Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
by Max Hastings

Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
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Book Summary Information

Author: Max Hastings
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-03-18
ISBN: 0307263517
Number of pages: 656
Publisher: Knopf

Book Reviews of Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Book Review: The Ruthless War
Summary: 5 Stars

Max Hastings' well written book, Retribution, is a grippingly powerful story about the final campaigns of World War II in the Pacific Theatre of Operations. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, many of them personal accounts, Professor Hastings provides a well focused look inside the desperate fighting that took place in the final year of the war against the "Empire of Japan." Combined with his insights into the leaders of the different forces, and the shambles that were happening in China, Hastings explodes many of the popular "myths" that came out of WW II surrounding the fighting in the closing year of the war. He sets the stage for much of what is going on today in the region politically and economically.

Summary of Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Hailed in Britain as “Spectacular . . . Searingly powerful” (Andrew Roberts, The Sunday Telegraph), a riveting, impeccably informed chronicle of the final year of the Pacific war. In his critically acclaimed Armageddon, Hastings detailed the last twelve months of the struggle for Germany. Here, in what can be considered a companion volume, he covers the horrific story of the war against Japan.

By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory would be achieved remained to be seen. The ensuing drama—that ended in Japan’s utter devastation—was acted out across the vast stage of Asia, with massive clashes of naval and air forces, fighting through jungles, and barbarities by an apparently incomprehensible foe. In recounting the saga of this time and place, Max Hastings gives us incisive portraits of the theater’s key figures—MacArthur, Nimitz, Mountbatten, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. But he is equally adept in his portrayals of the ordinary soldiers and sailors—American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese—caught in some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns.

With unprecedented insight, Hastings discusses Japan’s war against China, now all but forgotten in the West, MacArthur’s follies in the Philippines, the Marines at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria. He analyzes the decision-making process that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which, he convincingly argues, ultimately saved lives. Finally, he delves into the Japanese wartime mind-set, which caused an otherwise civilized society to carry out atrocities that haunt the nation to this day.

Retribution is a brilliant telling of an epic conflict from a master military historian at the height of his powers.

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