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Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

The worst of friends

Max Hastings
HarperCollins, 670pp, £25,

Max Hastings

Wednesday, 3rd October 2007

Michael Howard

The key element in American strength, according to Hastings, was the least spectacular — their submarine force, whose blockade had indeed, by the end of 1944, rendered Japan incapable of carrying on the war. But her armies were still in place, fighting with the loyal support of a fully indoctrinated population and a ferocity that awed their antagonists; and neither the American people nor their armed forces were in a mood to lie back and wait for them to surrender. So the marines battled ashore on what Hastings calls ‘the bloody handkerchiefs’ of Iwojima and Okinawa so that Curtis Le May’s B29s could lay waste the cities of Japan and would have gone on doing so indefinitely if the dropping of the atomic bombs had not at last persuaded the emperor to speak out and bring the war to an end. Hastings gives a full and fair account, both of the decision to drop the bomb, and of the prolonged process by which the Japanese government ultimately surrendered; arguing, to my mind conclusively, that the decision saved many more lives than it cost.

Brilliantly though Hastings lays out the strategic context, his real talent lies in his account of ‘the terrible human experience’ that it involved. British readers will know about the ordeals of jungle campaigning and the sufferings of Japanese prisoners of war; less about what it was like to serve on a warship in the Pacific with its months of tedium and moments of nightmare when the vessel was hit by shellfire or worse, a kamikaze bomber; or what was involved in piloting a B29, especially in the early days before the innumerable bugs had been ironed out of it; or the horrors involved in attacking or defending one of those ‘bloody handkerchiefs’ that now rank so high in American mythology. Even less do they know of the ordeals of the Chinese people under Japanese occupation. As for the Japanese themselves, even Hastings recoils baffled from the attempt to enter into the mind of a people whose soldiers were so infinitely courageous, whose officers could be so literate and civilised, but who behaved with such systematic brutality to those whom they had defeated and ruled: a brutality that they still deny.

This is a book not only for military history buffs but for anyone who wants to understand what happened in half the world during one of the bloodiest periods of the blood-soaked 20th century.

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