War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

I read this book with some interest but left with the feeling that the author was trying to make an anti-racist statement rather than compile good history. He understates the Japanese mistreatment of other Asians and basically blames the ferocity of the war on American racial attitudes while failing to attribute appropriate weight to Japanese fanaticism. If you were compiling a large library on the subject you should have this book, but if you are looking for reasonable explanations of the Pacific War it's not so good.

Dower later wrote another great book, "Embracing Defeat," about the US Occupation of Japan after WW II. This earlier work is a detailed and powerful examination of how racism on both sides had a major effect on the coming of war. Dower particularly points out institutional and legal racism in the United States, and in the League of Nations, that most Western histories of the Pacific War completely ignore. It is always easier to look at the other guy's sins and ignore our own. One way of doing this is by pretend that Pearl Harbor happened out of the blue, and that America and the European empires (that occupied almost all of Africa, and much of Asia at the time) did nothing to provoke an attack. Dower has the courage to look in the mirror, and asks other Americans to do the same. Otherwise, he says, the chances are good we will repeat past mistakes. The current tendency to demonize Moslems and Arabs is an obvious signal that he's right.

John W. Dower's insightful work, "War Without Mercy, Race & Power in the Pacific War", offers a unique perspective on World War II in the Pacific theater. Rather than a standard military or political history of the conflict, Dower focuses on the racial hatred that prevailed on both sides, and how this in turn led to a harder, tougher war. Dower illustrates, through political cartoons, letters from soldiers to those back home, and various types of national media just how each side looked down upon the other. For instance, Dower writes that before the war Americans' almost uniformally looked down upon the Japanese as inferiors, but after their successes at Pearl Harbor and against the British, this view was replaced with that of the Japanese superman whose military skill was matched only by his barbarity. This perception was again replaced at the end of the war with the view of the Japanese tamed Monkey, which allowed Americans to adopt a paternalistic attitude to their defeated foes. Conversely, the Japanese portrayed the Americans before the war as being merchants, interested solely in money and trade and unwilling to fight a protracted war in the Pacific. Once the USA entered the war in earnest and began making serious inroads into Japan's conquests, the Japanese portrayed Americans as a barbaric horde intent on murder and rape.

Both sides accused the other of barbarity, and there certainly is much to back up the claim for both. The Bataan death march and the Rape of Nanking will forever stand as witnesses against Japanese cruelty. Perhaps just as shocking was the (albeit limited) practice of American service men sending the skulls of Japanese enemies to sweethearts back home for use as paperweights.

This racial aspect of the war is important to remember and shares its infamy with the Nazi-Soviet war in Europe. Dower does fail, however, to put this racial war into the larger context of military and political realities of the day. He decries American bombings of Japanese cities as a product of this racial hatred, but fails to appreciate, or at least comment upon, their military necessities. Sudden, dramatic horror quickly delivered was believed during the war, quite correctly, to spare a greater and more protracted horror in the long run. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki an invasion of the Japanese islands would have been necessary, resulting conservatively in ten times the casualties of the atom bombs. Dower fails to properly put this into perspective.

Despite this weakness, this is an important books and sheds light upon this aspect of the war. In a world where racial and religious hatred still abound and continue to threaten war, Dower's message seems very timely.

I first read this text when I took a WWII in Asia history course in college. As a high school history teacher, I now incorporate the major themes from the text into my WWII unit.

Dower does an excellent job dissecting both American and Japanese views of themselves and each other. I was stunned to learn how much psychoanalysis went into the racist rhetoric of the time. The whole text is loaded with valuable information and insight.

A very dense book and difficult read, but worth getting through.

Would pair nicely with Absolute War by Chris Bellamy to get the Eastern Front perspective between the Nazis and the Soviets.

It is hard to take a book seriosuly that states Italian and German Americans were nto interred (they were), and ignores that Japanese soldiers killed cooked and ate Australian POWs "just to see what they tasted like." Yes, everyone is racist,and yes, war is a terrible thing. But the author shows image after image of the Jpanese as apes and monkeys, and yet somehow miss the staggerign number of WW1 propoganda images of Germans as brutal uncivilized apes is just poor scholarship.

The book is not so much history, as an attempt to make it seem like both the Americans and Japanese were equally at fault for their extreme racist attitudes. No coutry in the world was as racist in WW2 as Japan. Yes this is ignored.

Yes, Most American soldiers did not take prisoners, yet it is glossed over why- the number of accounts of grenades and pistols hidden on men surrendering to take out one last Yankee. In the ETO it became standard for soldiers to shoot any SS men surrendering, while allowing regular Army to come forward- as long as they had not held out to the very end.

I notice the author is in Japanese studies and not a military historian. I assume he wanted to try and make the USA as guilty of racisim as the Japanese- and it is just not true.