Like Helmet For My Pillow, I decided to read With the Old Breed after watching The Pacific on HBO. This book was written by Sledge later in life, and was apparently originally intended as an account for his family to learn about his war experience.
The book came highly recommended, with a number of sources naming it one of the top WWII memoirs available. After reading it, I would completely agree. I thoroughly enjoyed every page. Like Helmet For My Pillow, Sledge's book addresses the points of the war experience that the mini-series didn't--specifically getting to know Sledge as a person as well as his experience in boot camp. Sledge's descriptions are amazing, and I think that they express the horrors of jungle warfare as well as they can be expressed on a page. He spares the reader no horrors, and a few of the images really stuck with me, including the extraction of gold teeth from a still-living Japanese soldier and the experience of one of Sledge's comrades who fell down a muddy slope into a pile of decomposing corpses. Sledge also does not spare himself in his description of the war (which was a major problem I had with Leckie's book). He fully admits to his fears, his hatred of the Japanese that developed as he fought them, and his gradual desensitization to things like the looting of bodies. All of that made the book a lot more real for me.
I had virtually no problems with the book other than that outside of a few people almost no one was named in the book. I can understand why he would want to keep people anonymous, but at times it made things somewhat difficult to follow.
This was one of my favourite war memoirs, and I would recommend it to anyone (over and above Helmet For My Pillow).
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