Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“A sweeping epic.… Promises to do for the war in the Pacific what Rick Atkinson did for Europe.” —James M. Scott, author of Rampage
In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.
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Military historian Frank (Downfall) taps a massive, multicontinent array of sources to deliver the definitive account of the first phase of WWII in the Pacific. Frank begins more than four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with the July 1937 skirmish between Japanese and Chinese Nationalist forces that sparked full-scale combat in the region. He documents the Battle of Shanghai, where fierce Chinese resistance enraged Japanese attackers, leading to the Imperial Army's "carnival of violation" at Nanking, and reveals that Chiang Kai-shek's attempt to save the wartime capital of Wuhan by breaching dykes along the Yellow River cost roughly half a million civilian lives. Frank traces the intricacies of Japanese, British, and American war plans as the theater of combat expanded to Hong Kong, the Malaya Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and the Philippines, and details intelligence and communication failures that led the U.S. Pacific Fleet to be caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor. Interweaving high-level strategic analysis with vivid eyewitness reports, Frank documents the chaotic fall of Singapore, when Japanese soldiers "wreaked slaughter" on thousands fleeing the city-state in "every imaginable craft... with the faintest prospect of seaworthiness." Concluding with a brief but gruesome account of the Bataan Death March and noting that the capture of Corregidor "marked the moment when the Imperial Japanese Empire reached its zenith," Frank masterfully sets the stage for the next installment in a planned trilogy. With copious maps and 160 pages of endnotes, this epic yet accessible account sets a new gold standard for histories of the conflict.
