'An Invention of Hell'

“H-hour, 0800. Long jets of red flame mixed with thick black smoke rushed out of the muzzles of the huge battleships’ 16-inch guns with a noise like a thunderclap. The giant shells tore through the air toward the island, roaring like locomotives. “‘Boy, it must cost a fortune to fire them 16-inch babies,’ said a buddy near me. “‘Screw the expense,’ growled another.” It’s the morning of September 15, 1944, off the coast of Peleliu, an island in the Palau archipelago in the western Pacific, some five hundred miles east of the Philippines. Eugene Sledge (1923-2001) was a twenty-three-year-old mortarman, stretcher bearer and, like all Marines, a rifleman, from Alabama serving with the 1st Marine Division. The passage above opens Chapter Four, “Assault into Hell,” of With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), the finest World War II memoir I have read. Here Sledge describes the landing craft hitting the beach and his own awkward lurch ashore: “At that instant a burst of machine-gun…