Devil Dogs: A New History of the Second World War from the Sunday Times Bestselling Author of SBS Saul David

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Exquisite detail…subtly textured… the Pacific War is rendered in painful and poignant detail… A narrative that reads like war in real time. Devil Dogs: First In, Last Out – King Company From The Guadalcanal To The Shores of Japan by Saul David | 9780008395766. For K/3/5, or King Company, the next war was a far longer, bloodier, tougher one, with a high rate of casualties and for the men concerned more than a fair share of horror.

In between they fought in the 'Green Hell' of Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, and across the coral wasteland of Peleliu in the Palau Islands, a campaign described by one K Company veteran as 'thirty days of the meanest, around-the-clock slaughter that desperate men can inflict on each other. Sledge and his NCO comrade RV Burgin are the two threads that run more or less through the whole book: they were lucky enough to survive (Burgin sustained a minor wound to his neck on Okinawa; Sledge was a rare marine to see years of fighting and come home without a Purple Heart). For this work he has combed American government papers and, more importantly, accounts written by the men themselves both at the time (even though it was against regulations to keep a diary) and afterwards. Gripping, intimate, authoritative and far-reaching, this is a unique and incredibly personal narrative of war. Running into a fusillade of the Marines’ machine guns is death with honour; and David recounts a succession of Japanese commanders committing hara-kiri – ritually disembowelling themselves before being beheaded – because of the defeats inflicted on them by the Americans.Fascinating account of how the Pacific war progressed through the involvement of one group of Americans. His recent books include Operation Thunderbolt , which was turned into the movie Entebbe ; Crucible of Hell , picked as a Best Book of 2020 by The Times and The Telegraph ; and SBS: Silent Warriors , which reached No.

But David is alert to the shortcomings on the part of the righteous: an unpopular officer shows cowardice in the face of the enemy, as does an equally unpopular sergeant, raising the question of how such people ever rose to positions of authority in an elite corps in the first place.

A well wrutten and sholarly work, but the seemingly endless biographical details of the participants become somewhat tiresome, and one bottle seems very much like another. A Times History Book of the Year 2022From Sunday Times bestselling historian Saul David, the dramatic tale of the first American troops to take the fight to the enemy in the Second World War, and also the last. In Devil Dogs, award-winning historian Saul David sets the searing experience of K Company into the broader context of the brutal war in the Pacific and does for the U. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. A harrowing account of the USMC King Company as they fight the Imperial Japanese Army from Guadalcanal to Okinawa 1942 - 1945.