Author: Michael A. Barnhart
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468450
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Michael A. Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security, drawing on a wide array of Japanese and American sources.Barnhart focuses on the critical years from 1938 to 1941 as he investigates the development of Japan's drive for national economic self-sufficiency and independence and the way in which this drive shaped its internal and external policies. He also explores American economic pressure on Tokyo and assesses its impact on Japan's foreign policy and domestic economy. He concludes that Japan's internal political dynamics, especially the bitter rivalry between its army and navy, played a far greater role in propelling the nation into war with the United States than did its economic condition or even pressure from Washington. Japan Prepares for Total War sheds new light on prewar Japan and confirms the opinions of those in Washington who advocated economic pressure against Japan.
Author: Michael A. Barnhart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Author: Jeremy A. Yellen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions—one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines. Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.
Author: Ronald H. Spector
Publisher: Free Press
ISBN: 1982135239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
“The best book by far on the Pacific War” (The New York Times Book Review), this classic one-volume history of World War II in the Pacific draws on declassified intelligence files; British, American, and Japanese archival material; and military memoirs to provide a stunning and complete history of the conflict. This “superbly readable, insightful, gripping” (Washington Post Book World) contribution to WWII history combines impeccable research with electrifying detail and offers provocative interpretations of this brutal forty-four-month struggle. Author and historian Ronald H. Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy than a strategic calculation. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition. Spector skillfully takes us from top-secret strategy meetings in Washington, London, and Tokyo to distant beaches and remote Asian jungles with battle-weary GIs. He reveals that the US had secret plans to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan months before Pearl Harbor and shows that MacArthur and his commanders ignored important intercepts of Japanese messages that would have saved thousands of lives in Papua and Leyte. Throughout, Spector contends that American decisions in the Pacific War were shaped more often by the struggles between the British and the Americans, and between the Army and the Navy, than by strategic considerations. Spector vividly recreates the major battles, little-known campaigns, and unfamiliar events leading up to the deadliest air raid ever, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the American war in the Pacific and the people and forces that determined its outcome.
Author: Haruo Tohmatsu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742581268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
The United States' involvement in World War II began with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But for Japan, the conflict began at a much earlier date. This book focuses on Japan and the events in its military history leading up to and including Pearl Harbor. Unique in its perspective, A Gathering Darkness shows how historical events in the 1920s and 1930s steered the country into war with America and its allies. A Gathering Darkness looks at what happened inside Japan in the 1920s to change its outlook on the West. There was a general repudiation of western values by Japanese society, and Japan turned its back on the outside world and an international order that were making life difficult for the country. The treaties made in Washington in the 1920s left Japan with a local supremacy that no other power, including Britain and the United States, could challenge on the account of their lack of forward bases and their commitments that precluded full deployment of forces in the western Pacific. A Gathering Darkness shows why Japan became increasingly militant in the 1930s. The authors look at Japanese military involvement in Manchuria beginning in September 1931. They cover the beginning of Japan's involvement in China in 1937, a conflict in which Japan would up in a deadlock with the China theater of operations in the period 1939–1941. The book then analyzes the first five months of the Pacific War, including the Pearl Harbor strike and the synchronization of offensive operations across more than four thousand miles of ocean. It also investigates the dilemma Japan faced as it realized in early 1942 that the United States was not going to collapse. A Gathering Darkness is the first volume in SR Books' trilogy on the Pacific War. This book offers a fascinating look at the prelude to the Pacific War and the early stages of the conflict that no one interested in World War II, military history, or Japanese history will want to miss.
Author: Louise Young
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520923154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 509
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Book Description
In this first social and cultural history of Japan's construction of Manchuria, Louise Young offers an incisive examination of the nature of Japanese imperialism. Focusing on the domestic impact of Japan's activities in Northeast China between 1931 and 1945, Young considers "metropolitan effects" of empire building: how people at home imagined and experienced the empire they called Manchukuo. Contrary to the conventional assumption that a few army officers and bureaucrats were responsible for Japan's overseas expansion, Young finds that a variety of organizations helped to mobilize popular support for Manchukuo—the mass media, the academy, chambers of commerce, women's organizations, youth groups, and agricultural cooperatives—leading to broad-based support among diverse groups of Japanese. As the empire was being built in China, Young shows, an imagined Manchukuo was emerging at home, constructed of visions of a defensive lifeline, a developing economy, and a settler's paradise.
Author: Benjamin Uchiyama
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107186749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
This cultural history of the Japanese home front during the Asia-Pacific War challenges ideas of the period as one of unrelenting repression. Uchiyama demonstrates that 'carnival war' coexisted with the demands of total war to promote consumerist desire alongside sacrifice and fantasy alongside nightmare, helping mobilize the war effort.
Author: H. P Willmott
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612517285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
The respected British military historian H. P. Willmott presents the first of a three-volume appraisal of the strategic policies of the countries involved in the Pacific War. Remarkable in its scope and depth of research, his thoughtful analysis covers the whole range of political, economic, military, and naval activity in the Pacific. This first volume comprehensively covers events between December 1941 and April 1942, concluding with the Doolittle Raid on April 18. When published in hardcover in 1982, the book was hailed as an eloquent portrayal of great empires on trial that no one should miss. Willmott’s stimulating and original approach to the subject remains unmatched even today.
Author: James B Wood
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1461638089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
In this provocative history, James B. Wood challenges the received wisdom that Japan's defeat in the Pacific was historically inevitable. He argues instead that it was only when the Japanese military prematurely abandoned its original sound strategic plan—to secure the resources Japan needed and establish a viable defensible perimeter for the Empire—that the Allies were able to regain the initiative and lock Japanese forces into a war of attrition they were not prepared to fight. The book persuasively shows how the Japanese army and navy had both the opportunity and the capability to have fought a different and more successful war in the Pacific that could have influenced the course and outcome of World War II. It is therefore a study both of Japanese defeat and of what was needed to achieve a potential Japanese victory, or at the very least, to avoid total ruin. Wood's argument does not depend on signal individual historical events or dramatic accidents. Instead it examines how familiar events could have b
Author: Sue Rosen
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1760638005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In 1942 the threat of Japanese invasion hung over Australia. The men were away overseas, fighting on other fronts, and civilians were left unprotected at home. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese advance south, Prime Minister Curtin ordered state governments to prepare. From January 1942, a team frantically pulled together secret plans for a 'scorched earth' strategy. The goal was to prevent the Japanese from seizing resources for their war machine as they landed, and capturing Australians as slaves as they had done in Malaya and elsewhere in Asia. From draining domestic water tanks to sinking dinghies and burning crops, from training special citizen squads to evacuating coastal towns, 'Total war, total citizen collaboration' was the motto. Today these plans vividly evoke the fraught atmosphere of the year Australia was threatened with invasion. After the war these top secret plans were forgotten. This is the first time they have ever been made public. 'This is a treasure trove, a gold mine, a Christmas-every-day cornucopia of rich Australian history...' Peter Grose, author of An Awkward Truth and A Very Rude Awakening.
