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Author: Roy M. MacLeod
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792358510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War occasioned many reflections on the place of science and technology in the conflict. That the war ended with Allied victory in the Pacific theatre, inevitably focussed attention upon the Pacific region, and particularly upon the Manhattan project and its outcome. It was in the Pacific that Western physics and engineering gave birth to the Atomic Age. However, the Pacific war had also proved a testing time, and a testing space, for other disciplines and institutions. Extreme environments and opemtional distances, and the fundamental demands of logistics, required the Allies and the Japanese to innovate many scientific and technological practices. Just as medicine and botany were called upon to fight tropical diseases and insect pests, so engineers, anthropol ogists and geographers were called upon to understand local conditions and cli mates, and to work with local peoples whose traditional lives were changed forever by the experience. At the same time, the war played midwife to a host of new de velopments, not least in scientific intelligence and in chemical and biological weapons, which were to acquire far greater importance after 1945.
Author: Roy M. MacLeod
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792358510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Get Book
Book Description
In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War occasioned many reflections on the place of science and technology in the conflict. That the war ended with Allied victory in the Pacific theatre, inevitably focussed attention upon the Pacific region, and particularly upon the Manhattan project and its outcome. It was in the Pacific that Western physics and engineering gave birth to the Atomic Age. However, the Pacific war had also proved a testing time, and a testing space, for other disciplines and institutions. Extreme environments and opemtional distances, and the fundamental demands of logistics, required the Allies and the Japanese to innovate many scientific and technological practices. Just as medicine and botany were called upon to fight tropical diseases and insect pests, so engineers, anthropol ogists and geographers were called upon to understand local conditions and cli mates, and to work with local peoples whose traditional lives were changed forever by the experience. At the same time, the war played midwife to a host of new de velopments, not least in scientific intelligence and in chemical and biological weapons, which were to acquire far greater importance after 1945.
Author: Walter E. Grunden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
While previous writers have focused primarily on strategic, military, and intelligence factors, Walter Grunden underscores the dramatic scientific and technological disparities that left Japan vunerable and ultimately led to its defeat in World War II.
Author: Eri Hotta
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385350511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.
Author: Alan Levine
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Nineteen ninety-five is a year of celebration and remembrance of the Axis collapse that signaled the end of the Second World War. In August, the world will mark the 50th anniversary of V-J Day. Particularly important, then, is this new historical study o the Pacific phase of World War War II that coers not just the military, but also the political side of the war. Rejecting recent trends that tend to whitewash or demonize the Japanese, this book casts new light on many controversial issues from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. It treats the submarine campaign,the air attacks on Japan, the use of the atomic bombs, and Japan's surrender in unusual detail. Finally, it emphasizes that the war was primarily a struggle for the air and sea.
Author: Thomas Helling, M.D.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476664218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475
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Book Description
Caring for the wounded in the World War II Pacific Theater posed serious challenges to doctors and surgeons. The thick jungles, remote atolls and heavily defended Japanese islands of the Pacific presented dangers to medical personnel never before encountered in modern warfare, as did the devastating new kamikaze attacks. Sophisticated treatments, including complex surgery, were by necessity far removed from the fighting, requiring front line doctors to do the minimum--often under fire--to stabilize patients until they could be evacuated: "damage control," it would later be called. Navy doctors responsible for thousands of sailors aboard fleets in battle found caring for the wounded daunting or nearly impossible. Yet to save lives, medical resources had to be kept as close as possible to the action. This book systematically details the efforts and innovations of the doctors and surgeons who worked to preserve life under extreme peril.
Author: Hector C. Bywater
Publisher: Applewood Books
ISBN: 1557095574
Category : Imaginary wars and battles
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This gripping blow-by-blow account of a war between the United States and Japan, originally published in 1925, predicted actual events. Writing 16 years before the japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Bywater, the world's leading naval authority in the period between the two world wars, prophesied a Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. in the Pacific, while simultaneously invading the Phillippines and Guam.
Author: John C. McManus
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
ISBN: 0451475046
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 642
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Book Description
"John C. McManus, one of our most highly-acclaimed historians of World War II, takes readers from Pearl Harbor--a rude awakening for a ragtag militia woefully unprepared for war--to Makin, a sliver of coral reef where the Army was tested against the increasingly-desperate Japanese. In between were nearly two years of punishing combat as the Army transformed, at times unsteadily, from an undertrained garrison force into an unstoppable juggernaut, and America evolved from an inward-looking nation into a global superpower."--Provided by publisher.
Author: John C. McManus
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 069819277X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 657
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Book Description
In Fire and Fortitude—winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History—John C. McManus presented a riveting account of the US Army's fledgling fight in the Pacific following Pearl Harbor. Now, in Island Infernos, he explores the Army’s dogged pursuit of Japanese forces, island by island, throughout 1944, a year that would bring America ever closer to victory or defeat. “A feat of prodigious scholarship.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Wonderful.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch • “Outstanding.”—Publishers Weekly • “Rich and absorbing.”—Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins • “A considerable achievement, and one that, importantly, adds much to our understanding of the Pacific War.”—James Holland, author of Normandy ’44 After some two years at war, the Army in the Pacific held ground across nearly a third of the globe, from Alaska’s Aleutians to Burma and New Guinea. The challenges ahead were enormous: supplying a vast number of troops over thousands of miles of ocean; surviving in jungles ripe with dysentery, malaria, and other tropical diseases; fighting an enemy prone to ever-more desperate and dangerous assaults. Yet the Army had proven they could fight. Now, they had to prove they could win a war. Brilliantly researched and written, Island Infernos moves seamlessly from the highest generals to the lowest foot soldiers and in between, capturing the true essence of this horrible conflict. A sprawling yet page-turning narrative, the story spans the battles for Saipan and Guam, the appalling carnage of Peleliu, General MacArthur’s dramatic return to the Philippines, and the grinding jungle combat to capture the island of Leyte. This masterful history is the second volume of John C. McManus’s trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, proving McManus to be one of our finest historians of World War II.
Author: W. Puck Brecher
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824881370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes. Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a “unified Japan” and its “illegal war” or “race war,” early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the “performance of Japaneseness,” the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever. Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.
Author: Christina Twomey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131780788X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
The Pacific War is an umbrella term that refers collectively to a disparate set of wars, however, this book presents a strong case for considering this assemblage of conflicts as a collective, singular war. It highlights the genuine thematic commonalities in the legacies of war that cohere across the Asia-Pacific and shows how the wars, both individually and collectively, wrought dramatic change to the geo-political makeup of the region. This book discusses the cultural, political and social implications of the Pacific War and engages with debates over the war’s impact, legacies, and continuing cultural resonances. Crucially, it examines the meanings and significance of the Second World War from a truly international perspective and the contributors present fascinating case studies that highlight the myriad of localised idiosyncrasies in how the Pacific War has been remembered and deployed in political contexts. The chapters trace the shared legacy that the individual wars had on demographics, culture and mobility across the Asia Pacific, and demonstrate how in the aftermath of the war political borders were transformed and new nation states emerged. The book also considers racial and sexual tensions which accompanied the arrival of both Allied and Axis personnel and their long lasting consequences, as well as the impact returning veterans and the war crime trials that followed the conflict had on societies in the region. In doing so, it succeeds in illuminating the events and issues that unfolded in the weeks, months, and indeed decades after the war. This interdisciplinary volume examines the aftermaths and legacies of war for individuals, communities, and institutions across South, Southeast, and East Asia, Oceania, and the Pacific world. As such, it will be welcomed by students and scholars of Asian history, modern history and cultural history, as well as by those interested in issues of memory and commemoration.
