책冊

Reading Sledge's "With the Old Breed" is both a re-reading of the history of the Pacific War and a look at the grand event of war from a human perspective. Sledge served in the 5th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division and directly experienced the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. He recorded what he saw and experienced in a small notebook on the battlefield, and after the war, he completed his memoir based on those records. The book was published in 1981 and has since been regarded as an important work among memoirs of the Pacific War. However, the value of this book does not lie solely in its vivid description of combat. Rather, Sledge revives the human aspect that is often lost in war. On a map, Peleliu and Okinawa are merely small islands, and in military history, they are organized by specific dates and operation names. But for the soldiers who fought on those islands, one island was their entire world.

Another meaning of the Pacific War shown by Peleliu and Okinawa

The Battle of Peleliu might seem like a small battle in the grand scheme of the Pacific War. However, in Sledge's records, it was by no means small. Amidst the harsh terrain of the coral island, scorching heat, water shortages, and incessant shelling, soldiers experienced the limits of human endurance. In a battlefield, even an island with minimal strategic value was a place where a dying person's entire life was at stake. Okinawa holds an even more complex meaning. This battle was one of the last major battles before the invasion of mainland Japan, but it transcended the framework of war as a clash between armies. The residents of Okinawa also became direct victims of the war. As the battlefield overlapped with civilian living spaces, the war was no longer solely the concern of combatants.

At this point, another face of the Pacific War emerges. The longer the war drags on, the more the nation needs not just its military. The entire society, including labor, food, supplies, industrial facilities, transportation, and even women's labor, is aligned with the needs of the war. In imperialist wars, residents of colonies and occupied territories are also forcibly incorporated into that system. Humans are transformed not into individuals with their own lives, but into numbers representing military strength and labor.

But where were Koreans in this war?

For Koreans, the most important question in looking at the Pacific War begins here. While Sledge was fighting the Japanese army in Peleliu and Okinawa, the Korean Peninsula was also within the Japanese Empire's war system. However, Koreans were not in the same position as American soldiers. American soldiers were combatants who participated in a war decided by their own nation, but Koreans were colonial subjects who had lost their independent nation. As the war expanded, Japan further incorporated Korea as a base for supplying human and material resources for the empire's war effort. After the National General Mobilization Law was enacted in 1938, various forms of human resource mobilization took place in Korea, and Korean laborers, soldiers, and civilian military personnel moved to mainland Japan and war zones. This mobilization occurred within a national mobilization system that is difficult to explain solely through the framework of individual free choice.

However, this history should not be recorded only in numbers. Behind the hundreds of thousands and millions were individual lives. There were people who had to leave their hometowns, people who were separated from their families, people who had to work in unfamiliar factories, people who were dragged to the battlefield, and people who never returned home. The vast statistics of war can easily erase the lives of those individuals, but history is ultimately about remembering that each of those numbers was a human being.

The war damage suffered by Koreans was not 'damage in the rear.'

It is insufficient to understand the suffering of Koreans as merely indirect damage incurred in the rear during wartime. Koreans were mobilized as labor to sustain Japan's war economy, and some were directly incorporated into the war as soldiers and military personnel. Among women, some suffered severe human rights abuses within the Japanese military comfort station system. However, it is also not enough to record the history of Koreans solely as a history of suffering. Among those forcibly mobilized, there were also people who resisted in various ways, such as escaping, refusing work, and engaging in strikes and slowdowns. Colonial residents were not passive beings who moved according to the empire's demands. They, too, made choices and acted to protect their lives.

This fact is important. Describing people who experienced colonial rule solely as helpless victims, in fact, erases their human agency. The fact of being oppressed and the fact of resisting are not contradictory. Rather, the stronger the oppression, the more humans tried to protect their dignity in various ways.

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Koreans were also victims.

When we talk about the final scenes of the Pacific War, we recall Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the two cities, and Japan eventually surrendered. This event caused immense damage to Japanese civilians. However, Koreans also lived in those cities. A significant number of Koreans who had been mobilized to Japan for labor were victims of the atomic bombs. While there are differences in the exact scale depending on data and estimation methods, the fact that a considerable number of Korean atomic bomb victims existed is difficult to deny.

Here lies the tragic irony of the Pacific War. Koreans were mobilized to mainland Japan for the Japanese Empire's war, and there they experienced the final devastation of the war. Colonial rule, war, forced mobilization, and atomic bomb damage were connected in a single historical chain. Therefore, the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should not be explained solely as Japanese suffering, nor, conversely, should only Korean suffering be emphasized. It is necessary to look at the complex reality that Japanese civilians, Korean laborers, and other foreign laborers and prisoners of war suffered together.

The 'Hidden Meaning' of the Pacific War

If the Pacific War is understood only as a war between the United States and Japan, a much broader historical structure is overlooked. The Pacific War was a conflict between the United States and Japan, and at the same time, it was part of the expansionist war that the Japanese Empire pursued in Asia and the Pacific region. The Manchurian Incident and the establishment of Manchukuo in 1931, the expansion of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the war on the Chinese mainland, the advance into Southeast Asia, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 were not isolated events. As the expansion of the Japanese Empire and the conflict of interests with existing powers such as the United States and Britain overlapped, the scope of the war gradually expanded.

Therefore, multiple wars were superimposed within the Pacific War. There was a hegemonic rivalry between the United States and Japan, a long-term war between Japan and China, and wars fought in the colonies and occupied territories of Southeast Asia. In the process, residents of colonies, including Korea and Taiwan, were incorporated into the Japanese Empire's war system. Viewed this way, the Pacific War was not a war between nation-states. It was a complex history in which empires clashed, empires utilized colonies and occupied territories as resources for war, and in the process, countless civilians became victims of the war.

What Sledge ultimately shows is that even the 'enemy' is human.

Another issue that comes to mind while reading "With the Old Breed" is the fact that the enemy is also human. For Sledge, the Japanese soldiers were clearly enemies who killed his comrades and attacked him. In the reality of battle, fear and hatred of the enemy were real. However, documenting the war after it ends is a different matter than simply leaving the enemy as a monster. Japanese soldiers also operated within a military system created by the state, and among them were ordinary people with different life circumstances than the ruling class who chose war. This is the difficulty of remembering war. Recognizing the enemy as human does not absolve them of responsibility for their actions. Conversely, denying the enemy's humanity does not justify the violence of war. Rather, when we can see the enemy as human, the inhumanity of war itself becomes even clearer.

War corrupts human judgment from the moment it turns people into targets to be killed. The reason Sledge's records endure is that he not only documented the heroic scenes of war but also showed how humans change amidst hatred and fear.

Reading "With the Old Breed" in Korea

For Korean readers, Sledge's book poses a slightly different question. What was happening in Korea when Sledge was experiencing the war in Peleliu and Okinawa? The people of the Korean Peninsula were living under Japan's wartime system. Some were responsible for food production in rural areas, some moved to factories and mines in mainland Japan, and some were incorporated into the military and its supply system. Some left their families for unfamiliar lands, and some never returned. From this perspective, the Pacific War was by no means a distant war unrelated to Korea. It was at the heart of the colonial history directly experienced by our parents' and grandparents' generations.

The liberation on August 15, 1945, came with the end of that war. However, liberation was not the moment when all problems were solved. In the place where the Japanese Empire disappeared, a new order of US military government and Soviet military government, the Cold War, and division emerged, and a few years later, another war broke out on the Korean Peninsula. Therefore, reading the Pacific War in modern Korean history does not end the story in 1945. It is necessary to view 1945 within the continuous history of colonial rule and liberation, division, and the Korean War.

Reasons to remember war history

The reason to read 《With the Old Breed》 is not just because the battle scenes are vivid. This book changes the very questions we ask about war. We often first ask who won the war. However, if we look a little deeper into war history, different questions become necessary. Who decided the war? Who carried out the war? Who benefited from that war? And who paid the price? Political leaders decide wars, and soldiers carry out orders. The state mobilizes its citizens and colonial residents. But the ultimate price of war is paid by nameless soldiers and civilians.

Especially in colonies, the burden is distributed even more unequally. This is because those who do not have the political right to determine the direction of the war themselves bear the cost of a war decided by the empire. In that sense, the Pacific War is an important window for understanding modern Korean history. This is because it can be viewed within a long historical flow, from the forced mobilization and military mobilization of Koreans, to labor sites in mainland Japan, the atomic bomb damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, liberation and repatriation, and the subsequent division.

If we only remember the history of the nations that won wars, then war becomes a story of heroes. However, if we also remember the lives of the soldiers who died in that war, the laborers who were forcibly mobilized, the colonial residents who lost their homes, and the civilians who were bombed and nuked, then war takes on a completely different appearance. Ultimately, perhaps the heaviest question that 《With the Old Breed》 leaves us with is this: Will we remember the victory or defeat of war, or will we remember the price humanity had to pay for that victory or defeat? Reading this book in Korea means re-asking that question of our own history. And at the end of that question lies both the image of a soldier who died on some nameless island in the Pacific and the image of a person from colonial Joseon who was dragged into the empire's war against their will.