DEVIL DOGS: First In Last Out – King Company from Guadalcan

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.The ‘Devil Dogs’ of K Company 3/5 Marines were part of the legendary first Marine Division. 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. 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.’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. This is the story of how they did just that and in the process forged bonds of brotherhood that still survive today.Remarkably the company contained an unusually high number of talented writers whose first-hand accounts and memoirs provide the colour emotion and context for this extraordinary story. 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.S. Marines what Band of Brothers did for the 101st Airborne.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.Saul David's book 'SBS – Silent Warriors' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 06-09-2021.