To the End of the Earth
The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Award for Excellence in U.S. Army Writing
From the liberation of the Philippines to the Japanese surrender, the final volume of John C. McManus's trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War
“Brilliant [and] riveting… a truly great book.”—Gen. David Petraeus • “Triumphant [and] compelling.”—Richard Frank • “McManus is one of the best—if not the best—World War II historians working today.”—World War II magazine
The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus, winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, concludes his magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” with this brilliant final volume.
On the island of Luzon, a months-long stand-off between US and Japanese troops finally breaks open, as American soldiers push into Manila, while paratroopers and amphibious invaders capture nearby Corregidor. The Philippines are soon liberated, and Allied strategists turn their eyes to China, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands themselves. Readers will walk in the boots of American soldiers and officers, braving intense heat, rampant disease, and a by-now suicidal enemy, determined to kill as many opponents as possible before defeat, and they will encounter Japanese soldiers faced with the terrible choice between capitulation or doom. At the same time, this outstanding narrative lays bare the titanic ego and ambition of the Pacific War’s most prominent general, Douglas MacArthur, and the complex challenges he faced in Japan’s unconditional surrender and America’s lengthy occupation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian McManus (Island Infernos) concludes his trilogy on the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater of WWII with a dramatic account of the period from the recapture of the Philippines through the invasion of Okinawa and Japan's surrender. As McManus makes clear throughout, the Army faced fierce resistance in the war's final months: nearly 300,000 Japanese troops took to the hills and mountains of the Philippines island of Luzon to "fight to the death" in hopes of slowing the American advance. In Burma, U.S. military engineers, with the help of Chinese, Burmese, and Indian laborers, opened a supply route between India and China to provide a lifeline to American troops and their Nationalist allies fighting in western China. According to one Army historian, the amount of soil moved to construct the road was enough "to build a continuous six-foot-high wall from New York to San Francisco." The campaign across the Pacific culminated in the bitter, monthslong fight for Okinawa, where an entire field hospital was devoted to caring for combat fatigue cases. Throughout, McManus seesaws between command-level decision-making and the frontline experiences of American and Japanese soldiers, and shines a light on the suffering, fortitude, and resilience of those whose homelands were invaded. Wide-ranging yet granular, it's a fitting capstone to the series.
