History Channel - Unsung Heroes Sledgehammer - Old Breed Marine (2001)

Heroism doesn't wait for cameras and headlines. Some of the greatest heroes perform their feats unseen and unsung. “Sledgehammer Old Breed Marine” is an unforgettable testimony of an enlisted man's uncensored window into the stink and horror endured by those on the front lines. Just 20 years old when he joined the Marine Corps, Private Eugene B. Sledge joined the war in the summer of 1944 just in time to participate in the two bloodiest campaigns in the Pacific War. This is his story, and the story of his comrades in the 1st Marine Division… A biography of Private Eugene B. Sledge, U.S. Marine Corps, who served in a rifle company and spent four months engaged in close combat with the Japanese. Sledge fought in the Battle of Peleliu and on Okinawa during World War II as a PFC and wrote of his horrific experiences in his book “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.” The man who wrote the book hailed as the finest account of an enlisted man's war speaks on camera about his harrowing experiences in the South Pacific. An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war's famous 1st Marine Division-3d Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, “With the Old Breed” captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill – and came to love – his fellow man. Eugene Sledge's memoirs have been immortalised forever as the inspiration for HBO's critically acclaimed mini-series The Pacific, but this is the true story of a marksman's fight for life in two major battles told by the man himself. The stirring words of his classic book and Sledge's brutal on-camera testimony provide an hour you won't forget.

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