Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
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Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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The end of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
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Max Hastings takes his readers from the jungles of Burma to the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His human stories are taken from interviews, letters, diaries and memoirs.
Hastings describes the courage of men in combat on both sides of the fighting, and he is critical of military leaders and of military decisions that unnecessarily cost many lives. Examples: the Burma Road to resupply Chiang Kai-shek's armies was a sideshow "to restore [Britain's] imperial prestige and to indulge American fantasies about China." MacArthur's "I shall return" campaign destroyed much of Manila and caused enormous civilian casualties to satisfy MacArthur's "ego and wounded vanity"; MacArthur could have bypassed the Phillipines and attacked islands closer to Japan as part of the overall "Island Hopping" strategy.
Hastings writes that the Chinese suffered both from the Japanese and from Chiang and Mao Zedong seeking postwar power rather than fighting the Japanese; China "resembled a vast wounded animal, bleeding in a thousand places, prostrate in the dust, twitching and lashing out in its agony, inflicting more pain on itself than upon its foes."
Hasting admires the courage and selflessness shown on both sides on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but believes that these islands and others might have been bypassed, saving thousands of lives. He notes that America possessed overwhelming naval and air superiority and believes it did not need to conquer Japan island by island. On the human side, he describes a Marine who tears off his own damaged arm to continue an attack, and a group of blinded Marines holding hands and singing "Three Blind Mice." A Marine on Okinawa stares at a dead Japanese machine gunner "lacking the top of his head; overnight rain had collected in the open skull."
Mr. Hastings's description of the naval battle of Leyte Gulf is powerful; he describes the kamikaze offensive that began there. Altogether, 4,000 Japanese kamikaze pilots died on their missions; one in seven hit American ships, causing more damage than all of the rest of the Japanese navy. Like the suicide bombers of al Qaeda or Hamas, the kamikaze was "institutionalization of a tactic that makes [death] inevitable."
Japan's tenacious tactics kept the war going. In March B-29 firebombing raids began, killing 100,000 civilians in one attack on Tokyo. Curtis LeMay is quoted: "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." Hasting reports that by then it was total war: "American moral sensibility was numbed by kamikaze attacks, revelations of savagery toward POW's and subject peoples and general war weariness." He describes the cruelties imposed on Japanese civilians with the same detail he describes Japanese systematic cruelty toward its military prisoners, toward the Chinese and toward other peoples.
Hastings believes that dropping the atomic bombs were necessary not only to compel Japan's surrender but also to pre-empt Russia's invasion of Manchuria and other parts of Asia. President Truman "understood, as some people in the West did not yet understand, the depth of evil which Stalin's Soviet Union represented."
Finally, Hastings describes many of the results of the war: the end of colonial empires; the fall of China to communism; the outbreak of the Korean War; and the emergence of Japan as a peaceful and prosperous nation. The military lesson Hastings draws is less positive. "Only total war enabled a liberal democracy to exploit weapons of mass destruction." Limited war is much more likely to favor belligerents of limited means. Defeating Japan in a total war was "a freak of history."
I found this book big, densely written, and fascinating. |
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