Devil Dogs
King Company, Third Battalion, 5th Marines: From Guadalcanal to the Shores of Japan
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning historian Saul David reveals the searing experience of the Devil Dogs of World War II and does for the U.S. Marines what Band of Brothers did for the 101st Airborne.
The “Devil Dogs” of King Company, Third Battalion, 5th Marines—part of the legendary 1st Marine Division—were among the first American soldiers to take the offensive in World World II—and also the last.
They landed on the beaches of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in August 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 King 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, “utterly ruthless and treacherous” 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 color, emotion, and context for this extraordinary story. In Devil Dogs, award-winning historian Saul David sets the searing experience of the Devil Dogs 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian David (Crucible of Hell) recounts in this stirring saga the WWII campaigns of Company K, the 1st Marine Division unit whose exploits at Peleliu and Okinawa were documented by Eugene B. Sledge in his celebrated combat memoir With the Old Breed. Drawing on diaries, letters, and published accounts from Sledge and others who served in the company at various points during the war, David documents their participation in the August 1942 invasion of Guadalcanal ("a pesthole that reeked of death, struggle and disease," in the words of war correspondent Richard Tregaskis) and the Battle of Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, where it took "a Herculean effort" to dislodge the Japanese from their entrenched positions. Subsequent stops on the campaign across the Pacific included the capture of Peleliu, which Sledge described as "the absolute essence of the depths of Hell," and Okinawa, where Japanese soldiers launched ferocious, suicidal counterattacks, leading to a relentless series of last stands. 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 result is a captivating chronicle of the war in the Pacific.
