Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (Vintage)

"Retribution" is even better than "Armageddon," Max Hastings' review of the history of the end of World War II in Europe.

I say review of the history rather than history, because Hastings does not do original research, aside from interviewing (sometimes by means of agents) survivors. Little or nothing new is in these books.

Their high value is that Hastings is an incisive -- perhaps the most incisive -- analyst of what was going on in the late days of the great war, when the outcome was certain and leaders began to turn their attention to what sort of world would emerge after peace. From a perspective 60 years on, Hastings does a masterly job of sorting out the big themes, like the province-grabbing of Stalin and the uselessness of the Kuomintang.

He is as ready to criticize one side as the other, although, obviously, there was more to criticize on the Japanese side. It was one thing for the Americans to "credit their enemies with excessive rationality," much different for the Japanese to conduct a war in which "there seemed no limit to Japanese brutality."

In the last few pages, Hastings says he "embarked upon this book with a determination to view Japanese wartime conduct objectively, thrusting aside nationalistic sentiments which have clouded the perspective of many British and American writers since 1945 . . . Yet it proved hard to sustain lofty aspirations of detachment, in the face of the evidence of systemic Japanese barbarism, displayed against their fellow Asians on a vastly wider scale than against Americans and Europeans."

I disagree with this sentiment only in thinking that "many British and American writers" have been too easy, not too harsh in judging Japanese behavior. This is often the result of the revulsion at the use of atomic bombs, and the Japanese have played this card superbly in order to avoid taking responsibility for their crimes.

Even Hastings, although he concludes, correctly, that the atomic bombs were completely justified, finds himself again and again feeling somewhat sick at the thought. It is sick-making, but no more so -- less so, even -- than what routinely happened to the victims of the Japanese. Hastings recognizes this intellectually but has a hard time emotionally with it.

There was something different about Japanese and German aggression in the `40s. In most of history, when people surrender, they may be robbed or oppressed, but the rate of killing goes down. With the Germans and the Japanese, it went up.

The Germans killed because of a racist ideology and callousness and policy. The Japanese did not kill for policy and although they were utterly contemptuous of non-Japanese, that was more cultural than political (in fact, for public consumption, all Asians were brothers of a kind in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere). The Japanese killed for sport.

Not since the Mongols had this happened on such a large scale.

In that sense, the Japanese were morally even worse than the Germans, although in the West they have escaped the opprobrium that was heaped on the Germans. There is no single word, like Holocaust or Shoah, to designate the Japanese slaughter, because it was not a policy. It was sport.

Although Hastings does not say so (Iris Chang did, though), the sportiveness was not somehow confined to the Japanese army or militarists. Virtually all Japanese participated, as rooters, for the sporting murders. In the daily newspapers, Japanese followed the exploits of two officers who had staged a contest to see which would soonest manage to chop off 100 Chinese heads.

The Germans more or less hid their atrocities. The Japanese reveled in them.

And, as we know from the repeated "slips of the tongue" of the Liberal Democratic political leaders of Japan in the 21st century, they still do.

The peace constitution imposed by the Americans is a sham.

Hastings lays about with his cudgel on all sides, spending much time mocking Douglas MacArthur (who deserves every slur), denigrating the corruption and incompetence of the Chinese Nationalists, clear-sightedly refusing the accept the self-proclaimed heroics of the Eighth Route Army, registering the crimes of the invading Russians.

A few, very few men in high places pass muster: Chester Nimitz and Bill Slim and not many others.

In a final evaluation, he concludes that Americans especially learned the wrong lesson from their overwhelming, unconditional victory: They then believed, he says, their writ would run anywhere.

In the new order, though, unlimited war was no longer acceptable, and unconditional surrenders no longer a doable policy goal.

We shall see. The Second World War was won by hard men, but there was no reason to suppose in 1938 that men like Roosevelt or Truman were hard. It was the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians who bragged about their hardness. The Americans turned out not to be soft but hard.

Today, America again looks soft. Given again the kind of incentive that they had in 1941-45, Americans might again throw up hard men, and our enemies, who again brag of their own hardness and mock our softness, could be administered the lessons that the Japanese had to submit to, even if they have never accepted them.

I'm about halfway through this now and am struggling to keep slogging through. Yes Hastings does bring out some details about things that are not often covered and yes he gives a bit more coverage to the China-Burma-India theater than most others do. On the other hand, despite providing a fair amount of anecdotes from individuals on both sides, few of them carry through to anything. They are just quick anecdotes. You never really get the feeling of being there. The author writes from such a distance that it is more anthropology than recent history. As other reviews have noted there are a number of errors in details of particular ships and engagements, particularly in the Battle for Leyte Gulf. What has been bothering me the most is that just as you start getting the feeling for a particular area or engagement, it jumps somewhere else without really connecting the jump logically via time or strategic importance.

Other times the author's British perspective is a bit overpowering. For instance he cannot understand why the US forces in CBI were somewhat reluctant to fully cooperate with the forces of the Empire, especially in everyday matters in India. He clearly misses the fact that the Americans, having forcibly thrown off the shackles of the British Empire, were a bit reluctant to embrace the Empire's treatment of a current colony and its people.

If you have not read many books about the Pacific Theater of WWII, this one would be a good starting point. However, having already read numerous works by a variety of authors, this one lacks in accuracy of detail and leaves one wanting more than just glimpses of anecdotes. To get a better feeling of what it was like and how it played out, I would recommend these titles: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, Halsey's Typhoon, Goodbye Darkness, The Lions of Iwo Jima, The Burma Road, The Bravest Man: Richard O'Kane and the Amazing Submarine Adventures of the USS Tang, Fighter Squadron at Guadalcanal.

I really enjoyed this book! While it is long and in small print I was able to finish it as it was very interesting. I would highly recommend this book for someone who is looking to learn and understand more about the last one and one half years of the Pacific war. g

Hastings' Retribution is a breath of fresh air after endless volumes of ethocentric books from British and American historians focusing only on the battles fought by their armies in the Pacific theater to the exclusion of anything else. As a result, China's role in the war which cost it upwards of 20 million dead, is dismissed in a few sentences by those historians. Hastings tries to correct that and gives good coverage of the final days in Manchuria, whose people suffered so much since 1895 all the way to 1945 from the imperialist wars Russia and Japan waged on its territory. From the horrors of life under the Japanese occupation replete with gratuitous executions for trivial infractions to being subjects of horrific experiments at the hands of the perverted Japanese doctors of Unit 731, the people of Manchuria had yet to endure in 1945 the wholesale rape and pillage of the " liberators", Russians hell-bent on rape and pillage of the infrastructure which left few women unmolested and the population deprived of electricity and water. Yet the final three pages of his narrative are in many ways most significant. It finds Japan, which caused the deaths and suffering of millions of people by its ruthless campaign to subjugate Asia, still unwilling to face up to its responsibility for the war 60 plus years after its end. The excuse that Japan need not face up to its war crimes because China has not faced up to its killings under Mao is tantamount to the Germans telling the Russians that they need not apologize for their actions in Russia because Russians have not prosecuted those responsible for the communist excesses in the Gulags and elsewhere. One atrocity should never be used to condone another! I commend Mr. Hastings for finally bringing a balanced view of the War in the East to us and for resisting attempts at ethnocentric history-telling and hope that the eventual opening of all historical archives in China, Russia and most-important Japan, will give us an even better understanding of that horrible event.

A slightly dry but well-researched and laid-out discussion about the last two years of WWII in the Pacific. That Japan was going to lose was a forgone conclusion, but there were many battles to be fought and many deaths and casualties to come. A great mix of the macro level of the war (states, leaders both political and military, etc.) and the look of the war from the grunts on the ground/in the ships/on the planes, similar in style to some degree to Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day but not quite as novelistic.

I went with four stars, but this is really a four and a half star book.