Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Book Code:  AW0399

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Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

A masterly narrative history of the climactic battles of the Second World War, and companion volume to his bestselling 'Armageddon', by the pre-eminent military historian Max Hastings. The battle for Japan that ended many months after the battle for Europe involved enormous naval, military and air operations from the borders of India to the most distant regions of China. There is no finer chronicler of these events than the great military historian Max Hastings, whose gripping account explores not just the global strategic objectives of the USA, Japan and Britain but also the first-hand experiences of the airmen, sailors and soldiers of all the countries who participated in the Far East and the war in the Pacific. The big moments in the story are chosen to reflect a wide variety of human experience: the great naval battle of Leyte Gulf; the under-reported war in China; the re-conquest of Burma by the British Army under General Slim; MacArthur's follies in the Philippines; the Marines on Iwo Jima and Okinawa; LeMay's fire-raising Super-fortress assaults on Japan; the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the kamikaze pilots of Japan; the almost unknown Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria in the last days of the war, as Stalin hastened to gather the spoils; and the terrible final acts across Japanese-occupied Asia. This is classic, epic history -- both in the content and the manner of telling.

In 1944-45, the war against Japan embraced the most remarkable cast of statesmen and commanders the world has ever seen: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin; Nimitz, MacArthur, Mountbatten, Slim, LeMay; Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. The drama which ended in Japan's utter defeat was acted out across the vast stage of Asia. Battles by land, sea and air extended over millions of square miles: Imphal and Kohima, Leyte Gulf and Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the B-29 fire-bombing offensive against Japan's cities, the great Soviet assault on Manchuria.

Max Hastings has written Nemesis as a counterpart to Armageddon, his bestselling saga of the 1944-45 struggle for Germany. Once again, he matches the story of command decisions, rivalries and follies with the experiences of British, American, Russian, Chinese and Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen, fighting some of the bloodiest campaigns of the war amid heat, disease, privation and against a merciless enemy. He has interviewed extensively in Asia to tell the story of China's war, which cost at least fifteen million lives yet is almost unknown in the West. Modern China's bitterness towards Japan is rooted in the horrors which Hirohito's armies inflicted on the Chinese people between 1931 and 1945.

With the aid of scores of eyewitness accounts, Hastings portrays the Russian onslaught of August 1945, in which Stalin launched 1.5 million men against the Japanese, to gain the territorial booty promised to him at Yalta. The book describes Slim's brilliant 1945 campaign in Burma, which Churchill never wanted to fight. The British and Indian armies achieved a sunset victory for the Empire - but one their commanders knew could contribute nothing to Japan's defeat.

Australia's soldiers earned much more glory in the early war years - yet almost vanished from the battlefield in 1944-45, because of their country's bitter internal dissensions, and MacArthur's refusal to concede them a real role in America's showdown with Japan. Hastings analyses the decision-making which precipitated the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and concludes that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved many lives.

Here are word-portraits of the ordeals of American sailors in the great sea battles which destroyed the Japanese Imperial Navy, alongside tales of communist Chinese guerrillas, Japanese fighter pilots, British soldiers sweating in the jungles of Burma, Tokyo families facing incineration by firestorm. Nemesis weaves together in brilliant fashion the complex strands of an epic which stretched across a continent and many nations, in three dimensions, embracing some of the most terrible human experiences of the twentieth century.