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

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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. A harrowing account of the USMC King Company as they fight the Imperial Japanese Army from Guadalcanal to Okinawa 1942 - 1945.

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. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.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. This is the story of how they did just that and, in the process, forged bonds of brotherhood that still survive today. 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.

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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It does not take long for the Marines to gauge the bestiality to which this equates: on Guadalcanal they come across a river awash with body parts of their slaughtered comrades, hacked to pieces for the gratification of the Japanese who have killed them. Devil Dogs: First In, Last Out – King Company From The Guadalcanal To The Shores of Japan by Saul David | 9780008395766. 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.Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). 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.

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. 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.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. 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. 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). We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.