Hello, and thank you for listening to The History of World War II podcast.

Episode 389 Interview with Saul David about his book, Devil Dogs, from Guadalcanal to the

shores of Japan, King Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines.

Saul David, best-selling military historian, novelist and broadcaster, writer of such books

as Crucible of Hell, Okinawa, the last great battle of the Second World War, The Force,

the legendary special ops unit, World War II's Mission Impossible, and at least 13 other

books, comes on the show as his latest book follows King Company, from Guadalcanal to the

shores of Japan.

Mr. David, thank you very much for being with us today.

Well, thank you for inviting me on, right?

Absolutely.

I loved your book.

We're going to get into it, but I first have to say I've been doing this for about 10 years

now, and I've had more than a few people question my sanity, trying to cover such a large

topic as World War II.

So it's only fair that I get to ask you what motivated you to write a book about a company

and then follow it all the way through the war.

Well, I'd previously written about the story of the final stage of the Pacific campaign,

and that is Okinawa.

The book Crucible of Hell, of course, involved both army and Marines, but while I was working

my way through the horrors of that campaign and really dealing particularly with some

of the first-hand accounts which I managed to get hold of at Quantico, where the US Marine

...