Japan's Pacific War

Japan's Pacific War
Author: Peter Williams
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526796139

‘I had no qualms fighting the Australians, just as I have killed without remorse any of the Emperor’s enemies: the British, the Americans and the Dutch’, so admits Takahiro Sato in this ground-breaking oral history of Japan’s Pacific War. Thanks to years of research and over 100 interviews with veterans, the Author has compiled a fascinating collection of personal accounts by former Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen. Their candid views are often provocative and shocking. There are admissions of brutality, the killing of prisoners and cannibalism. Stark descriptions of appalling conditions and bitter fighting blend with descriptions of family life. Their views on the prowess of the enemy differ with some like air ace Kazuo Tsunoda who believed the Australians ‘worthy’. Some remain unrepentant while others such as Hideo Abe are ashamed of his part in Japan’s war of aggression. The result is a revealing insight into the minds of a ruthless and formidable enemy which provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the Second World War.

The Pacific War, 1931-1945

The Pacific War, 1931-1945
Author: Saburo Ienaga
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2010-06-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307756092

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.

The Early Air War in the Pacific

The Early Air War in the Pacific
Author: Ralph F. Wetterhahn
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 147666997X

 During the first 10 months of the war in the Pacific, Japan achieved air supremacy with its carrier and land-based forces. But after major setbacks at Midway and Guadalcanal, the empire's expansion stalled, in part due to flaws in aircraft design, strategy and command. This book offers a fresh analysis of the air war in the Pacific during the early phases of World War II. Details are included from two expeditions conducted by the author that reveal the location of an American pilot missing in the Philippines since 1942 and clear up a controversial account involving famed Japanese ace Saburo Sakai and U.S. Navy pilot James "Pug" Southerland.

Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War

Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War
Author: James B Wood
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2023-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1461638089

In this provocative history, James B. Wood challenges the received wisdom that Japan's defeat in the Pacific was historically inevitable. He argues instead that it was only when the Japanese military prematurely abandoned its original sound strategic plan—to secure the resources Japan needed and establish a viable defensible perimeter for the Empire—that the Allies were able to regain the initiative and lock Japanese forces into a war of attrition they were not prepared to fight. The book persuasively shows how the Japanese army and navy had both the opportunity and the capability to have fought a different and more successful war in the Pacific that could have influenced the course and outcome of World War II. It is therefore a study both of Japanese defeat and of what was needed to achieve a potential Japanese victory, or at the very least, to avoid total ruin. Wood's argument does not depend on signal individual historical events or dramatic accidents. Instead it examines how familiar events could have b

Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War

Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War
Author: W. Puck Brecher
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824881370

This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes. Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a “unified Japan” and its “illegal war” or “race war,” early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the “performance of Japaneseness,” the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever. Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.

Japan's War

Japan's War
Author: Edwin Palmer Hoyt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2001
Genre: Japan
ISBN: 0815411189

Tracing the history of Japanese aggression from 1853 onward, Hoyt masterfully addresses some of the biggest questions left from the Pacific front of World War II.

War in the Pacific

War in the Pacific
Author: Harry Gailey
Publisher: Presidio Press
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2011-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307802043

Historian Harry Gailey offers a fresh one-volume treatment of the vast Pacific theater in World War II, examining in detail the performance of Japanese and Allied naval, air, and land forces in every major military operation. The War in the Pacific begins with an examination of events leading up to World War II and compares the Japanese and American economies and societies, as well as the chief combatants' military doctrine, training, war plans, and equipment. The book then chronicles all significant actions - from the early Allied defeats in the Philippines, the East Indies, and New Guinea; through the gradual improvement of the Allied position in the Central and Southwest Pacific regions; to the final agonies of the Japanese people, whose leaders refused to admit defeat until the very end. Gailey gives detailed treatment to much that has been neglected or given only cursory mention in previous surveys. The reader thus gains an unparalleled overview of operations, as well as many fresh insights into the behind-the-scenes bickering between the Allies and the interservice squabbles that dogged MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the war. NOTE: This edition does not include a photo insert.

War without Mercy

War without Mercy
Author: John Dower
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307816141

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

Refighting the Pacific War

Refighting the Pacific War
Author: James Bresnahan
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2011-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 161251068X

Refighting the Pacific War presents the viewpoints of more than thirty historians, authors, and veterans regarding what happened and what might have happened if events in the Pacific had unfolded differently during World War II. Contributors to this alternative history include the noted military historians William Bartsch, John Burton, Donald Goldstein, John Lundstrom, Robert Mrazek, Jon Parshall, Douglas Smith, Peter Smith, Barrett Tillman, Anthony Tully, and H. P. Willmott. In chapters organized in a roundtable discussion format, the contributors present their differing views on the possible outcomes of the major campaigns of the Pacific War and the implications of those changes on the course of history. The result is a thought-provoking collection of divergent views about the outcome of the war that will be certain to stimulate debate. The naval campaigns and battles discussed include Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf. Additionally, the book delves into key island battles like Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as prewar and postwar political issues: Could Japan have inflicted even greater damage at Pearl Harbor? How might Admiral Yamamoto have achieved victory at Midway? What would have been the impact of that victory on the direction of the war? These are just some of the discussion points posed in Refighting the Pacific War. In addition, the book explores whether the war was inevitable, includes an extensive study of the opening year of the war when the Japanese war machine seemed unstoppable, and considers if the conflict could have ended without the use of the atomic bomb. Vice Admiral Yoji Koda, Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (Ret.), Yamamoto’s successor as commander of Japan’s combined fleet and a pillar of the postwar alliance between the United States and Japan, provides the book’s introduction, in which he places the book in the context of the frequently told stories and views from the Japanese side.

Pacific Campaign

Pacific Campaign
Author: Dan Van der Vat
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1992-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0671792172

Naval history of the United States and Japan in the Pacific Ocean during World War II.