Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb [Paperback]

George Feifer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 1994

Tennozan is a brilliant account of the Battle of Okinawa, the largest land-sea-air engagement in history. Feifer examines the collision of three diverse cultures--American, Japanese, and Okinawan--setting the stage for one of the most dramatic moments of this century, the dropping of the atom bomb.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tennozan: a decisive, all-out stand. Thus did the Japanese characterize the vicious, sprawling struggle for the island of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. Feifer ( Moscow Farewell ) relates events throughout the campaign from American, Japanese and Okinawan viewpoints, disclosing the grotesque reality of the battlefield so vibrantlyin first review that one ultimately accepts his startling comment that famed correspondent Ernie Pyle "prettified" his coverage for the American public. One horror Feifer reveals is that more civilians died on Okinawa during the three-month campaign than from the atom bombs loosed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the island was secured, the Americans faced the dreadful prospect of invading the Japanese home islands. In his detailed analysis of what the cost might have been, Feifer sympathetically explains why President Truman, six weeks after the capture of Okinawa, decided he had no choice but to order the dropping of the two bombs. An accurate and painstakingly detailed chronicle of the last great battle of World War II, the book is also a powerful anti warok that the word "war" ends this sentence?/yeah, war is war, so hard to find a sub word.gs statement that takes an unblinking look at the monstrous waste, pain and horror of modern war. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Tennozan was an epic battle in remote Japanese history which determined the fate of the empire. It is a particularly apt term for the battle of Okinawa, the bloody climax of the Pacific War which was to be the stepping stone for the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. Feifer, author of nine books including the bestselling Moscow Farewell (Viking, 1976), has written an unusually good popular history of the campaign that offers more than battlefield anecdotes and a recital of military tactics. He intersperses a compelling human narrative which profiles numerous participants in the fighting, Japanese as well as American, and devotes nearly as much space to the hapless Okinawan civilians as to the soldiers. This forms the framework for considering a larger issue: did the suicidal defense of Okinawa foreshadow an even more desperate struggle for Japan itself, and if so, did this justify the use of atomic bombs? Highly recommended to public and military collections.
- Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 620 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; First Edition edition (May 10, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395700663
• ISBN-13: 978-0395700662
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #679,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Spell-Binding Account of the Last Battle of the War!, June 23, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (Hardcover)

Wow! This is a truly magnificent piece of historical scholarship as well as a fascinating example of how entertaining and riveting a well-written recounting of the events of the war in the Pacific can be. The author presents an absolutely gripping account of the Allied assault on Okinawa, the last necessary step in the island hopping strategy of the American drive toward final victory against the Japanese. All this is done in a carefully researched and quite well documented account of the day-to-day details of the siege of the island.

Okinawa absolutely had to be taken in order to have a point for both staging and launching an invasion of the home islands, and both sides recognized the value of this piece of real estate in strategic terms. Thus the struggle over it was the most ferocious and bloody of the entire 44 month-long war in the Pacific, with over 91,000 Japanese, 23,000 Americans, and 150,000 Okinawans killed in the three-month long battle. It was also significant in that it served as a key indicator to the Allied command structure of just how tenacious Japanese defense of their home islands was likely to be.

In this sense, it acted as an extremely persuasive supporting argument in the highest circles of the American government for the use of the atomic bomb to bring Imperial Japan to the negotiating table and thereby avoid hundreds of thousands or even millions of Allied casualties. Revisionist arguments to the contrary, the author offers compelling evidence that the cultural tenets of Japanese culture, including those of emphasizing national honor, avoiding the loss of face, and including "kamikaze" type ritual suicide, led not only to the horrors of what happened at Okinawa but were also leading to fervent and desperate preparations for a ferocious, "to the death" type defense of the home islands.

This book is important, then, not only for its contribution to helping us better understand the last and most hotly contested battle in the Pacific campaign, but also for providing a much clearer understanding of the cultural context in which the decision to use the atomic bomb was made. Disregarding this evidence leads one to underestimate just how savage that invasion would have been, and how many Allied and Japanese lives were saved by use of the bomb. This book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the last several months of the war, and how those events influenced the decision to use the bomb.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 Stars PLUS, March 18, 2000

By 

Aussie Reader ""Rick"" (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (Hardcover)

Having read this book when it was first published in hardback some years ago I am still to find another book that can better the author's account of this terrible Pacific War battle. Gerald Astor's book 'Operation Iceberg' comes close but in a much different style. George Feifer's research was in-depth and exhaustive, his style of writing is excellent. This is a finely written combat narrative that utilises accounts of the participants on sides; soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians. It is a haunting account and some of the stories of the fighting are truly evocative. I found that I could not put this book down and the narrative just raced along carrying me into this terrible maelstrom of battle and carnage. This is a great book and I hope that every American appreciates what it's young men were asked to do doing the Second World War. No serious student of the Pacific War during WW2 should be without this book.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Account From the Soldier's Point of View, January 7, 2000

By 

Graham Broad (London, Ont. Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (Hardcover)

Tennozan recounts the terrible and merciless battle for Okinawa fought in the spring and summer of 1945. Like many of the new generation of popular American histories about the Second World War, Tennozan is big, slickly presented, and marvelously written - with nary a citation in sight. It's this last fact which makes some of Tennozan a truly frustrating read. When Feifer writes that MacArthur concluded that the invasion of Kyushu and Honshu would cost the United States a million casualties, the well informed reader will know that MacArthur's only official study predicted about about one fifth that number. Did MacArthur revise his estimates? Did he conduct another study? We do not know because Feifer does not provide us with a reference. This would be unacceptable in academic history - and it gives the casual reader a distorted impression of the facts.

Feifer has subtitled his book "The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb". It is his thesis that the horrific American casualties at Okinawa convinced the administration that the atomic bomb ought to be used. But this view is incorrect: the atomic bomb would have been used even if there had been no American casualties at Okinawa at all; furthermore, the Joint Chiefs apparently believed that the invasion would have to go forward even after the use of the atomic bomb, and preparation for Operation Olympic continued right up until Japan's surrender. There was never any real painstaking decision to use the bomb: no one in authority at the time seriously proposed not using it. America was at war, Japan could not retaliate in kind, and those war leaders who expressed misgivings about its use (Admiral Leahy and General Eisenhower, for instance) either did not express them at the time or forcefully enough to change anyone's mind.

What Feifer does do exceptionally well is recount this cruel battle from the viewpoint of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought it: their voices are often forgotten in academic history. Here the story is told through their eyes: they are at once heroic, inhumanly brave, tough, exhausted, terrified, and desperate to survive. Feifer is also to be commended for giving a human face to an enemy usually caricaturized as mindless automotons, suicidal drones with no greater wish than to die for their Emperor. Nor are the Okinawans who suffered terribly during those three months forgotten, according to Feifer, as many as 200,000 were casualties during the battle.

The Battle for Okinawa was not, as some of other reviewers have contended, the biggest battle of the war (the US suffered 23,000 dead at Okinawa; at Stalingrad, the Soviet Union lost about 800,000) nor was it, by many standards, the bloodiest land battle in which Americans have fought: at Gettysburg, roughly as many Americans were killed on the ground in three days eighty years earlier. But it was one of the truly great combined military operations in history, and those citizen soldiers who did service there can be proud of all they acheived in overthrowing an enemy as tenacious and ruthless as any in history. If Tennozan accomplishes anything, it is proving to us, despite the innumerable claims to the contrary, that the young men of a democracy, when called upon, were at least as tough, smart, and brave as the young men produced by the dictatorships.