Customer Reviews

Before The Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War

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If you read the respectable academic review rather than rely upon the rant that gives this book only one star, you'll get a much truer view of this book's worth. Chappell's book is distinguished by the fact that it's readable (even, apparently, for those incapable of understanding it), especially for a piece that is a solid work of historiography. The use of constituent letters to representatives is a particularly innovative way of tapping into the minds of the attentive public during this period.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'll tell you I am a colleague of the author, but I have actually read the book and feel I can defend it on objective grounds. (Well, I'll have to make a tenure recommendation, after all!)

There is the nucleus of a reasonable book here but it lies buried under a kiloton of notes and a feeble, puerile, puling, wurnt-it-awful attempt at a hatchet job aimed at every white male alive in America at the time. Oh, Chappell moans, we were SO racist, sexist, consumerist--ignoring (or at best giving short shrift to) facts such as: (1) Japanese atrocities (Rape of Nanking, Bataan Death March etc.) were widely known well before the awful truth about the Nazi death camps (and in any case the Germans were defeated already); (2) Since the US was only just emerging from depression and massive unemployment at the start of WW2 (largely because of armaments production), it was justly feared that there wouldn't be enough jobs to go around for demobilized servicemen in a demilitarizing economy (and remember this was an age of the one-breadwinner nuclear family!); and (3) People who'd had no money during the 30's--and money but nothing to buy during the war--were naturally anticipating goods (such as new cars) they'd been denied for so long. --Beneath all this is an issue well worth exploring: whether Hiroshima & Nagasaki could have been avoided by clarifying surrender terms, and to what extent US public opinion would have allowed or prevented this. But Chappell merely states his own conclusion after a meandering, scattershot treatment which never lets the task of making a cogent argument get in the way of trashing with perfect hindsight the dead white males who had to make the policies in the midst of the "fog of war". --While the extensive endnotes (60 pages out of 250) are of some value in sorting the period out (discounting the author's comments), this book could have been reduced to a list of same, published on the Internet, and a lot of deserving trees (not to mention public library budgets) would have been saved. Then again, it probably wouldn't've counted toward tenure...