The Old Breed . . . The Complete Story Revealed:
A Father, A Son, and How WWII in the Pacific Shaped Their Lives
W. Henry Sledge
Knox Press, 2025; 352 pp.
As Murray Rothbard has taught us, few wars are just, and in modern times the conditions for a just war are virtually impossible to fulfill. One of the main reasons for this is that a modern war is bound to injure innocent civilians. As he puts it:
“I think—first, one of the points that I should have mentioned about wars, why I am opposed to all of them—is that in modern times the scale of weaponry that’s used is escalated so that it’s almost impossible not to murder innocent civilians. Part of the reason for this is not only the march of technology, the fact that if you use a bow and arrow you can pinpoint it against the enemy army, you can pinpoint it at the retinue of a king. If you use H-bombs or B-29s or whatever, of course, you can’t pinpoint the warring soldiers and officers—you have to start the mass murdering of civilians.
“There’s another reason for this: the state apparatus gathers to itself the entire population of its territory. If you happen to live in France you as a French citizen, even though you might hate the war that France is conducting against Portugal, you are committed to it by the very nature of the state system. So that if the French government goes to war with the Portuguese government, the Portuguese government would undoubtedly bomb, if it could, the French civilian population. So, in other words, the very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology.”
The Old Breed, and the predecessor volume on which it is based, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge (Ballantine Books, 1981), brings out another aspect of the injustice of war: the horrors its participants endure. The books give a detailed account of life on the battlefield and the enduring effects of what combatants lived through, and the horrors they carried for the rest of their lives.
Eugene Sledge was Henry Sledge’s father, and his book became an international bestseller. His grim account of modern war is unsurpassed, and he became a popular lecturer in the years after its publication. In 1994, he spoke at the Mises Institute’s The Costs of War conference (the talk is included in The Costs of War, edited by John V. Denson [Mises Institute, 1994]).
It turns out that the senior Sledge’s book had been cut from a much larger manuscript of over 1,000 pages. In The Old Breed his son, with full access to his father’s papers, has newly published more excerpts from it, along with his memories of what his father told him, as well as his own comments on the events and his relationship with his father (both father and son were endowed with amazingly retentive memories).
The way in which both books add to our sense of the horrors of war is this. Although soldiers can hardly be called “innocent civilians” and are trying to kill their enemies, they are usually in this situation because they are compelled to be there and have been subjected to misleading propaganda. Once on the scene, they face inhuman conditions of perpetual danger that affect them for the remainder of their lives, should they be fortunate enough to survive. What happens to these soldiers surely deserves to be counted in the costs of war.
Here is an example of what it was like to be in combat during World War II:
“One day in my father’s study, I pulled his web pistol belt and leather holster out of the closet. This was the very belt he had worn through combat. He looked thoughtfully at me and the belt as I held it in my hands. ‘See how thick that material is? Strong enough to stop a shell fragment. I remember when we were crossing the airfield on Peleliu. As we were running across, a shell exploded right beside Snafu. We both went down—I heard this piece of shrapnel fly through the air. It went right over my head. When Snafu went down he made kind of an “omph” sound—you know, because it knocked the wind out of him. I crawled over to him and saw he was OK and I saw this inch square piece of hot metal that had hit him—right in his web belt—he was wearing one just like that one. And you could see how the material was all frayed from it, but it stopped that piece and probably saved his life. ‘But I picked up that piece of metal and had to juggle it in my hand because it was so hot’—my father mimicked the motion of bouncing a piece of hot metal in his hand—‘and Snafu was trying to yell to me to put it in his pack.’ Course it was so loud I couldn’t hear him, but he motioned with his hand to do that, so I did, and then we got up and got on across.’ By the time they made it across the fire-swept airfield, they had gone several hundred yards. My father always said, both to me and in his many interviews, that crossing that airfield was the worst experience of the war.”
The experiences of war left permanent psychological scars on Sledge. He often had nightmares that left him in a cold sweat. His son deeply admired him, and from his account, it is clear that they had a loving relationship, but once, when he was young, he saw another side of his father:
“When I was about nine or ten years old, I had a plastic Tommy gun that I had bought from the dime store in downtown Montevallo. One night after supper, I got the bright idea to hide in the pantry in our kitchen—it was a large cabinet-like affair that I could fit inside comfortably— and jump out at my father as he walked into the kitchen. I heard him coming down the hall from his study, humming to himself, which he frequently did. I jumped into the pantry and closed the door softly, clutching my trusty plastic Tommy gun with my finger on the trigger. The trap was set! My father rounded the corner and came into the room. At that moment I pushed open the door of the pantry cabinet and jumped out as I squeezed the little trigger on my toy Tommy gun. I will never forget the look on his face as he spun around and faced me. I immediately realized that I had grievously miscalculated his reaction to my prank; he was not amused, I had screwed up, and I was about to be severely punished. In the next moments of my sheer terror, he grabbed me by the shirt collar and, if I remember correctly, lifted me off the ground. He was not a large man—five-foot-nine, or maybe an inch more—but at that moment it did not matter. I don’t remember if he marched me into the bedroom or not; I just remember his belt coming off rapidly and giving a spirited thrashing. He did not lose his temper; he was not raving; in fact, I don’t believe he said a word through the entire event. It was a controlled, calculated, and instantaneous response to a foolish error on my part. That night I learned to never unnecessarily startle a combat veteran. He also took away my plastic Tommy gun.”
Sledge supported the war against Japan and also dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the latter because he thought around a million soldiers would be casualties in a land invasion. However regrettable we may find this position, it did not prevent Sledge from realizing that parts of the campaign to retake the Pacific Islands from Japan were unnecessary but had been undertaken because of Douglas MacArthur’s vanity, though the son is a little dubious about this:”
“The Sea Runner got underway the next day for Pavuvu in the Russell Islands. One of the stated reasons for invading Peleliu was to neutralize its airfield and secure MacArthur’s right flank as he advanced on the Philippines. However, MacArthur hit Leyte on October 20, 1944. As I heard my father say more than once, ‘MacArthur walked ashore upright with cameras grinding, and Peleliu wasn’t even secured yet, and wouldn’t be for several more weeks. It made a lot of us ask ourselves, “What the hell are we doing here?”’”
Reading this book confirms Charles Tansill’s emendation of a familiar saying: “The paths of military glory lead but to the grave.” When one considers the horrors of war for the combatants, Rothbard’s argument that the costs of war are virtually never worth paying is strengthened.
