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

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Specialising as they did in amphibious operations, the US Marines played a vital part in taking the fight directly to the enemy, as one heavily fortified and unforgiving island after another had to be flushed clean of Japanese soldiers as the Americans made their advance towards the home islands of Japan.

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. 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). 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.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.

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.

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.

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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. Overall I was disappointed with this book as it doesn't offer anything new about the war in the Pacific, hence only 3 stars out of 5. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. 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.