The real theatre of war

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia was the second world war’s greatest event. The Asian theatre, much of it water, was seven times larger than the European theatre. America’s mobilisation was the most complex in history, Japan’s crimes among the most sadistic. Metaphysically, the atomic consummation altered our relationship to our habitat.

Yet only three comprehensive, single-volume accounts of the war in Asia have appeared — until now the most recent being Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun in 1985. Hirohito’s War by Francis Pike sets a new standard: oceanic in scope, comprehensive in detail, subtle in dissection, magisterial in organisation and consistently readable. Pike re-balances our view of the war — it emerges as Hirohito’s crime as much as Hitler’s — and transforms our understanding of its origins and outcomes.

Europe’s catastrophe derived from the failure to manage the expansion of Germany; Asia’s from the failure to manage the implosion of China in the early 1800s. With Asia destabilised, America, Russia, the European empires and Japan contended for dominance. The Treaty of Versailles created a Pacific security system, but the western powers failed to enforce their ‘Pax Anglo-Saxon’. Japan, empowered by imported technology and Darwinian doctrines, converted this power vacuum into the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

For Pike, the war began not in Poland, but in China in July 1937, with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, a Japanese provocation against Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang republic. For the next four years, the Kuomintang sapped Japan’s military capacity, and Japanese soldiers perpetrated terrible atrocities: shootings, rape, torture, sexual slavery, beheading and forced labour. Meanwhile, FDR struggled against domestic isolationists and feared that Germany and Japan would exclude America from the world’s markets.