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

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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. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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. 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. 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.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.

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. David decided to tell the story of the Pacific this way – about one unit fighting all the way through – following the example of Stephen Ambrose’s celebrated Band of Brothers, which looked at the progress of a unit from the D-Day beaches through to victory against Germany.Until near the very end of the Second World War, once the defeat of Nazi Germany was certain, the war in the Pacific against the Japanese was entirely America’s struggle. Saul David’s previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021.

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. A Times History Book of the Year 2022 A Daily Telegraph History Book of the Year From 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. The narrative is one of attritional, sickening fighting, but all the time the Japanese are being pushed back, and Japan itself is coming into the Americans’ sights.