A Look Inside Company K at Guadalcanal

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.