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). Saul David’s previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021. 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. 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.

A harrowing account of the USMC King Company as they fight the Imperial Japanese Army from Guadalcanal to Okinawa 1942 - 1945. 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. On some islands it hardly stopped raining, men and materiel had to be moved through roads of mud, and jungle had to be cleared.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. 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. 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. Gripping, intimate, authoritative and far-reaching, this is a unique and incredibly personal narrative of war. Saul David's previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021.

This is the story of how they did just that and, in the process, forged bonds of brotherhood that still survive today. 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. 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. 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.

To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. 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. 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.