After a brief stint at the Georgia Institute of Technology in an officers’ training program in 1943-44, he left the program to serve in the ranks as an enlisted man. Sledge graduated from Murphy High School in Mobile in 1942 and entered Marion Military Institute in Marion, Perry County.

Two of Sledge’s ancestors on his mother’s side served as officers in the Confederate States Army during the Civil War, and Sledge maintained a lifelong interest in that conflict. As a boy, Sledge spent many hours exploring Mobile Bay waterways observing nature (his father taught him to describe birds, animals, and features of the landscape-training that came in handy in his career as a biologist) and looking for Civil War relics. Sledge grew up in Georgia Cottage, an antebellum house on the outskirts of Mobile that once had been owned by nineteenth-century novelist Augusta Jane Evans.

His mother was the daughter of Ellen Rush Sturdivant, the dean of women at Huntingdon College in Montgomery. Sledge’s father was a physician with undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Inside the state, he also was a professor of biology popular with students at the University of Montevallo, where he taught for many years.Įugene Bondurant Sledge was born in Mobile on November 4, 1923, to Edward Simmons Sledge and Mary Frank Sturdivant. Mobile native Eugene Sledge (1923-2001) is renowned outside of Alabama largely for his graphic portrayal of combat in the Pacific during World War II, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.

Eugene b sledge with the old breed