Books This article is more than 16 years oldReviewForgotten war
This article is more than 16 years oldNemesis by Max Hastings is an admirably balanced account of the last days of the Pacific conflict, says Dan van der VatNemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
by Max Hastings
674pp, Harper Press, £25
Five days after providing half the troops for the first wave of the D-Day landing in 1944, the Americans put 130,000 men ashore in the Marianas Islands in the Pacific, only 22,500 less than the whole Normandy assault force (and 20,000 more than today's entire British Army). This fact alone should have convinced America's enemies in 1944 that there was not much point in fighting on against such overwhelming power. But reason was not the strong suit of the military junta that ruled Japan; their ever more tenuous grasp on reality made Hitler look like a strategist. So the Japanese fought on, and on and on, until the atomic bomb forced them to give up.
The Marianas were a turning point in the Pacific war second only to the US naval victory at Midway in June 1942, which halted Japanese expansion. The islands provided American B29 bombers with bases from which they could reach the Japanese home islands, which they proceeded to despoil in a firebombing campaign that did more immediate damage than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids.
It seems logical therefore for Max Hastings to start his highly readable book with the meeting between President Roosevelt, Admiral Chester Nimitz, C-in-C Pacific, and General Douglas MacArthur, C-in-C South-West Pacific, at Honolulu in July 1944 to plan the end-game. "For students of history," he writes, the manner in which the war ended "is even more fascinating than that in which it began."
Having covered the same ground myself, I am not so sure. The manner in which the junta generals painted themselves into a corner over more than a decade is just as absorbing, as are events in Manchuria and China before 1941 and the apparently unstoppable Japanese rampage in the first months of 1942. But the author presents this book as the counterpart of Armageddon, his account of the last phase of the war against Germany. They make a handsome pair, but the historical value of the two stories is not the same. The German war is far more familiar today in Britain, yet most people think that it was all over bar the shooting once the Allies broke out of Normandy. Armageddon usefully reminded us of the great last battles as the Germans defended their own soil.
In his excellent description of the belated British campaign to recapture Burma, Hastings recalls that General "Bill" Slim's 14th Army was christened the "forgotten army" by its own members. But as the war against Japan begins to pass out of living memory, the entire conflict is already, for most people outside the affected region, the forgotten war.
There are few enough good accounts of the Japanese war as a whole and Hastings would have done us a favour by finishing the job, starting with the complex origins and early campaigns of a horrific but fascinating struggle across an 8,000-mile front on land and sea. On this form, the result would have been very worthwhile. But then critics are often criticised for telling authors to write a different book.
Hastings, though a little too fond of judgments and generalisations, effectively debunks MacArthur, the olympian self-publicist, and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the charismatic but fairly thick C-in-C of SEAC (South-East Asia Command, or "Save England's Asian Colonies" as Americans called it). He also brings out the quality of such self-effacing commanders as the American admirals Nimitz and Spruance, as well as the British General Slim, whose victory in an appalling campaign Hastings regretfully recognises as an almost irrelevant sideshow. So was the humiliating participation of the Royal Navy's Pacific Fleet in the last phase of the maritime campaign, as a mere Task Force 57 in a colossal American armada.
Yet the British wanted not only to recover their empire but also to have a say in the postwar settlement of the Pacific. India and Burma, however, became independent within three years of VJ Day. This book is no gloriography in the Arthur Bryant tradition but an admirably balanced re-examination of the last phases of a conflict that it is not fashionable to remember.
Hastings's treatment of the unending controversy about the atomic bombs is no less even-handed. They were dropped, in ignorance of the effects of radiation, not only to avoid huge casualties in an invasion of Japan but also to forestall Soviet intervention in the Far East - which might not have happened had the Japanese surrendered after the first bomb. But they gave in a week too late, enabling Stalin to make his territorial grab. Hastings covers all the other main areas, including the enormous final naval battles and the devastation in China, as well as the wasteful diversion to the Philippines and the sidelining of gallant Australia, both the work of the ineffable MacArthur.
The author's attitude to such themes as class divisions within all the belligerent nations is refreshingly modern and sensitive, even if his graceful English is sometimes a little too up to date. He tells us for example that in Burma water supply was an "issue". I wager that everyone on both sides understood that the lack of fresh water was not an issue between them but a problem they shared.
· Dan van der Vat's The Pacific Campaign is published by Simon & Schuster
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