He conveyed the terror of combat on Peleliu and Okinawa and recounted the atrocities on both sides. In this no-holds-barred book, Sledge does an incredible job of making readers understand the tragedy taking place, and how war makes men do things they would never have imagined doing. Sledge served with a mortar team in the 5th Marines. Eugene Sledge published his memoir, With the Old Breed, in 1981 after using clandestine notes he made in his wartime Bible to reconstruct his memories. Leckie has few rivals among memoirists in the Pacific Theater but his comrade in the 1st Marine Division, Eugene Sledge, left us with what is widely considered to be one of the best accounts of war from any era. No student of the Pacific War can afford to overlook it. His memoir surpassed them all in sales, however, because of its brutal honesty and directness. Following the publication of Leckie’s memoir, he authored nearly 40 other works of fiction and nonfiction, including several historical studies of campaigns in the Pacific War. He also included an extremely rare glimpse of what a marine felt when suffering from what now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Leckie went on to give a vivid picture of the confused jungle combat on Guadalcanal and the savage combat on hellish Peleliu. Above all, Ernie showed America a heroic and defiant Britain that soldiered on. Ernie visited Royal Air Force airfields to recount pilots’ heroics, but he also told of his stops in sleepy farm towns which were now the front lines in feeding a beleaguered nation. Published in 1941, this book was a compilation of Ernie’s reporting from England in 1940 as that nation struggled under the daily German bombing raids and desperate shortages caused by the U-boat menace. Here are four of our “can’t miss” favorites:Įrnie Pyle was probably the most famous of all war correspondents he also gave us one of the first eyewitness accounts of the fight against Hitler in Ernie Pyle in England. But with so many out there it can be hard to choose which ones to tackle first. World War II easily spawned more memoirs than any other twentieth century conflict by virtue of its size alone. Memoirs immerse us in small pieces of the war, showing us both its incredible brutality and the struggle for participants to retain their humanity.

The memoir genre is uniquely suited to pulling in the reader and giving them a first-person view of the author’s experiences. We have always enjoyed reading a good war memoir.

If You Survive by George Wilson