On the frontline
ROBERT LYMAN commends a masterful account of the Pacific War through the eyes of one company of US marines
Devil Dogs by Saul David
William Collins, 624 pages, £25
Television executives take note: this book is a huge achievement that, in my view, is the Pacific version of Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. A mini-series based on it should be produced without delay.
Saul David’s book succeeds in capturing the scale and horror of the long trauma of the Pacific War between 1941 and 1945, for both the Allies – mainly the US – and the Japanese. It does so through the ground-level eyes of “Devil Dogs”, the ordinary men of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines (K/3/5). The voices of individual enlisted men are significant in this story, primarily because of the very high literary standard of these soldiers. Many were college graduates, and a number left memoirs, diaries and letters, all of which David has plundered in the building of this remarkable story.
It’s a story that begins on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in the latter months of 1942, and ends in 1945 with the long, exhausting terrors on Okinawa; the battles of Cape Gloucester (on New Britain) and Peleliu (Palau) being fought in between. These four years saw grindingly tough fighting against the most demanding enemy imaginable.
At Guadalcanal, the troops of K/3/5 – all rookies – were suddenly thrust into the relentless viciousness of brutal war amid the fungal and malarial misery of the monsoon. It was both an individual and a corporate experience. Each man had to overcome his fears and adapt to survive. Teams had to develop, coalesce around good, bad or indifferent leaders, and learn to live and fight as one.
“One thing those [Japanese troops] have got that you haven’t is guts,” Colonel Merritt A Edson chastised his men at Guadalcanal, as wave after wave of attacks threatened to overwhelm his traumatised, exhausted troops. His exhortation was enough to drive them to hang on – which they did, by their fingertips. They learned fast; it was adapt or die. At Guadalcanal – proportionately the costliest US campaign of the entire war – there was no psychological preparation: it was a matter of direct and rapid immersion. This is perhaps one of the defining features of this war: its grinding relentlessness. It’s exhausting enough to read David’s account of the battle. What hell it must have been for the brave souls who had to endure it.
This is the primary takeaway from David’s book. He does a magnificent job in keeping us close to the strategy of the Pacific War, but this is principally a story of how men learn to fight, adapt to the rigours of vicious, uncompromising battle, and cope with the decimation of their ranks.
There was no subtlety to this war, as is clear from the description by Sergeant Asa Bordages of the struggle for Walt’s Ridge on Cape Gloucester. “The Japanese attacked, bent low, screaming death… It was hand to hand in the dark, in the pelting rain… Man against man. Smashing, clawing in the dark. Stabbing, clubbing. Slipping in the mud. Gasping, grunting, dying. Each man alone in the blackness, not knowing what was happening on his right or his left, but holding until he died [on] the ground where his feet were planted.” This fight, he observed, was won by marines “who died but would not step back”.
Bordages’ words perfectly encapsulate the achievement of the men who fought and died in this most terrible of wars, and who ultimately triumphed, at huge cost, against the most fearsome of foes.