Two eminent chroniclers of the World War II combat experience—one an artist, both of them authors—passed away in 2001. Their legacies remain, however, for all time in paint and ink.
The artist from Texas was covering the war for Life magazine. The youngster from Alabama had dropped out of college to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. Neither was aware of the other's existence. But on 15 September 1944, they both landed against heavy opposition on a small Japanese-- held island called Peleliu in the western Pacific.
Fifty-seven years later, Tom Lea, the Texas artist, and Eugene B. Sledge, the Alabama college kid, died within weeks of each other—Lea on 29 January 2001 at age 93, and Sledge, who was 77, on 3 March. Over the years, Lea gained international recognition as an artist and author. Sledge, who became a college professor, wrote what many consider the war finest memoir of infantry combat.
The Peleliu campaign, which Admiral Bull Halsey had recommended canceling, turned into one of the bloodiest of the Pacific War, and Lea's painting of a mortally wounded Marine staggering on the beach, his arm shattered by a Japanese mortar burst, evokes images of "a landscape turned slightly red," as a Union soldier described the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War.
Sledge, a 60-mm mortarman with K Company, 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, never forgot the brutality of the combat on Peleliu, and, in later years, turned down all requests to revisit the island.
When the atomic bomb ended the war, Lea, who had been on the USS Hornet (CV-8) before she went down in October 1942 and had covered the war in Europe and China before the Peleliu landing, was in El Paso waiting to go back to the Pacific; Sledge, who endured yet another island campaign after Peleliu—Okinawa—was with his outfit getting ready for the invasion of Japan.
After the war, Lea resumed his painting and, when he felt a need to express himself even more, began to write. Hollywood filmed two of his novels—The Wonderful Country and The Brave Bulls. Check out The Wonderful Country some time and watch for the barber who cuts Robert Mitchum's hair—it's Tom Lea in a cameo role.
Sledge came home, earned a Ph.D. in zoology, and then taught for many years at the University of Montevallo in Alabama. In 1981, With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa was published to wide critical acclaim. Paul Fussell and John Keegan called it one of the finest combat memoirs to emerge from the war. Sledge dedicated the book to his beloved company commander, Captain Andrew A. Haldane, killed in action on Peleliu. That same year the book came out, I served in an attack squadron with Haldane's nephew, Chief Warrant Officer Steve Moore, another good Marine. The Corps indeed is linked by generations.
Although I met both late in their lives, I corresponded with them, shared books, marveled at their modesty, and accumulated a store of wonderful memories.
I was at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia the night that then-candidate George W. Bush ended his acceptance speech with a quote from his friend Tom Lea, and I was at the Naval Institute’s 1996 Annual Meeting when Eugene Sledge, accepting a special award from the Marine Corps Historical Foundation, said that if the United States ever puts women in frontline infantry units he hoped that Patricia Schoeder (the former Democratic representative from Colorado) would lead the charge. He had strong opinions on the reality of combat.
As Tom got older, I tried to limit my intrusions on his time. Our final contact came last year when I sent him a copy of The Cowboy from the Wild Horse Prairie by Bobby Cavazos, a member of a distinguished family of King Ranch vaqueros (kinenos) that has worked cattle on the ranch for generations.
My final conversation with Dr. Sledge came just before I retired from the Naval Institute last summer. We agreed to meet “sometime soon” in Montevallo.
Now they both are gone, and I never will get to ask Tom any more questions about the great strain of horses that the Spaniards brought to the new world from Andalusia or discuss with Dr. Sledge the merits of John Masters’ memoir Bugles and a Tiger. I will miss them.
Over the years, many people asked Lea about the painting of the Marine in camouflage headed for the beach at Peleliu. Did the features come from a relative—or someone he knew? To all, he replied: “No, I just glimpsed him through the smoke on the way and I painted what I saw. I don’t know who he was.”
But I do. Although they never met, then or later, on that terrible morning in 1944, Tom Lea glimpsed Eugene Sledge.
A graduate of West Point, Colonel Greeley flew 20 years with the Marine Corps. In 1989, he joined the Proceedings/Naval History staff as a senior editor after a tour with Aviation Week & Space Technology. He knew and wrote about Tom Lea and Eugene Sledge.