140 Days to Hiroshima
The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon
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4.5 • 25 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A WWII history told from US and Japanese perspectives—"an impressively researched chronicle of the months leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima" (Publishers Weekly).
During the closing months of World War II, two military giants locked in a death embrace of cultural differences and diplomatic intransigence. While developing history's deadliest weapon and weighing an invasion that would have dwarfed D-Day, the US called for the "unconditional surrender" of Japan. The Japanese Empire responded with a last-ditch plan termed Ketsu-Go, which called for the suicidal resistance of every able-bodied man and woman in "The Decisive Battle" for the homeland.
In 140 Days to Hiroshima, historian David Dean Barrett captures war-room drama on both sides of the conflict. Here are the secret strategy sessions, fierce debates, looming assassinations, and planned invasions that resulted in Armageddon on August 6, 1945. Barrett then examines the next nine chaotic days as the Japanese government struggled to respond to the reality of nuclear war.
Customer Reviews
Excellent in all aspects
Superbly researched, flawlessly integrating multiple accounts of both the Japanese and Allied records, diaries, press accounts, and military documents which disprove the revisionists’ theories that Japan could not resist invasions; that the Japanese military had completely collapsed, and that our naval blockade only needed another month or two before Japan would have surrendered — making the attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary.
If anything was proven by this book, it is that not 9nky had the U.S. and its allies badly underestimated the Japanese resistance to invasion, but American military and War Department officials significantly underestimated American x casualties of both planned invasions. Given the post-surrender surveys of both main Japanese islands, war game estimates done by supercomputers after 2020 estimate that both invasions of the home empire would have resulted in almost 1.6 million American/Allied dead, and nearly 4.7 million wounded. That no one in 1944-45 gave FDR or Truman an integrated estimate of total land, sea, and air force casualties was unthinkable: every estimate given Truman was for only one segment of military forces — never a total forecast; equally, it is significant that no one in the War Department considered the defenses laid in by the Japanese following their losses in the Pacific through the fall of Okinawa.
The author finds these flaws, but didn’t fully enumerate them in detail, but left the reader to marvel at the gross errors made by Allied planners. One of the lessons we could have learned from this was our operations in Cuba 16 years later, when Pentagon officials repeated their folly in predicting casualties for invading Cuba, and later, Vietnam: not telling American Presidents the truth with regard to consequences has its root in 1944 wartime experiences.
In all, this book wipes away the scourge of revisionists who have simplified their conclusions based on partial truths and carefully-crafted lies which have become a monument to excess.
Excellent
Well written account covers what the Japanese government was thinking and doing, what what the U.S. government and military was doing during the 140 days. Also details the long list of atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese military. The author provides a thorough debunking of many of the accusations that try to make the case dropping the bomb was not needed to get the Japanese to surrender.