BROTHERS IN ARMS – Pacific War

Previously unpublished in France, Eugene B. Sledge's book, Brothers in Arms, is considered by historians and filmmakers as the definitive first-hand account of the Pacific War. Sledge is twenty years old when, together with his comrades of the 1st Marine Division, he lands on the small island of Peleliu, where furious fighting against Japanese troops will unfold. Then comes the assault on the island of Okinawa, the conquest of which will cost the Americans 50,000 men killed or wounded, with a further 25,000 evacuated for post-traumatic stress.

Of Sledge's company, only 26 would survive. Nicknamed "Sledgehammer", the young Marine served on the front line operating a 60 mm mortar, and kept his war diary by taking notes in a pocket edition of the New Testament — the basis of his book published in 1981, which met with immediate success. No one has described the hell of the Pacific War like Sledge. He conceals nothing of the wars of extermination being waged, nor of the destructive effects of that unimaginable violence on young American soldiers. For between the Marines and the Japanese, hatred was total, "a brutal, primitive hatred as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands." Ken Burns devoted an episode to Eugene B. Sledge in his documentary series on the Second World War, and his book inspired the television series by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, The Pacific.

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