Hirohito's War
The Pacific War, 1941-1945
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- 32,99 €
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- 32,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Named one of Foreign Affairs' Best Books of 2016
In his magisterial 1,208 page narrative of the Pacific War, Francis Pike's Hirohito's War offers an original interpretation, balancing the existing Western-centric view with attention to the Japanese perspective on the conflict. As well as giving a 'blow-by-blow' account of campaigns and battles, Francis Pike offers many challenges to the standard interpretations with regards to the causes of the war; Emperor Hirohito's war guilt; the inevitability of US Victory; the abilities of General MacArthur and Admiral Yamamoto; the role of China, Great Britain and Australia; military and naval technology; and the need for the fire-bombing of Japan and the eventual use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hirohito's War is accompanied by additional online resources, including more details on logistics, economics, POWs, submarines and kamikaze, as well as a 1930-1945 timeline and over 200 maps.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pike (Empires at War), a journalist and historian who focuses on Asian military history, offers a spectrum of fresh perspectives on a war generally presented in Western terms that minimize Japan's agency. He addresses the Pacific conflicts in WWII in the context of a comprehensive century-long struggle for dominance over the Pacific. Within that framework, Pike establishes Hirohito's central position in "the mythology of Japanese exceptionalism." He interprets the attack on Pearl Harbor strategically as the outcome of mutually incompatible geopolitical objectives and operationally as "at best a superficial success and at worst a colossal mistake." The narrative takes off from there. Pike's integrated analysis of Japan's simultaneous victories in Malaya, Burma, Philippines, and Dutch East Indies presents them as a virtuoso performance unsurpassed in modern warfare. Yet these victories resulted in a strategic overreach, due to Japan's belief that quick victories would be followed by rapid settlement. Instead, the U.S., Britain, and China dug in for a war of attrition on levels Japan could not hope to match, and Japan suffered "the most stunning military defeat in its history." The U.S. decisively "brought home to the Japanese the catastrophe of their rulers' military adventures," and Pike tells the epic story on a fitting scale.
