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222 of 232 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I may be crazy, but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war..." *, March 18, 2008
This review is from: Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (Hardcover)
With age comes a bit of weariness, and I confess that huge books with small print have begun to intimidate me just a bit. But some of them are so well-written and so interesting that page-anxiety drops away after the first couple of chapters. So it was for me with Max Hastings' Retribution.
Retribution, which chronicles the final year of World War II's Pacific Theatre, is a companion to Hasting's Armageddon, a history of the European Theatre's final year. The new volume begins with General MacArthur's plans to retake the Philippines and ends with a quick summary of the war's effects on Japanese society and culture. In between, Hastings examines the infiltration of total warfare into everyday Japanese life; the battle for control of the sea corridors, the Burma campaign and the Aussies who fought it (which I found particularly fascinating, knowing virtually nothing about it); the air campaign over Japan, masterminded by Curtis LeMay (also an especially intriguing chapter, particularly for those who presume that the only big bomb damage in Japan were the nuclear blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki); the unspeakably horrific Japanese treatment of China and Manchuria; the ferocious battles on Iwo Jima (to which Hastings devotes an entire chapter); and the behind-the-scenes negotiations that led up to Japan's final surrender.
Hastings punctuates his history of the Pacific Theatre's final year with dozens of stories about individual people whose lives were affected--GIs, sailors, Japanese infantrymen and pilots, Chinese "comfort girls," generals, admirals, statesmen--and this is part of what makes his book such a fascinating read. Moreover, Hastings doesn't pull any punches in his estimation of the war's leaders. MacArthur, for example, comes off as one of the most overrated military leaders ever produced by the U.S. Hirohito also comes across badly. Despite the post-war efforts to paint him as a pacifist overwhelmed by sabre-rattling generals, Hastings argues that the Emperor advocated war right up to the end.
Three things in particular struck me in reading Hastings. The first was that bushido, the ancient code of honor embraced by the Japanese military, made life hell for ordinary foot soldiers, who could be savagely beaten by superiors for little or no reason. Apparently such abuse was seen as a way of toughening up the fighting spirit. Bushido also encouraged disdain for military technology on the part of Japanese officers. "Why do we need radar?" one of them asked. "Do we not have eyes that see perfectly well?" (p. 47) This attitude led to a constant technological lag throughout the entire war.
The second was that the Kamikaze strategy adopted by the Japanese toward the end of the war not only failed in its aim of striking fear and panic into the hearts of Allied sailors, but actually had the opposite effect. Sailors were so enraged by what they perceived as cowardly attacks that their ferocity against the Japanese intensified. As one seaman wrote, "seeing dead Japanese in the water was like making love to a beautiful girl" (p. 173). This is a point worth considering, given the current war on terrorism.
Finally, I was amazed to discover that Japanese civilians were so physically and psychologically exhausted by the war that the US occupation forces actually had to protect Japanese soldiers from their wrath when the war ended (pp. 547-48). Even before the end came, some Japanese were privately voicing reservations about the culture of bushido (p. 264). But with defeat came a desire to leave behind the old culture--to such an extent that only Japan, out of all the war's Axis powers, has refused to acknowledge any war guilt or offer reparations (p. 549).
Hastings' book is well worth reading, either straight-through or selectively. One better appreciates just how daunting a task the island-by-island Allied strategy was, as well as how hopeless (at least when viewed in hindsight) Japan's imperialistic aims were.
________
* A message to Admiral Nimitz from Admiral Richmond Turner, commander of amphibious forces during the invasion of Okinawa. Nimitz's skeptical reply: "Delete all after 'crazy'" (p. 375).
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96 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Pacific War Classic, March 18, 2008
This review is from: Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (Hardcover)
I became aware of this book on the brink of its UK pubication. The UK title is: Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945. I ended up getting the UK edition. I just didn't want to wait for the US edition, so I got it (and I live in Wyoming!). I'm glad I did. Hastings brings forth all his formidable powers, both in research, analysis and in his writing abilities.
Hastings praises the US Navy (especially the Submarine Service), condemns MacArthur (or more correctly, his oversized ego), Bill Slim is seen as one of the war's great captains (though Hastings believes Burma did little to contribute to the defeat of Japan), praises the courage of the Japanese, but damns their cruelty and their leadership's poor decisions.
Retribution is the companion volume to Armageddon. As is typical of Hastings, readers probably won't agree with 100% of his judgements and opinions. But the way he organizes his facts and presents his narrative, he presents a formidable case that's hard to deny.
What sets this book apart from the clear majority of Pacific war books, is that Hastings also has chapters on the war's neglected theaters, China and we see the war as both the Communists and Kuomintang, the Australians and of course, the Soviets. It's not just about the Americans, Japanese and to a lesser extent, the British. American readers may not agree with everything Mr. Hastings writes, but part of what makes him so interesting is that he's brilliantly provocative.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Do not be put off by Amazon's featured review by Kai Bird. It is misleading., January 31, 2009
This review is from: Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (Hardcover)
Interested readers should not be put off by Kai Bird's misleading review for the Washington Post, which features on Amazon.com's page for this book, which, incidentally, is published under the title Nemesis in the UK. This is an excellent study of the last years of events in the pacific theatre during the second world war.
Kai Bird says that Hastings "abandons his critical faculties" when it comes to the book's "central theme", namely that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wholly justified.
Bird is mistaken on one account and deliberately misleading on another. Hasting's 600 page book naturally deals with the events at hand in chronological fashion and it is not until the very final chapters that he comes to discuss the dropping of the bombs. Reading the book, I did not identify the contents of these 2 chapters as either presenting or encapsulating a "central theme" in it. In these chapters, Hastings addresses both sides of the argument as to whether the decision to drop Little Boy and Fat Man was justifiable. He is of the opinion that it was, but far from abandoning his critical faculties he reasonably presents the opposing argument and then goes on to expose the holes that he sees in it. While he acknowledges that giving the Russians a display of US might was seen as a very useful added bonus of the atomic drop, to put it crudely, he rejects the argument that this was foremost in the minds of the members of the war cabinet and the top brass when planning the drop. He also shows how, far from there being any soul searching amongs decision makers, the atomic bomb drop was more a military project that had been put in place a few years back and was at this point running its course. He points out that the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities by General Lemay's B29s killed more people than did the atomic bombs and ridicules the idea that the deaths that Japanese civilians met at the hands of Lemay's pilots were any less excruciating than those of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Kai Bird says that Hastings misleads his readers by presenting the decision to drop the bombs as the lesser of two evils - the greater being Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu by the Allied forces, which would certainly have resulted in a death toll far higher than that of the atomic bombs. Only the most wilful of misreadings could come to such a conclusion. Hastings does not present the "decision" to drop the bombs in this light, although naturally he presents the possibility of a homeland invasion as part of the context in which the Americans were weighing their options. As I observed above, part of his argument is that there was no real decision to drop the bombs but rather there was no decision to call a halt to a military project that was then reaching fruition after years of development. Bird goes on to say that Hastings himself acknowledges the fallacy of his supposed argument regarding Olympic when he admits that "an invasion would almost certainly have been unnecessary". What Bird crucially omits to mention is that when Hastings makes this assertion it is in the context of the first atomic bomb already having been dropped. Here Bird is deliberately misleading his reader for what one can suppose are purely ideological reasons. He asserts that Hastings ignores the real issue: that Truman ignored the urgings of Henry Stimson and others to give the Japanese assurances that the position of the emperor in the constitution of Japanese society would not be meddled with by the Americans. With such assurances, Bird believes, the Japanese would have surrendered before the bombs were dropped. In fact Hastings does address this matter and in sufficient detail to allow his reader to understand that this was not so cut and dry and was far more complicated than Bird would have you believe.
Hastings has tracked down many veterans and civilian survivors from all sides in order to give his reader an impression of the war from the bottom up as well as from the top down. US readers of the book may be irked by the amount of coverage he gives to what they might view as British sideshows in the war - Bill Slim's battle for Burma, for example, but given that Hastings is British it is surely understandable that he has chosen to cover in detail the history of the British effort in the pacific theatre with British readers in mind.
I read Kai Bird's review of this excellent book only as I was coming to the end of the work and was dismayed by Bird's charges. I defy anyone to read Hastings work and then conclude that Bird's review of his book is objective
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