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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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.

It covers all the same stuff in Ambrose's Pacific, from Guadalcanal, to New Britain, Peliu, Iwa Jima and Okinawa, with a brief mention of the naval battles.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. 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. 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).

On some islands it hardly stopped raining, men and materiel had to be moved through roads of mud, and jungle had to be cleared. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Devil Dogs: First In, Last Out – King Company From The Guadalcanal To The Shores of Japan by Saul David | 9780008395766. Gripping, intimate, authoritative and far-reaching, this is a unique and incredibly personal narrative of war.For K/3/5, or King Company, the next war was a far longer, bloodier, tougher one, with a high rate of casualties and for the men concerned more than a fair share of horror.