Crucible of Hell: Okinawa – Stalingrad of the Pacific

Saul, David

William Collins

From award-winning historian Saul David, the first authorised history of the SBS.\nBritain’s SBS – or Special Boat Section – was the world’s first maritime special operations unit. Founded in the dark days of 1940, it started as a small and inexperienced outfit that leaned heavily on volunteers’ raw courage and boyish enthusiasm.\nIt would become one of the most effective fighting forces of the Second World War – and has served as a model for Special Forces ever since.\nIts first mission was a daring beach reconnaissance of Rhodes in the spring of 1941. Over the next four years, the SBS and its affiliates would carry out many more spectacular operations in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Channel and the Far East: they included the destruction of enemy ships, railways and bridges; the rescue of fugitive Allied soldiers; the support of Commando operations; the survey of coastal landing zones in North Africa, Italy and France; and the use of midget submarines to signpost the Normandy beaches on D-Day.\nUsing new material from multiple archives (including the secret SBS archives in Poole), this book is the first authoritative history of Britain’s maritime special operations. Very much a human tale, it concentrates on the key personalities and the daredevil missions they undertook. It is an authorized history - the first time the SBS Regimental Association has given its seal of approval to any book about the Unit’s past activities – but not an official one.\nWhat the SBS and its affiliated units were able to achieve in four years of warfare is nothing less than extraordinary. At no time did these units individually number more than a hundred officers and men. Yet these small ‘Bands of Brothers’ were able to take part in scores of planned operations from submarines, surface craft and other means of transport, as well as carry out numerous minor reconnaissance trips and fighting patrols behind enemy lines. Their missions – accomplished by a handful of brave and determined men, paddling flimsy canoes, and armed only with knives, pistols and a few sub machine guns – were some of the most audacious and legendary of the war.

SBS - Silent Warriors

A Times History Book of the Year 2022\nA Daily Telegraph History Book of the Year\nFrom 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.’\nOrdinary 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.\nRemarkably, 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.\nGripping, intimate, authoritative and far-reaching, this is a unique and incredibly personal narrative of war.\nSaul David’s previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021.

Devil Dogs

HarperCollins GB

Devil Dogs: First in, Last out – King Company from Guadalcanal to the Shores of Japan

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

The Force: The Legendary Special Ops Unit and WWII’s Mission Impossible

In the early part of Queen Victoria's reign, the British Empire was well on the way to becoming the greatest empire the world had ever seen. This is the story of how it happened and the people who made it happen. In a fast-moving narrative ranging from London to the harsh terrain of India, Russia and the Far East, Saul David shows how Britain ruthlessly exploited her position as the world's only superpower to expand her empire. Yet little of this territorial acquisition was planned or sanctioned by the home government. Instead, it was largely the work of the men on the ground, and to those at home it really did seem that the empire was acquired in a 'fit of absence of mind'. Saul David creates a vivid portrait of life on the violent fringes of empire, and of the seemingly endless and brutal wars that were fought in the name of trade, civilization and the balance of power.

Victoria's Wars: The Rise of Empire

History

Europe

Penguin??Books

The Encyclopedia of War from Ancient Egypt to Iraq

Reference

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Penguin Random House UK

Bio of Lord Cardigan, the Victorian aristocrat and soldier.

Homicidal Earl

Little,Brown

George Hart, back in England following his heroics in the Zulu Wars, scarcely has time to gamble away his meagre fortune when he is summoned to a secret meeting in Whitehall. There, Prime Minister Disraeli himself asks George to undertake a dangerous mission to Afghanistan. Mistrust and dislike for the local ruler chosen by the British is growing and Muslim extremists threaten to overthrow the local government. The British cannot allow the loss of Afghanistan, which would put at risk India, the jewel in the Imperial crown. Although he suspects that the Establishment sees a part-Zulu officer as expendable, George can see that his dark skin will help him go undercover, and soon, accompanied only by a Pathan guide, he is descending the Khyber pass into a strange and violent land. On the way he meets Yasmin, an alluring Afghan princess, and together this unlikely trio find themselves in a race against time to prevent a tribal uprising and head off a catastrophic British invasion.

Hart of Empire

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Hodder Hb

Back in England following his heroics in the Zulu Wars, George Hart is summoned to a new adventure when Prime Minister Disraeli asks him to go on a secret mission to Afghanistan, where the British fear Muslim extremists are poised to overthrow the local ruler and threaten the jewel in the Imperial crown, India. Hart has severe misgivings. Always an outsider in British society, he doesn't like Whitehall's arrogant way of meddling in other people's religious and political affairs, but desperate for money, he takes the job and descends the Khyber Pass into a strange and violent land. When his warnings are ignored by the pompous British Resident in Kabul, a terrible massacre occurs and soon Hart is on the run with a beautiful Afghan princess, in a race to prevent an uprising and head off a catastrophic British invasion.

Hart of Empire: (Zulu Hart 2)

Hodder&Stoughton Ltd

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