Eugene Bondurant Sledge (November 4, 1923 – March 3, 2001) was a United States Marine, university professor, and author. His 1981 memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa chronicled his combat experiences during World War II and was used as source material for the Ken Burns PBS documentary The War (2007), as well as the HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), in which he is portrayed by Joseph Mazzello.
Biography
Early life
Eugene Bondurant Sledge was born on November 4, 1923, in Mobile, Alabama, to Edward Simmons Sledge, a physician, and Mary Frank Sturdivant Sledge, dean of women students at Huntingdon College. He graduated from Murphy High School in Mobile in the spring of 1942. His older brother, Edward Simmons Sledge II, was born on September 10, 1920, and enlisted in the United States Army. He went on to serve in the Western European theater, and left the Army with the rank of Major.
Eugene was a sickly child and lost two years of schooling due to rheumatic fever which left him with a heart murmur. However once the condition subsided, his family encouraged him to enroll in college rather than join the military. His close childhood friend Sidney Phillips also wrote to Sledge from Guadalcanal and urged him not to join anything.
Military career
In the fall of 1942, Sledge enrolled in the Marion Military Institute, in Marion, Alabama, but then he chose to volunteer for the U.S. Marine Corps in December 1942. He was placed in the V-12 officer training program and was sent to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he and half of his detachment "flunked out" so they would be allowed to serve their time as enlistees and not "miss the war".
Once he was out of school, he was assigned duty as an enlisted man in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division (K/3/5), where he served with Corporal R.V. Burgin and Private First Class Merriell "Snafu" Shelton. He rose to the rank of corporal in the Pacific Theater and saw combat as a 60 mm mortarman at Peleliu and Okinawa. When fighting grew too close for effective use of the mortar, he served in other duties such as stretcher bearer and as a rifleman.
During his service, Sledge kept notes of what happened in his pocket-sized New Testament. When the war ended, he compiled these notes which would, many years later, become the memoir With the Old Breed. After being posted to Beijing after the war, he was discharged from the Marine Corps in February 1946 with the rank of corporal.
Post-war
After the war ended, Sledge attended Auburn University (then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute), where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration in the summer of 1949.
Sledge had a hard time readjusting to civilian life:
As I strolled the streets of Mobile, civilian life seemed so strange. People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things. Few seemed to realize how blessed they were to be free and untouched by the horrors of war. To them, a veteran was a veteran—all were the same, whether one man had survived the deadliest combat or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform.
Once an avid hunter, Sledge gave up his hobby. He found that he could not endure the thought of wounding a bird and said that killing a deer felt like shooting a cow in a pasture. His father found him weeping after a dove hunt in which Sledge had to kill a wounded dove, and in the ensuing conversations he told his father he could no longer tolerate seeing any suffering. A key turning point in his life and career followed when his father advised him that he could substitute bird watching as a hobby. Sledge started to assist the conservation department in its banding study efforts, the origin of his well-known passion for the science of ornithology.
When he enrolled at Auburn University, the clerk at the Registrar's office asked him if the Marine Corps had taught him anything useful. Sledge replied:
Lady, there was a killing war. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill Japs and try to survive. Now, if that don't fit into any academic course, I'm sorry. But some of us had to do the killing—and most of my buddies got killed or wounded.
Sledge married Jeanne Arceneaux in 1952 and the couple had two sons, John (born 1957) and Henry (born 1965). He returned to Auburn in 1953, where he worked as a research assistant until 1955. That same year he graduated from API with a Master of Science degree in botany.