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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Kai Bird

The British military historian Max Hastings is best known for volumes that insist on recounting World War II from the bottom up. Hastings wants his readers to learn history from the perspective of the army grunts, sailors and airmen who endured the tedium and barbarity of war. His is military history as told from the foxhole -- or, in the case of this narrative of the last year of the Pacific war, as told from the decks of aircraft carriers.

Too often the little actors in history are forgotten in the shadows of the kings, presidents and generals who send them into battle. In Retribution, Hastings does not leave out the big actors, but what is new and original are the personal stories he has extracted from oral histories and his own interviews with veterans of the American, Japanese, Russian, Australian and even Chinese armies. A fine writer, Hastings conveys many heartrending testimonies. He quotes a sailor describing his friend's decapitation during a kamikaze raid: "His head fell off at my feet. I looked down . . . and I believe his mouth was still trying to tell me something." A Japanese soldier observes his starving men cooking the remains of a dead officer. A Marine on Iwo Jima comes across "piles of dead Marines, waiting to be collected."

Hastings's veterans recount numerous firefights, ambushes, massacres and rapes. War crimes are committed by all sides -- but most methodically by the Japanese. When Gen. Douglas MacArthur refuses to bombard Manila's old Spanish district, one of his officers complains: "War is never pretty. I am frank to say I would sacrifice Philipino [sic] lives under such circumstances to save the lives of my men. I feel quite bitter about this tonight."

Hastings draws an array of lessons from these stories. He concludes, unarguably, that war is chaotic, arbitrary and brutal for the people on the frontlines, and that generals often make decisions that needlessly sacrifice their soldiers. He is very tough on MacArthur, criticizing many of the Pacific commander's strategic moves, particularly his decision to waste lives and resources in seizing Manila. Describing the U.S. loss of 8,140 men on Luzon, Hastings observes that "Japanese barbarism rendered the battle for Manila a human catastrophe, but MacArthur's obsession with seizing the city created the circumstances for it. . . . MacArthur presided over the largest ground campaign of America's war in the Pacific in a fashion which satisfied his own ambitions more convincingly than the national purpose of his country."

But when it comes to Retribution's central theme -- that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wholly justified and necessary to persuade a recalcitrant enemy to surrender -- Hastings abandons his critical faculties. He is not content simply to argue that "the fate which befell Japan in 1945" was "retributive justice" for that country's misdeeds. In language reminiscent of the patriotically correct criticism of the Smithsonian's attempt in 1995 to mount an exhibit about the Enola Gay, Hastings asserts, "The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so comprehensively discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence." He calls these unnamed writers "peddlers of fantasies."

Of course, the American Legion agrees with him. But it is an assertion rather than an argument, and the evidence of ongoing, robust debate is abundant. Numerous historians continue to question one aspect or another of the standard defense of President Harry Truman's decision to use the bomb, in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "against an enemy that was essentially defeated." Three years ago, the Japanese scholar Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a widely praised book, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, revealing evidence from Japanese and Russian archives that it was the Soviet entry into the war -- and not the atomic bombings -- that induced surrender. But Hastings does not alert his readers to this new evidence.

Let's clear the deck here: Few, if any, critics of the atomic bombings believe that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been preferable to the use of weapons of mass destruction. But the critics -- and Hastings -- know that this was not the real choice; Hastings admits that an invasion "would almost certainly have been unnecessary." The real question is whether lives could have been saved by following the advice of War Secretary Henry Stimson, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, the State Department's Joseph Grew, Gen. George Marshall and numerous other advisers to the president. They -- and by the way, The Washington Post at the time -- urged Truman to clarify the terms of unconditional surrender by stipulating that the United States would allow Japan to retain its emperor as a constitutional monarch. There is good evidence -- even in Hastings's book -- that this might have led to an earlier surrender.

But while Hastings devotes two full chapters to these issues, he can't find the space to note that Truman, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Adm. William D. Leahy, the president's chief of staff, all reportedly agreed on Aug. 3, 1945 -- three days before 140,000 civilians were killed in Hiroshima -- that Japan was "looking for peace." Similarly, Hastings says Byrnes advised Truman that Americans would not stand for a clarification of the terms of surrender that appeared to coddle Japan. But Hastings does not tell his readers that the Senate Republican leadership was publicly attacking Truman for prolonging the war by not giving the Japanese what the State Department knew they wanted: a guarantee of the continuation of the emperorship. Rather, Hastings has this to say about Byrnes's judgments: "If there was a strand of triumphalism in American conduct, why should there not have been?"

In the end, I don't quarrel with many of the facts in this book. But I am appalled by the critical evidence left out. This is both unfortunate and unnecessary because Hastings's narrative is fully compatible with a more nuanced interpretation of how the Pacific war ended. He amply demonstrates, for instance, that the Japanese were essentially defeated before the atomic bombs fell. But the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a hot-button issue, something that can make otherwise responsible historians nose-dive into polemics.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"Hastings is a military historian in the grand tradition . . . He is equally adept at analyzing the broad sweep of strategy and creating thrilling set pieces that put the reader in the cockpit of a fighter plane or the conning tower of a submarine."
--Evan Thomas, The New York Times Book Review

"Compelling . . . To the broad sweep of military events Mr. Hastings adds myriad human stories . . . and he does not hesitate to offer his own keen analysis along the way."
--Peter R. Kann, The Wall Street Journal

"The great merit of Max Hastings's many books on war is his skill at bringing the numbers, as it were, down to earth. Through the imaginative power of his writing, we get an inkling . . . of what it must have been like to slog one's way up a cliff at Iwo Jima, or be firebombed in Tokyo."
--Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books

"Hastings has another winner . . . This book is first-rate popular history, stiffened with a strongly stated point of view . . . A close-up and personal look at war as it affected real people, and how it felt to them at the time."--Harry Levins, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Explosive, argumentative, intensely researched . . . Demands to be read. A book of stunning disclosures."--Tom Mackin, Sunday Star-Ledger

"[A] masterful interpretive narrative . . . Hastings is both comprehensive and finely acute."
--Booklist

"Spectacular . . . Searingly powerful. Hastings makes important points about the war in the East that have been all too rarely heard."
--Andrew Roberts, The Sunday Telegraph

"A triumph . . . The key to the book's success lies not in its accessibility, nor in its vivid portraits of the key figures in the drama--although it has both--but in something else entirely: the author's supremely confident ambition."
--Laurence Rees, The Sunday Times

"Extraordinary . . . Anyone who believes that we're all living through a uniquely troubled time should read this . . . book."
--Georgie Rose, The Sunday Herald

"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."
--The Spectator

"Highly readable . . . An admirably balanced re-examination of the last phases of a conflict that it is not fashionable to remember."
--Dan van der Vat, The Guardian

"Engrossing . . . Its originality lies in the meticulousness of the author's research and the amazing witnesses he has found."
--Murray Sayle, The Evening Standard

"Hastings is . . . a master of the sort of detail that illuminates the human cost. It is the way he leaps so adeptly to and fro between the vast panorama and the tiny snapshot pictures that makes him such a readable historian."--Mail on Sunday

About the Author

Max Hastings is the author of more than fifteen books. He has served as a foreign correspondent and as the editor of Britain’s Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph and has received numerous British Press Awards, including Journalist of the Year in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988. He lives outside London.

Customer Reviews

Do not be put off by Amazon's featured review by Kai Bird. It is misleading.
Interested readers should not be put off by Kai Bird's misleading review for the Washington Post, which features on Amazon.com's page for this book, which, incidentally, is published under the title Nemesis in the UK. This is an excellent study of the last years of events in the pacific theatre during the second world war.

Kai Bird says that Hastings "abandons his critical faculties" when it comes to the book's "central theme", namely that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wholly justified.

Bird is mistaken on one account and deliberately misleading on another. Hasting's 600 page book naturally deals with the events at hand in chronological fashion and it is not until the very final chapters that he comes to discuss the dropping of the bombs. Reading the book, I did not identify the contents of these 2 chapters as either presenting or encapsulating a "central theme" in it. In these chapters, Hastings addresses both sides of the argument as to whether the decision to drop Little Boy and Fat Man was justifiable. He is of the opinion that it was, but far from abandoning his critical faculties he reasonably presents the opposing argument and then goes on to expose the holes that he sees in it. While he acknowledges that giving the Russians a display of US might was seen as a very useful added bonus of the atomic drop, to put it crudely, he rejects the argument that this was foremost in the minds of the members of the war cabinet and the top brass when planning the drop. He also shows how, far from there being any soul searching amongs decision makers, the atomic bomb drop was more a military project that had been put in place a few years back and was at this point running its course. He points out that the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities by General Lemay's B29s killed more people than did the atomic bombs and ridicules the idea that the deaths that Japanese civilians met at the hands of Lemay's pilots were any less excruciating than those of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Kai Bird says that Hastings misleads his readers by presenting the decision to drop the bombs as the lesser of two evils - the greater being Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu by the Allied forces, which would certainly have resulted in a death toll far higher than that of the atomic bombs. Only the most wilful of misreadings could come to such a conclusion. Hastings does not present the "decision" to drop the bombs in this light, although naturally he presents the possibility of a homeland invasion as part of the context in which the Americans were weighing their options. As I observed above, part of his argument is that there was no real decision to drop the bombs but rather there was no decision to call a halt to a military project that was then reaching fruition after years of development. Bird goes on to say that Hastings himself acknowledges the fallacy of his supposed argument regarding Olympic when he admits that "an invasion would almost certainly have been unnecessary". What Bird crucially omits to mention is that when Hastings makes this assertion it is in the context of the first atomic bomb already having been dropped. Here Bird is deliberately misleading his reader for what one can suppose are purely ideological reasons. He asserts that Hastings ignores the real issue: that Truman ignored the urgings of Henry Stimson and others to give the Japanese assurances that the position of the emperor in the constitution of Japanese society would not be meddled with by the Americans. With such assurances, Bird believes, the Japanese would have surrendered before the bombs were dropped. In fact Hastings does address this matter and in sufficient detail to allow his reader to understand that this was not so cut and dry and was far more complicated than Bird would have you believe.

Hastings has tracked down many veterans and civilian survivors from all sides in order to give his reader an impression of the war from the bottom up as well as from the top down. US readers of the book may be irked by the amount of coverage he gives to what they might view as British sideshows in the war - Bill Slim's battle for Burma, for example, but given that Hastings is British it is surely understandable that he has chosen to cover in detail the history of the British effort in the pacific theatre with British readers in mind.

I read Kai Bird's review of this excellent book only as I was coming to the end of the work and was dismayed by Bird's charges. I defy anyone to read Hastings work and then conclude that Bird's review of his book is objective

Retribution The Battle for Japan
Another excellent book by Max Hastings. Great way to learn the inside of the Pacific theatre 1944-1945.

A must have for any World War II enthusiast
Max Hastings has presented the perfect companion for his previous book "Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45". Of the 300+ books on World War II in my personal library, there are few that stand out as distinctly as "Retribution".

One would ordinarily think that a comprehensive view of the final year of the Pacific theatre would be a tedious, multi-volume effort to read, but Hastings has provided a wonderful alternative. Chock full of details and personal accounts, Hastings takes a fresh look at the major events as well as the forgotten or ignored aspects of the Pacific war.

As with "Armageddon", "Retribution" de-sterilizes the myth that World War II was "the good war" as well as debunking the common belief that Allied commanders were as competent as American history preaches. What Hastings does is expose the gritty truth as to how the Allies achieved victory, warts and all (and there are plenty of warts). I never knew how hated McArthur was ... or how the Japanese army advanced, without opposition, in China until the end of the war. The continuous ineptitude of Allied leadership is a constant issue throughout the book ... as are the horrors of war experienced by individuals (civilians and military alike). The fireboming dilemma, the POW experience, the wasteful Phillipines campaign, allied atrocities, the politics, naval, ground and air ... it's all there.

The research is thorough and the presentation is superb. "Retribution" is an engrossing read that is NEVER dull; I highly recommend it to anyone interested in World War II or history ... I cannot imagine anyone not learning something from this terrific book.