I didn’t think I had it in me, but I have just finished yet another book about World War II, probably the hundredth or so that I have read in a lifetime of interest in the myriad angles, intricacies and strategies of that great conflict fought by my parents’ generation. I am glad that I did what with the dust-up in Georgia and a war in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the time between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and their unconditional surrender.
Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, published in March, focuses on the closing years of the war in the Pacific and among the lessons it offers is that the politicians who are starting wars these days like Bush and Putin, as well as pundits like Kristol and Kagan who are constantly agitating for even more wars, are a bunch of cocked hats by comparison.
I doubt that Max Hastings, the esteemed journalist-historian and author of Retribution, would say as much. In fact, Hastings has pretty much been in the neocon camp on Iraq.
That doesn’t diminish a provocative book full of fresh insights that acknowledges Japanese brutality was returned in kind by the Americans, and to pretend that race had nothing to do with that tit-for-tat is to ignore the historic record. But Hastings writes that neither should it be ignored that Japanese sadism and disregard for the lives of their own infantrymen, fliers and subjugates invited the Yankee payback.
As Hastings notes in the introduction:
“For students of history . . . the manner in which the Second World War ended is even more fascinating than that in which it began. Giants of their respective nations, or rather mortal men cast into giants’ roles, resolved the great issues of the twentieth century on battlefields in three dimensions, and in the war rooms of their capitals. Some of the most populous societies on earth teemed in flux. Technology displayed a terrifying maturity. . . . For millions, 1944-45 brought liberation, the banishment of privation, fear and oppression; but air attacks during those years killed larger numbers of people than in the rest of the conflict put together. Posterity knows that the war ended in August 1945. However, it would have provided scant comfort to the men who risked their lives in the Pacific island battles, as well as in the other bloody campaigns of that spring and summer, to be assured that the tumult would soon be stilled. Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.”
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