The Old Breed of Marine: A World War II Diary (review)

Not all the Marines who served in the Pacific War were as gallant as machine gunner Manila John Basilone, as colorful as Lou Diamond, or as youthfully innocent as Gene Sledge. The men of the 1st Marine Division during World War II were known as the "Old Breed"; even by their standards, Abe Felber was an old man: he was thirty-five when he landed on Guadalcanal. He grew up in the slums of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the son of Jewish immigrants, and joined the Marine Corps Reserve in May 1931 at age twenty-four. Called to active service at the end of 1940, he left for the Pacific with the 1st Marine Division's artillery regiment, the 11th Marines.

Felber was the first sergeant for the regimental headquarters battery. His wartime service included the Guadalcanal and New Britain operations. As senior enlisted man of his unit, his existence was much less cathartic than that of a cannoneer on the gun line or a spotter attached to one of the rifle companies. He had time to maintain a detailed journal and double as his unit's official photographer. His entries are incredibly dense and detailed. Taken in full, they give one the same sense of immediacy as Richard Tregaskis's 1943 dispatch, Guadalcanal Diary. In Felber's case, the atmosphere is generally mundane and consumed by paperwork—pay matters, promotions, and unit punishment.

What your reviewer found most impressive in Old Breed of Marine was its candor. Felber clearly was not writing for the edification of the Marine Corps. He witnessed plenty of heroism, for sure, but he also saw and recorded in his war journal instances of Marines breaking down under fire, falling asleep on post, and facing courts-martial for other offenses. "It is not safe to move about after dark," he writes on 10 August 1942. The following night, a Marine on the line kills another Marine by mistake.

Victory in the Pacific was not preordained, the author reminds us. It was a near-run thing at times, in fact. "I decided to sleep no more," Felber writes during September 1942 on Guadalcanal, after receiving instructions to prepare for evacuation. "I sat there miserably, realizing that if we lost the airfield [Henderson Field], and the Japs brought in planes, we might be killed or chased off the island." A month later, almost to the day, the situation worsens: "An admiral arrived today," Felber reports. "I sure hope that the fleet he commands is not far behind. The next few days are going to be very tough ones. They may be my last."

Felber made it through the war with his diaries and photographs. His son edited out two-thirds of the diary and embedded many of Felber's pictures within the text. William Bartsch, an academic historian with expertise in the Pacific War, added eighteen helpful pages of annotations to the back matter. The result, Old Breed of Marine, is a welcome, yet limited, addition to the voluminous collection of first-person writings on the Pacific War. Felber's diaries may not give us a true feeling for the savagery of the battles in the Pacific or the interplay of front-line fighting men, but they do further our understanding of the war.