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

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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. 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. 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. But above all there were the enemy and the enemy’s fighting code of Bushido, which places death with honour above life. 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.

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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. 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. 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.

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. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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. 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. On some islands it hardly stopped raining, men and materiel had to be moved through roads of mud, and jungle had to be cleared.