The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson Page A
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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When the battle was over, the U.S. Navy had suffered its worst single battle losses in its history. The newly formed Sixth Marine Division and Sledge’s veteran First Marine Division were wrecked, with almost half their original strength either killed or wounded. The commander of all U.S. ground forces on Okinawa, General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., became the highest-ranking soldier to die in combat in the Second World War. The destructive potential of thousands of kamikaze suicide bombers, together with the faulty prebattle intelligence that had sorely underestimated the size, armament, and ferocity of the island resistance, created a dread about the upcoming November 1 scheduled assault on the Japanese mainland (Operation Olympic).
Controversy still rages over the morality of dropping the two atomic bombs that ended the war before the American invasions of Kyushu and Honshu. But we forget that President Truman’s decision was largely predicated on avoiding the nightmare that Marines like E. B. Sledge had just endured on Peleliu and Okinawa. If today Americans in the leisure of a long peace wonder whether our grandfathers were too hasty in their decision to resort to atomic weapons, they forget that many veterans of the Pacific wondered why they had to suffer through an Okinawa when the successful test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16 came just a few days after the island was declared secure. Surely the carnage on Okinawa could have been delayed until late summer to let such envisioned weapons convince the Japanese of the futility of prolonging the war.
There are fine memoirs of Okinawa and narrative accounts of the battle’s role in the American victory over Japan, most notably William Manchester’s beautifully written, but controversial and sometimes unreliable, Goodbye, Darkness , and George Feifer’s comprehensive Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb . But E. B. Sledge’s harrowing story remains unmatched, told in a prose that is dignified, without obscenities or even much slang—all the more memorable since the author was not a formal stylist nor given to easy revelations of his own strong passions. John Keegan, Paul Fussel, and Studs Terkel have all praised Sledge’s honesty, especially his explicit acknowledgment that he experienced the same hatred but fought daily against the barbarity that drove others to nearly match the atrocities of their Japanese enemies.
Unlike the case of many postwar memoirs, the accuracy of Sledge’s facts has never been called into question. He does not magnify his own achievements or those of his own Company K. Sledge sometimes uses a few footnotes of explication; often they are heartbreaking asterisks that apprise the reader that the wonderful officer Sledge has just described in the text was later shot or blown up on Peleliu or Okinawa. He reminds his readers that his Marines, being as human as any other soldiers, were capable of great cruelty—“a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew.” But that being said, Sledge’s own moral censure reveals a certain American exceptionalism that such barbarism should be, and usually was, condemned as deviance rather than accepted as the norm—quite different from the Japanese:
In disbelief I stared at the face as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine’s penis and stuffed it into his mouth. My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would field strip their packs and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.
What I find most haunting about With the Old Breed is Sledge’s empathy with those whom he might not have been expected to share a natural affinity, among
When the battle was over, the U.S. Navy had suffered its worst single battle losses in its history. The newly formed Sixth Marine Division and Sledge’s veteran First Marine Division were wrecked, with almost half their original strength either killed or wounded. The commander of all U.S. ground forces on Okinawa, General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., became the highest-ranking soldier to die in combat in the Second World War. The destructive potential of thousands of kamikaze suicide bombers, together with the faulty prebattle intelligence that had sorely underestimated the size, armament, and ferocity of the island resistance, created a dread about the upcoming November 1 scheduled assault on the Japanese mainland (Operation Olympic).
Controversy still rages over the morality of dropping the two atomic bombs that ended the war before the American invasions of Kyushu and Honshu. But we forget that President Truman’s decision was largely predicated on avoiding the nightmare that Marines like E. B. Sledge had just endured on Peleliu and Okinawa. If today Americans in the leisure of a long peace wonder whether our grandfathers were too hasty in their decision to resort to atomic weapons, they forget that many veterans of the Pacific wondered why they had to suffer through an Okinawa when the successful test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16 came just a few days after the island was declared secure. Surely the carnage on Okinawa could have been delayed until late summer to let such envisioned weapons convince the Japanese of the futility of prolonging the war.
There are fine memoirs of Okinawa and narrative accounts of the battle’s role in the American victory over Japan, most notably William Manchester’s beautifully written, but controversial and sometimes unreliable, Goodbye, Darkness , and George Feifer’s comprehensive Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb . But E. B. Sledge’s harrowing story remains unmatched, told in a prose that is dignified, without obscenities or even much slang—all the more memorable since the author was not a formal stylist nor given to easy revelations of his own strong passions. John Keegan, Paul Fussel, and Studs Terkel have all praised Sledge’s honesty, especially his explicit acknowledgment that he experienced the same hatred but fought daily against the barbarity that drove others to nearly match the atrocities of their Japanese enemies.
Unlike the case of many postwar memoirs, the accuracy of Sledge’s facts has never been called into question. He does not magnify his own achievements or those of his own Company K. Sledge sometimes uses a few footnotes of explication; often they are heartbreaking asterisks that apprise the reader that the wonderful officer Sledge has just described in the text was later shot or blown up on Peleliu or Okinawa. He reminds his readers that his Marines, being as human as any other soldiers, were capable of great cruelty—“a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew.” But that being said, Sledge’s own moral censure reveals a certain American exceptionalism that such barbarism should be, and usually was, condemned as deviance rather than accepted as the norm—quite different from the Japanese:
In disbelief I stared at the face as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine’s penis and stuffed it into his mouth. My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would field strip their packs and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.
What I find most haunting about With the Old Breed is Sledge’s empathy with those whom he might not have been expected to share a natural affinity, among
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