This paper presents a new scheme for identification and control of an electro-hydraulic system using recurrent neural networks. The proposed neural network has the nonlinear block control form (NBC form) structure. A sliding mode control technique is applied then to design a discontinuous controller, which is able to track a force reference trajectory. Due to the presence of an unmodelled dynamics, the standard sliding mode (SSM) controller produces oscillations (or "chattering") in the closed-loop system. The relative new approach high order sliding mode (HOSM) is used to eliminate the undesired chattering effect. Simulations are presented to illustrate the results