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

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These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. He draws heavily on the memoir of Eugene B Sledge, or “Sledgehammer”, who saw most of the fighting that David describes and who became, effectively, the unit’s official chronicler. David has a claim to be our finest living military historian, with a string of highly acclaimed books about a range of conflicts behind him. A harrowing account of the USMC King Company as they fight the Imperial Japanese Army from Guadalcanal to Okinawa 1942 - 1945.

David chose this unit of men because, with inevitably massive personnel changes, it was in action from the beginning to the end of the Pacific war: from Guadacanal, on the outer limit of Japanese expansion and a relatively short hop from the north coast of Australia, in August 1942, to Okinawa in the summer of 1945 via New Britain, off New Guinea, and Peleliu, east of the Philippines.David recounts in this stirring saga the WWII campaigns of Company K, the 1st Marine Division unit … Skillfully plumbing the rich array of firsthand accounts by Company K veterans, David vividly describes pillbox raids, accidental deaths, and hellish jungle conditions, and draws incisive portraits of Marine officers and their command decisions.

Sledge struggled to find a publisher for his memoir when he first tried in the late 1970s: now that just about everyone is dead (though a gratifying number of the survivors lived well into their nineties), their astonishing bravery and endurance are nearly incomprehensible to a generation whose principal concern is paying their gas bills, and their recollections have a rarity value that makes them highly prized. The difficult mountainous ground, filth, squalor, smell of rotting corpses, the humidity, the endless artillery and mortar attacks made it one of the hardest campaigns the Amercican forces had to endure. Fascinating account of how the Pacific war progressed through the involvement of one group of Americans.They landed on the beaches of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942 - the first US ground offensive of the war - and were present when Okinawa, Japan's most southerly prefecture, finally fell to American troops after a bitter struggle in June 1945. 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. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. It covers all the same stuff in Ambrose's Pacific, from Guadalcanal, to New Britain, Peliu, Iwa Jima and Okinawa, with a brief mention of the naval battles. 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. Specialising as they did in amphibious operations, the US Marines played a vital part in taking the fight directly to the enemy, as one heavily fortified and unforgiving island after another had to be flushed clean of Japanese soldiers as the Americans made their advance towards the home islands of Japan.There is the shock one marine feels at seeing another pulling the gold teeth from a Japanese corpse, and the even greater shock of a marine deciding, until strongly advised otherwise, not to take a severed Japanese hand home with him as a souvenir.

This is the story of how they did just that and, in the process, forged bonds of brotherhood that still survive today. 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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Although their own bravery is conspicuous – officers and men will expose themselves in the open to try to flush out snipers, for example – there remains a sense of astonishment that the enemy continues to go on its own suicide missions when it knows the battle is lost. It is like all those films you have seen of the Pacific war; but this is a scholarly work, and the copious footnotes refer the reader to the accounts showing that these remarkable events really happened. 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.