Eugene Sledge. Un Marine dans L'enfer du Pacifique

On Friday 15 September 1944, after three days' intensive preliminary bombardment of the Japanese defences, the Old Breed , the 1st Marine Division, landed on the Island of Peleliu, in the Palaos Archipelago. The Marines' objective was to neutralise the island's garrison and capture the Japanese airfield in order to secure the northern flank of General MacArthur's army, advancing on its way to re-conquering the Philippines. New recruits, for whom the assault on Peleliu was their baptism of fire, landed alongside the hardened veterans of Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester. Among them was Eugene B. Sledge, a young mortar servant, a volunteer recruit from Mobile, Alabama.

According to the plans, capturing Peleliu was not to take more than three days. Unfortunately stubborn Japanese resistance, strategic and command mistakes together with a disastrous mix of optimism and arrogance on the part of American headquarters precipitated Eugene Sledge and his brothers in arms into the nightmare of an apocalyptic battle.

Eugene Sledge's story certainly deserves to be called fabulous, it is so extraordinary. The human tragedy depicted however in this book which will satisfy the ordinary public as it will do the informed reader, is well beyond the realms of fiction and remains profoundly anchored in historical reality.
All throughout the account, abundantly supplemented with maps and more than a hundred period photographs, all unpublished, the reader is plunged into the heart of this fighting and will relive an unknown episode of WWII on the Pacific front, the Battle of Peleliu, as it was lived and afterwards related by Eugene Sledge in his war memoirs, published in 1981.