Eugene Sledge

• 1. Introduction

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  Eugene Sledge carried a pocket-sized New Testament through the fighting in the Pacific, and he filled its pages with notes about what happened around him. Those notes outlasted the war. So did the young Marine who wrote them, though few of the men beside him could have guessed what he would become. Sledge spent most of his working life among birds, laboratory specimens and college students. How did a sickly boy from Alabama end up in some of the hardest combat of the Pacific? And what did he do with those memories once the shooting stopped?

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• 2. A Sickly Boy

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  On the 4th of November 1923, Eugene Bondurant Sledge was born in Mobile, Alabama. His father, Edward Simmons Sledge, was a physician. His mother, Mary Frank Sturdivant Sledge, served as dean of women students at Huntingdon College. In 1935 the family moved to Georgia Cottage in Mobile, and Eugene finished at Murphy High School in the spring of 1942.

  His older brother, Edward Simmons Sledge II, was born on the 10th of September 1920. Edward graduated from The Citadel as a cadet and took an Army commission. He served on the Western Front with the 741st Tank Battalion and fought at Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge. His honors included three Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars and a Silver Star, and he left the Army as a Major. He also gave an interview to Cornelius Ryan, who was then writing the script for The Longest Day.

  Eugene's own childhood was shaped by illness. Rheumatic fever cost him two years of school and left him with a heart murmur. When he recovered, his family pushed him toward college instead of the military. He later recalled their fear that he would simply become "cannon fodder." The warning did not come only from home. From Guadalcanal, his close friend Sidney Phillips wrote letters begging him not to enlist.

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• 3. Flunking On Purpose

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  In the fall of 1942, Sledge arrived at the Marion Military Institute in Marion, Alabama. He stayed only a few months. In December 1942 he volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps. His parents wanted him to pursue a technical officer's role, so a compromise placed him in the V-12 officer training program. The Marines sent him to the Georgia Institute of Technology.

  The arrangement did not last a single semester. Sledge and about half of his detachment deliberately failed their courses. Their reasoning was simple. Washing out would release them for immediate service as enlisted men, and they would not "miss the war." The plan worked, and it put Sledge on the path to the front line as a rifleman's rank, with no officer's bars to separate him from the men around him.

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• 4. K Company

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  Sledge's new home was K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, part of the 1st Marine Division. Marines abbreviated it as K/3/5. Among his fellow Marines were Corporal R.V. Burgin and Private First Class Merriell Shelton, whom everyone called "Snafu."

  A strange twist of timing involved his old friend. Sledge was sent to Pavuvu, and he overlapped with Sidney Phillips there for roughly two weeks. Then Phillips went home after a lottery draw. The reunion was brief, and Sledge stayed behind.

  In the Pacific, Sledge rose to the rank of corporal. His job was firing a 60 mm mortar, and he saw combat with it at Peleliu and Okinawa. The mortar was useless when enemy positions pressed too close. In those moments he took on other duties, carrying wounded men on stretchers or fighting as a rifleman.

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• 5. Strange Streets of Home

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  After the fighting, Sledge was posted to Beijing, and in February 1946 he was discharged with the rank of corporal. He went on to Auburn University, which was then called Alabama Polytechnic Institute. There he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and earned a Bachelor of Science in business administration in the summer of 1949.

  Enrollment produced a sharp exchange. A clerk in the Registrar's office asked what useful skill the Marine Corps had taught him. Sledge answered, "Lady, there was a killing war." He told her the Corps had taught him to kill and to survive, that this might not suit any academic course, and that most of his buddies had been killed or wounded.

  Back in Mobile, he found daily life disorienting. In his own account, people hurried about over trivial matters and did not appreciate being free of war's horrors. To them, he felt, every veteran was the same, whether he had survived terrible combat or merely typed in uniform.

  Hunting, once a passion, became impossible. Sledge could not stand the idea of wounding a bird. He said that killing a deer felt like shooting a cow in a pasture. His father found him weeping after a dove hunt in which he had to finish off a wounded bird. After they talked, his father suggested a replacement hobby: watching birds. Sledge began helping the conservation department with its banding study, and that work sparked his lifelong devotion to ornithology.

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• 6. Scholar and Professor

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  In 1952, Sledge married Jeanne Arceneaux. They had two sons, John in 1957 and Henry in 1965. In 1953 Sledge returned to Auburn as a research assistant, a post he held until 1955. That same year, he earned a Master of Science degree in botany.

  From 1956 to 1960 he studied at the University of Florida while working as a research assistant. He published numerous papers on helminthology and joined the Helminthological Society of Washington in 1956. The University of Florida awarded him a doctorate in biology in 1960. Meanwhile, from 1959 to 1962, he held a job with the Division of Plant Industry of the Florida State Department of Agriculture.

  In the summer of 1962, Alabama College appointed him assistant professor of biology. The school is now the University of Montevallo. He became a full professor in 1970 and stayed until retiring in 1990. His courses included zoology, ornithology and comparative vertebrate anatomy. Students liked him, and he led field trips and collecting outings around town. In 1989, Marion Military Institute, where he had begun his college career, gave him an honorary degree and the rank of colonel.

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• 7. The Book and Its Afterlife

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  Years after Sledge returned from the Pacific, he sat down with his wartime notes and shaped them into a book. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa appeared in 1981 and described his combat experiences in World War II. Filmmakers later drew on it. Ken Burns used it as source material for the PBS documentary The War in 2007. HBO's miniseries The Pacific, released in 2010, portrayed Sledge through the actor Joseph Mazzello.

  Sledge died on the 3rd of March 2001, after a long fight with stomach cancer. He is buried at Pine Crest Cemetery in Mobile.

  The story did not end with his death. His younger son, Henry, became a military historian. In 2025 Henry published The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed: A Father, A Son, and How WWII in the Pacific Shaped Their Lives, expanding on his father's work.

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