| Dave Witzig
Normal Community High School |
 |
At our meeting in February at New Lenox High School Dr. McBride
posed the following question: "Should we make the books we
read for this class more broad." After reading E.B. Sledge's
"With the Old Breed" I say a resounding NO. Here is
how a high school American History textbook presents the battle
of Okinawa in the section titled "Japan Dies Hard":
Okinawa, a well defended Japanese island, was next on the list:
it was needed for closer bases from which to blast and burn
enemy cities and industries. Fighting dragged on from April
to June of 1945. Japanese soldiers, fighting with incredible
courage from their caves, finally sold Okinawa for eighty thousand
American casualties, while suffering far heavier losses themselves.
- Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy, The American
Pageant
What is that! I guess it is implied that American soldiers fought
with "incredible courage." How many millions of students
just gloss over these battles and never understand what war is
like? The smell of rotting corpses. The sounds of hours and hours
of artillery blasts. The taste of water that has an oily film
in it. The feeling of fighting for days with rain soaked clothes
and feet. The fear of running across a slope to help a fallen
marine while being shot at by snipers. The horrors of slipping
down a slick path into a Japanese corpse and becoming covered
with "fat maggots." Sledge writes, "Replete with
violence, shock, blood, gore, and suffering, this was the type
of incident that should be witnessed by anyone who has any delusions
about the glory of war" (307). Our students need to understand
that this is what war is like. Wouldn't it be better to discuss
in detail one battle (like Okinawa) than have a paragraph for
each battle? This book does an incredible job of getting the feel
of war.
Nighttime at war in the Pacific was a nightmare. Sledge describes
how the Japanese would sneak up and attack the marines in hand
to hand combat. One night he nearly shot one of his friends who
forgot to give the password. Sledge recounts, "I reamed out
one of the best friends I ever had" (84). One night Sledge
heard a battle, "where the Japanese had gone into the company
on our flank, came hideous, agonized, and prolonged screams that
defied description. Those wild, primitive, brutish yellings unnerved
me more than what was happening within my own field of vision"
(107). Later Sledge describes how he memorized every section of
the geography in front of him (269). When flares would go off
he would check to make sure that all the corpses were where they
were supposed to be and that a Japanese wasn't playing dead and
then later attacking. The importance of the person keeping watch
was emphasized. When Sam feel asleep his buddy was killed. "He
went to sleep on watch while on the line. As a result his buddy
died and another man would bear the heavy burden of knowing that,
accident though it was, he had pulled the trigger" (108).
How does a person push himself day after day physically with little
to eat and at night it turns into a nightmare! Sledge writes,
"How we kept going and continued fighting I'll never know"
(147). Maybe the answer is found in that someone else was always
counting on you.
Other than the gore and horrifying fighting conditions I was
most drawn to Captain Haldane. Sledge saw him as a great leader
(what a contrast Haldane was to Mac!). We could learn a lot about
his leadership style: he took a sincere interest in the personal
life of his men, disciplined, courageous, self-confident. Sledge
writes of his favorite commander, "Haldane quietly told us
what to do. We loved him for it and did the best job we knew how"
(40-41). When Haldane was killed in action the person who told
Sledge could hardly get the words out. Sledge cried upon learning
of "Ack Ack" death and writes, "We had lost our
leader and our friend. Our lives would never be the same"
(140-141). I have never met a man like Captain Haldane. The compliments
that Sledge gave him were the highest a man could receive.
Other than watching the first twenty minutes of "Saving
Private Ryan" this book vividly reminded me of war (what
a coincidence that as I write this our soldiers are fighting around
the caves of Afghanistan). Other than skim the section in a U.S.
History textbook I believe that having students read sections
of this would be eye opening. The sections on the smells, corpses,
flies, and the nighttime would make teenagers get a feel for real
warfare.
This book also brought up many questions. Have the Japanese written
about the horrors of war from their side? Did any survivors of
Okinawa write and describe life in the caves and the constant
bombardment? What did the Japanese think about the U.S. Soldiers?
I think the main question that I felt as I was reading is this:
what do our surviving World War II veterans (and each day that
number is fewer) think of our society today? Are they proud of
what our country looks like? How do they feel at the small crowds
at the Memorial Day parades? What a great account Sledge left
for us! "With privilege goes responsibility" (315).
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