Japan World History

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War - race - while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan."

When Japan attacked the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a conflict they were bound to lose. Availing herself of rarely consulted material, Hotta poses essential questions overlooked by historians in the seventy years since: Why did these men - military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor - put their country and its citizens in harm's way? Why did they make a decision that was doomed from the start?

On 1 April, 1945, the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific Theater began. The battle for the island of Okinawa would last for the next 82 days. Through the course of this dramatic battle, over 20,000 Americans would lose their lives, and over 75,000 Japanese were killed in one of the bloodiest clashes of World War II. Okinawa: The Last Battle is a remarkably detailed account of this monumental event by four soldiers who witnessed the action first-hand.

Before General MacArthur could fulfill his stirring promise of "I shall return" and retake the Philippines from Japanese control, a remarkable rescue mission would have to take place. Captured American soldiers, emaciated and ill from brutal mistreatment, were still being held at the notorious Cabanatuan prison camp. A small band of Army Rangers set out on a daring rescue effort: to penetrate thirty miles into Japanese-controlled territory, storm the camp, and escape with the POWs...

Sam Kleiner’s The Flying Tigers uncovers the hidden story of the group of young American men and women who crossed the Pacific before Pearl Harbor to risk their lives defending China. Led by legendary army pilot Claire Chennault, these men left behind an America still at peace in the summer of 1941 using false identities to travel across the Pacific to a run-down airbase in the jungles of Burma.

Firsthand accounts from interviews conducted in Japan with five WWII Japanese Naval aviators. All are veterans of the pivotal battles of the Pacific War including; USS Panay, Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Rabaul, Port Darwin, Indian Ocean Raid, Ceylon, Midway, Guadalcanal, Marshall Islands, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the kamikaze in the Philippines, the home defense and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Includes an introduction to the Japanese pilot training system for both officers and enlisted men.

Written by Robert Leckie, whose wartime exploits are featured in the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg HBO miniseries The Pacific, Strong Men Armed is the perennial bestselling classic account of the U.S. Marines' relentless drive through the Pacific during World War II.

Marching Orders tells the story of how the American military's breaking of the Japanese diplomatic Purple codes during World War II led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and hastened the end of the devastating conflict. With unprecedented access to over one million pages of US Army documents and thousands of pages of top-secret messages dispatched to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Berlin, author Bruce Lee offers a series of fascinating revelations about pivotal moments in the war.

The heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive story of two World War II soldiers - a Japanese surgeon and an American sergeant - during a brutal Alaskan battle in which the sergeant discovers the medic's revelatory and fascinating diary that changed our war-torn society’s perceptions of Japan.

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.

In late 1944 the Allies invaded the Japanese-held Philippines, and soon the end of the Pacific War was within reach. But for the last 150 American prisoners of war still held on the island of Palawan, there would be no salvation. As soldiers, sailors, and marines were herded into shallow air raid shelters, Japanese soldiers doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. By the next morning, only 11 men were left alive - but their desperate journey to freedom had just begun.

The American Provisional Tank Group had been in the Philippines only three weeks when the Japanese attacked the islands hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor. One of the tankmen parked his half-track on a runway and shot down a Japanese Zero that day, but the group's first tank-on-tank action - indeed the first American armor battle of World War II - would come two weeks later.

In the early hours of July 5, 1943, the destroyer USS Strong was hit by a Japanese torpedo. The powerful weapon broke the destroyer's back, flooded her engine room, killed dozens of sailors, and sparked raging fires. While accompanying ships were able to rescue most of Strong's surviving crewmen, scores were submerged in the ocean as the shattered warship sank beneath the waves - and a young officer's harrowing story of survival began.

December 7, 1941. The Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States was sucked into World War II. The nation was furious, and the public demanded revenge. Back home, Colonel James Doolittle of the United States Airforce was tasked with organizing a raid on Japan. On April 18, 1942, 16 B-25B Mitchell bombers were flown from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet off the coast of Japan. The daring mission was successful in creating fear within the hearts of the enemy and won support for the military back home. This is the story of The Doolittle Raid.

On the face of it, the three characters in this book seem to have little in common—aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point. Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur—Himmler calling him his “magic Buddha.”

Submarines exercised a decisive impact on the outcome of the Pacific Theater in World War II. The US submarine fleet, largely though not exclusively under the overall command of Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, strangled the supply lines and shipping traffic of the Empire of Japan. Their commerce raiding crippled both Japan's ability to keep its frontline units supplied and to manufacture the weapons, vessels, and vehicles needed to successfully carry on the struggle.

In the midst of the largest banzai attack of the war, US Army Lt. Col. William O'Brien, grievously wounded and out of ammunition, grabbed a sabre from a fallen Japanese soldier and flailed away at a small army of assailants, screaming to his men, "Don't give them a damn inch"! When his body was recovered the next day, 30 dead enemies were piled around him. The Battle of Saipan lasted 25 hellish days in the summer of 1944, and the stakes couldn't have been higher. If Japan lost possession of the island, all hope for victory would be lost.

The dramatic, pulse-pounding story of Harry Truman's first four months in office, when this unlikely president had to take on Germany, Japan, Stalin, and the atomic bomb, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

Richard McGregor's Asia's Reckoning is a compelling account of the widening geopolitical cracks in a region that has flourished under an American security umbrella for more than half a century. The toxic rivalry between China and Japan, two Asian giants consumed with endless history wars and ruled by entrenched political dynasties, is threatening to upend the peace underwritten by Pax Americana since World War II.