Early life Eugene Bondurant Sledge was born on November 4, 1923, in
Mobile, Alabama, to Edward Simmons Sledge, a physician, and Mary Frank
Sturdivant Sledge, dean of women students at
Huntingdon College. In 1935 his family moved to
Georgia Cottage in Mobile. He graduated from
Murphy High School in Mobile in the spring of 1942. His older brother, Edward Simmons Sledge II, was born on September 10, 1920, and was commissioned as an officer in the
United States Army after graduating as a cadet from
The Citadel. During World War II, he served on the
Western Front as part of the
741st Tank Battalion, fighting at
Omaha Beach and the
Battle of the Bulge. Edward II was awarded three
Purple Hearts, two
Bronze Stars, and a
Silver Star during his service, and left the Army with the rank of Major. He also provided an interview to
Cornelius Ryan while Ryan was writing the script for
The Longest Day. Eugene was a sickly child, and lost two years of schooling due to
rheumatic fever which left him with a
heart murmur. However, once the condition subsided, his family encouraged him to enroll in college rather than join the military, believing that he would become "cannon fodder" as he described it. His close childhood friend
Sidney Phillips also wrote to Sledge from
Guadalcanal, and urged him not to enlist.
Military career In the fall of 1942, Sledge enrolled in the
Marion Military Institute, in
Marion, Alabama, but then chose to volunteer for the U.S. Marine Corps in December 1942. As a compromise with his parents, who requested he seek out a technical officer's position, Sledge was placed in the
V-12 officer training program and was sent to the
Georgia Institute of Technology. However, he and half of his detachment intentionally flunked out by their first semester so they would be allowed to enter immediate service as enlistees and not "miss the war". Once he was out of school, he was assigned to duty as an enlisted man in K Company,
3rd Battalion, 5th Marines,
1st Marine Division (K/3/5), where he served with Corporal
R.V. Burgin and Private First Class
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton. He and Phillips briefly reunited with each other when Sledge was transported to
Pavuvu two weeks before Phillips returned home via a lottery draw. Sledge rose to the rank of
corporal in the
Pacific Theater and saw combat as a
60 mm mortarman at
Peleliu and
Okinawa. When fighting grew too close for effective use of the mortar, he served in other duties, such as stretcher bearer During his service, Sledge kept notes of what happened in his pocket-sized
New Testament. When the war ended, he compiled these notes which would, many years later, become the memoir
With the Old Breed. After being posted to
Beijing after the war, he was discharged from the Marine Corps in February 1946 with the rank of
corporal.
Post-war After the war ended, Sledge attended
Auburn University (then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute), where he was a member of the
Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He received a
Bachelor of Science degree in
business administration in the summer of 1949. Sledge had a hard time readjusting to civilian life: As I strolled the streets of Mobile, civilian life seemed so strange. People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things. Few seemed to realize how blessed they were to be free and untouched by the horrors of war. To them, a veteran was a veteran—all were the same, whether one man had survived the deadliest combat or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform. Once an avid hunter, Sledge gave up his hobby; he found that he could not endure the thought of wounding a bird, and said that killing a deer felt like shooting a cow in a pasture. His father found him weeping after a dove hunt in which Sledge had to kill a wounded dove, and in the ensuing conversations he told his father he could no longer tolerate seeing any suffering. A key turning point in his life and career followed when his father advised him that he could substitute
bird watching as a hobby. Sledge started to assist the conservation department in its banding study efforts, the origin of his well-known passion for the science of
ornithology. When he enrolled at Auburn University, the clerk at the Registrar's office asked him if the Marine Corps had taught him anything useful. Sledge replied: Lady, there was a killing war. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill Japs and try to survive. Now, if that don't fit into any academic course, I'm sorry. But some of us had to do the killing—and most of my buddies got killed or wounded. Sledge married Jeanne Arceneaux (died December 2023) in 1952 and the couple had two sons, John (born 1957) and Henry (a military historian, born 1965). Henry published his book expanding on his father's work, entitled,
The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed: A Father, A Son, and How WWII in the Pacific Shaped Their Lives in 2025. Eugene Sledge returned to Auburn in 1953, where he worked as a research assistant until 1955. That same year he graduated from API with a
Master of Science degree in
botany. In the summer of 1962, Sledge was appointed assistant professor of biology at Alabama College (now the
University of Montevallo). In 1970, he became a professor, a position he held until his retirement in 1990. He taught
zoology,
ornithology,
comparative vertebrate anatomy, and other courses during his long tenure there. Sledge was popular with his students, and organized field trips and collections around town. In 1989, he received an honorary degree and rank of colonel from Marion Military Institute.
Death Sledge died after a long battle with
stomach cancer on March 3, 2001. He is buried at Pine Crest Cemetery in Mobile. ==Bibliography==