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

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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). Ordinary men from very different backgrounds, and drawn from cities, towns, and settlements across America, the Devil Dogs were asked to do something extraordinary: take on the victorious Imperial Japanese Army, composed of some of the most effective soldiers in world history – and defeat it. 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. 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.

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.To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. But above all there were the enemy and the enemy’s fighting code of Bushido, which places death with honour above life. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

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. 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. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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.Devil Dogs: First In, Last Out – King Company From The Guadalcanal To The Shores of Japan by Saul David | 9780008395766. 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. Saul David's previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021.