pelelu i mean just complete brutality harsh fighting conditions but your dad and a lot
00:48:19.920the other Marines lost a mentor, Captain Akak Haldane on Peleliu. And this really hit your dad
00:48:27.380hard. And it was sort of a turning point for him in his world experience. How did Akak die? And
00:48:34.880how did his loss of leadership change the way your father viewed the rest of the war?
00:48:40.740Well, yeah, Captain Haldane, his codename Akak, they called him Akak. He was such a well thought
00:48:47.340of officer. He was their company commander. He was K Company's commander. He was killed
00:48:50.800on October 7th, 1944 by a sniper on Hill 140 on Peleliu. And my father said it was the worst
00:48:59.600grief I suffered during the entire war. You know, ACAC, Captain Haldane represented stability and
00:49:07.040security in a world gone mad. I mean, that's exactly the way he says it because, you know,
00:49:11.940even though Captain Haldane was like 27 years old, he had been at Guala Canal. He'd been at
00:49:16.780Cape Gloucester. He was incredibly well thought of and just a very cool headed, excellent company
00:49:22.500commander. And his men loved him and would have done anything for him. And the thought of him
00:49:28.440that he would be killed like that, my father wrote about how that never occurred to us that we could
00:49:33.540lose him. And it enraged them all that he was killed by a sniper, but that is how he died.
00:49:39.260And, you know, yeah, Captain Haldane was just so well thought of. And to lose him,
00:49:44.560you know it just was he he represented like i said stability and security and they they never
00:49:52.300conceived that he would be killed did it change what your dad thought his like chances of survival
00:49:59.700were it's like well if this guy could go i could go just as easily absolutely i mean certainly by
00:50:06.100the time they get to okinawa he's seen so many good marines get hit or killed and he said you
00:50:13.080know, the chance, the arithmetic of chance. I mean, you felt like every day you were running
00:50:20.020out of even more luck if you had any left at all. So even though the brass thought Peleliu
00:50:26.820could be taken in a few days, the 1st Marine Division fought on the island for about a month,
00:50:32.380a little over a month. They suffered over 6,500 casualties, including 1,000 deaths.
00:50:39.780And as you mentioned, Peleliu could have been bypassed,
00:50:43.500which your father had some bitterness about.
00:50:45.760After Peleliu, he fought on Okinawa for 82 days,
00:50:49.240on and off the front lines, mostly on the front lines.
00:50:52.220And Okinawa had its own nightmarish conditions,
00:50:55.120constant rain, mud, maggots, everything was moldering.
00:52:45.060And he says, I really had my eye on you coming into the unit before Peleliu.
00:52:50.180You know, I had my doubts about you being a doctor's kid and kind of, you know, coming from a rich family and haven't been to college and all that.
00:52:58.180And he said, I got to tell you, man, I kept my eye on you on Peleliu and you did OK.
00:53:03.080By God, you did OK. And my dad wrote about how his chest literally burst with pride.
00:53:08.760He said and he said many men were awarded Silver Stars and Bronze Stars, deservedly so.
00:53:15.020But he said those words from a veteran who had been at Cape Gloucester and Guadalcanal, those words meant more to me.
00:53:22.920That seal of approval from a fellow Marine meant more to him than any medal he could have ever been awarded.
00:53:29.880When Eugene returned home in 1946, he, like hundreds of thousands of American men, brought the abyss of war home with him.
00:53:36.980What was his transition to civilian life like?
00:54:04.300He dealt with, I remember asking him when I was a kid, I said, you know, dad, when you
00:54:08.900came home from World War II. After surviving that, I would think you would have just felt like you
00:54:14.740could conquer anything. And he said, to be honest with you, I did a lot of sitting around staring
00:54:20.000at the wall, just trying to mentally put my head back together. My grandfather was, and I write
00:54:27.700about this in my forthcoming second book, I talk about my grandfather a little bit, and what an
00:54:32.120intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man that he was. And my, my father credited my grandfather
00:54:37.580with really being a bridge back to sanity because he said, you know, pop, but that was what everybody
00:54:44.400in the family called my grandfather. He said, pop was an incredibly well thought of one of the
00:54:50.000finest physicians in the state of Alabama and professionally very well thought of and accomplished,
00:54:55.520but he just understood because he had treated shell shock victims and world war one. And he
00:55:00.620understood what these young men had been through. And he was a shield for my dad because my
00:55:06.780grandmother didn't understand it. And she would come in. They show this in the last episode of
00:55:11.160the Pacific. They show it really well when they show the kid playing my dad sitting under a tree
00:55:15.580and the lady playing my grandmother comes out and says, oh, Eugene, you look like a gangster with
00:55:20.280those glasses on. And she hands him a glass of iced tea and then starts talking about, you know,
00:55:25.960Eugene, you have to get a plan for the future. You need to be doing something. And they film
00:55:30.080not seen exactly the way we told them those conversations went. And my father said in those
00:55:35.420instances to my grandmother, my plan is to do nothing for a while. And then my grandfather
00:55:39.580would come out and just like he did in the Pacific, you know, in that last episode, he comes out and
00:55:44.660he says, Mary Frank, what are you doing? Leave the boy alone. You have no idea what men like him
00:55:49.100have been through. Go on, leave him alone. And that is exactly the way that happened. And I
00:55:53.680remember us talking to the producers about that and how my grandfather would do that and shoo her
00:55:58.460away and she'd start grumbling and mumbling and muttering and walk away in a huff, you know,
00:56:03.380and then my grandfather would just tell my father, you know, you have nothing to prove
00:56:07.320to anybody in this world. When someone reads your dad's book, what lessons do you hope they walk
00:56:13.820away with when they're finished? You know, they learn something about what it really means to
00:56:21.380send young men into combat. I mean, look, I've always said this, Brett, I mean, I am passionate
00:56:26.820about World War II history. And so I enjoy reading about everything concerning every battle across
00:56:32.520the Pacific and not only that, but in Europe as well. And I enjoy reading about the tanks,
00:56:36.520the weapons, the airplanes, all of those things, you know, the hardware, the logistics, all of it,
00:56:41.520the strategic planning, all of those things interest me greatly. But to really understand
00:56:45.200what it's all about, you have to go beneath the rim of the helmet and you have to understand what
00:56:49.880goes through a young man's head when he is under heavy fire and experiencing prolonged close combat
00:56:57.760and the emotional toll that that takes on a human being. And with the Elbury, my father's book helps
00:57:04.600you understand that. It helps you understand that beneath the rim of the helmet perspective.
00:57:09.240And I mean, my book explores that as well, you know, I mean, because it has not only my perspective
00:57:15.980of seeing how as a father, you know, and of course I was born in 1965, so I'm growing up in the 1970s
00:57:24.400and 80s, you know, how his Marine experience, how his World War II experience informed the choices
00:57:32.400he made as a husband to my mom and then as a father to my brother and me. Yeah. What do you
00:57:38.700think people listening to this show can learn from how your father carried himself after the war?
00:57:42.880Well, you know, the last thing he says in With the Old Breed, the last thing he says, if the country is good enough to live in, it's worth fighting for, is the troops used to say, with privilege goes responsibility.
00:57:56.220Certainly, he delved deeply into the whole matter of, you know, Peleliu was tragic, unrelenting horror and suffering and waste, unnecessary waste.
01:00:56.860You know, and he would say, I'm just happy I got dry socks.
01:00:59.180But he also, when we would have deeper conversations about all this, and we did that many times, he said to me, people who have not been under heavy shellfire cannot imagine what that is like.
01:01:12.240Well, Henry, this has been a great conversation.
01:01:14.480Where can people go to learn more about your father, his book, and your book, and the work you're doing around your dad's legacy?
01:04:10.380And make sure to check out our show notes at awim.is slash oldbreed, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
01:04:23.760Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast.
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