Old Breed Is a Memoir Book Review

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Sledge was instructed during basic training that if fighting "Japs," he should "kick him [a Japanese soldier] in the balls before he kicks you in yours," and was counseled that knives were especially effective fighting the Japanese because of their underhanded tactics. (18) The Japanese enemies were seen as less ethical and more desperate combatants than the Germans, because of their kamikaze warplane tactics. The idea of the Germans as more compassionate adversaries seems ironic in light of the revelations of the Nazi death camps in the aftermath of V-E day, but Sledge's account shows how, at the time, racial views of 'the enemy' permeated even the American side. The eyewitness depiction of this attitude also shows why Japanese-American's patriotism was called into question by the American government over the course of the war, unlike German-American's patriotism.

Sledge's book even contains photographs of dead Japanese soldiers, lying on the fields of combat, which seem disrespectful from a more distanced eye, but understandable, if not excusable, given what Sledge had been through, and the ideology into which he had been indoctrinated.

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His experiences shook him to the core of his being. Throughout the conflicts he witnessed, to keep his sanity, Sledge tucked his recorded thoughts into the pages of a New Testament, which he kept with him always.

The climax of the book is the Marine victory at Okinawa. Sledge paints a picture, not simply of bravery, but of flies swarming the Marine camp, and amoebic dysentery incapacitating whole swaths of soldiers. He mourns the dead, who are barely protected from the stench of death and the threat of decay from the torrential rains by ponchos thrown over the corpses, "rusting weapons still in hand." (252) The horror, the racism, the admitted fear of never returning, and the sadness Sledge felt does not detract from the achievement chronicled in the book, rather it makes it all the more moving in a realistic, rather than a jingoistic fashion.

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