Eugene Sledge – A Marine in the Hell of the Pacific

Alongside veterans of the battles of Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester, new recruits landed for whom the assault on Peleliu represented their baptism of fire. Among them was Eugene B. Sledge, a young mortar gunner, a volunteer, from Mobile, Alabama. According to the planned schedule, the conquest of Peleliu was not supposed to last more than three days.

Alas, the fierce Japanese resistance, errors of strategy and command, and a dangerous mixture of optimism and arrogance on the part of the American high command would plunge Eugene Sledge and his brothers-in-arms into the turmoil of a Dantesque battle… Certainly, so extraordinary is it, the story of Eugene Sledge would merit the qualifier of novelesque.

However, the human drama portrayed in this volume — which will satisfy the curiosity of the general reader as much as that of the informed historian — far exceeds fiction and remains deeply rooted in historical reality. Throughout the narrative, abundantly illustrated with maps and more than one hundred period photographs, entirely unpublished, the reader will be plunged into the heart of the fighting and will relive, seen from ground level, a little-known episode of the Second World War on the Pacific Front: the Battle of Peleliu, as experienced and later recounted by Eugene Sledge in his war memoirs, published in 1981…