The Second World War in the East: The history of World War II in Asia and the Pacific

If you're looking for an event that symbolises what both unites and divides Britain and the US, search no further than the Second World War. Britain and the US both 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, of course, is a little simplistic. 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 labour 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 US flag on Iwo Jima and the mushroom clouds over Japan--but that is just about it. So HP 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, then 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

In 1941 Germany's ally, Japan, initiated its own war against the European powers in the Pacific. Its instruments were to be chiefly those of amphibious warfare, including the aircraft carrier, though Japan's land war in China, which had begun in earnest in 1937, took the form of a traditional war of conquest. The Pacific war, though it included several important land campaigns, was principally a conflict between great triphibious task forces, in which aircraft carriers played the central role. Its action was perhaps the most dramatic ever played out in military history and culminated in the attack on Japan by the USA with nuclear weapons, an instrument of offence that called into question the utility of war as an inter-state activity. This history of World War II in Asia and the Pacific covers all these events.

H.P. Willmott. Cassell. 1999. Hardcover with d/w, 224 pages colour maps