WW2 - The Pacific

Eugene Bondurant Sledge was born on November 4, 1923 in Mobile, Alabama. He graduated from Murphy High School in Mobile in May 1942 and entered Marion Military Institute (MMI) in Marion, Alabama, that fall. Sledge enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in December 1942 at MMI and was eventually assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division (K-3-5). He served in the Pacific Theater where he saw action at Peleliu and Okinawa. After the war, Sledge attended Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in the summer of 1949. He returned to Auburn in 1953 where he worked as a research assistant until 1955; that same year he graduated from A.P.I. with a Master of Science degree in Botany. From 1956 to 1960 he attended the University of Florida and worked as a research assistant. He received his doctorate in biology from the University of Florida in 1960. He was employed by the Division of Plant Industries for the Florida State Department of Agriculture from 1959 to 1962. In the summer of 1962, Dr. Sledge was appointed Assistant Professor of Biology at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo). In 1970 he became a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Montevallo, a position he held until his retirement in 1990.

In 1981, Dr. Sledge published an account of his experiences during the Second World War in a book entitled "With the Old Breed: at Peleliu and Okinawa". "With the Old Breed" is now widely recognized as a classic war memoir.

Dr. Sledge died on March 3, 2001. A second memoir, "China Marine: An Infantryman's Life after World War II", was published posthumously in 2002.

http://diglib.auburn.edu/collections/ebsledge/about.html