With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa

This makes an excellent companion piece for Robert Leckie's Helmet For My Pillow; they could also be two parts of a duologie, with this book slightly overlapping the end of Leckie's story and then continuing on to Okinawa.

With The Old Breed follows the same basic pattern as Leckie, being largely an account of the experiences of a single man and the people he fights alongside (the the accounts of bootcamp in books are amusingly similar). It provides slightly more in the way of context than the other book, but it is still not a dry history book. Eugene Sledge's story also provides a stronger picture of the anger and frustration that the soldiers felt towards the Japanese troops whose ferocity and dedication led the US soldiers to dread the prospect of taking the fight to Japan itself.

This is another book to thoroughly recommend to anyone who wants to have a clearer picture of what happened in the Pacific in World War 2.

That I read in Florida at the authors former school probably increased my empathy & my rating.