Description:
If you're looking for an event that symbolizes what both unites and divides Britain and the United States, search no further than the Second World War. Britain and the U.S. fought on the same side, but as far as the British are concerned, the war started in 1939 and was, to all intents and Purposes, over in May 1945 with the fall of Berlin. The Americans see things a little differently. They reckon it started in 1941 with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and ended in August 1945 with the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This summary is a little simplistic, of course. The Americans did play a major part in the European War from D-Day onward, though not perhaps as much as films like Saving Private Ryan might suggest. (Watching Steven Spielberg's epic, you'd be hard-pushed to know there was a single Brit in Normandy in 1944.) And the Brits were involved in the Far East; first with the fall of Singapore, then with the Chindit campaign in Burma. No one should ignore, either, the suffering of the British POWs in the Japanese labor camps. Yet the fact remains that for most Eurocentric Brits, the war in the Far East is largely a forgotten war. We remember the odd vivid image--Pearl Harbor, the raising of the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, and the mushroom clouds over Japan--but that is just about it. So H.P. Willmott's book, part of Cassell's excellent History of Warfare series, comes as a salutary jolt to our conscience. We may have lived through hell in Europe, but some of the nastiest, most brutal hand-to-hand fighting was taking place nearly 10,000 miles away. As with the other books in this series, Willmott conjures an Alice in Wonderland effect; there is far more in here than you would imagine the space allowed. Detailed maps, period photos, helpful chronologies are all included, along with a substantial political and military overview. Above all, what you get is context. We don't wade in with Pearl Harbor. Instead, we start with Japan's imperialistic expansionist policies of the 1920s and '30s with its ongoing secret war with China, from which Pearl Harbor became a logical, opportunistic extension. And Japan almost got away with it. For a year they cleaned up everything that stood in their way, and by 1942 were in possession of the East Indies, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Philippines. But then the fight back began; first at the Midway Islands and then slowly, slowly through the Solomon Islands and the Philippines, until it became a battle for Japan itself. If you're looking for quibbles, Willmott misses a trick or two on the involvement of the Japanese Imperial Family in the war effort; everything the generals did had the blessing of Hirohito. But all in all, this is a robust and thoughtful book. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk
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