Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, by Max Hastings, March 2008, New York, Random House Inc. 656pp. $35.00 978-0-307-26351-3 (0-307-26351-7)
When Max Hastings chose “Retribution” as the title for his overview of the last two years of World War II in Asia, it is obvious that he had Japan in mind. This is the story of Japan reaping the whirlwind for the winds it had sown since 1937 in China, and since Pearl Harbor in 1941. But retribution also means a distribution of rewards and punishments, and it is here that Hastings stands out: this is the most judgmental work of military history I have ever read. Hastings passes out a little praise–he greatly admires William Slim for his generalship in Burma, and has kind words for Chester Nimitz–but his forte is denunciations. The most consistent target of his wrath is Douglas MacArthur, but his condemnation of William Halsey for his performance at Leyte Gulf is harsh as well. He also devotes an entire (short) chapter to condemning the Australian people, military, labor movement and leadership for their performance in the last stages of the war. But these are just the controversial denunciations. He reserves most of his anger for Japan, especially its leaders, from Hirohito down to individual officers, accusing most of them of combining casual cruelty with moral cowardice. But the Japanese are not alone: Hastings condemns all the Western powers for their patronizing, racist treatment of Asian allies, and, on the other side, sees both Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong as tyrants lacking human feelings for their own people.
But Retribution also intends to tell the story of the last two years of the war, and here Hastings faces major challenges. Unlike the war in Europe (Hastings covered its end in Armageddon, published in 2004) the conflict in Asia spanned a huge portion of globe, from Manchuria in the North to Australia in the South, and from Burma to Hawaii. It is unlikely the Soviet soldiers in Manchuria and the Australians fighting in New Guinea were even aware of each other’s existence. The author has chosen to combine chronology with a thematic approach. The book moves from early 1944, as the British prepare to recover Burma and the Americans plan for the invasion of the Philippines, to the war’s end with the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war. Narrative chapters recount the battles for Burma, the Philippines, and Okinawa, while thematic chapters deal with Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners, the war at sea, and so on. Sometimes this works better than others. Hastings obviously knows that the US Navy submarine force destroyed Japan’s trade and ability to supply its troops, but his “The War Underwater” chapter seems perfunctory. He is obviously far more interested in the decision to burn Japan’s cities with incendiary attacks, probably both because he is more at home with air forces and because the moral questions involved engage him.
It is difficult questions, moral, political and strategic that make Retribution interesting, and lift it above most military histories. I found his sections on the bombing of Japan–first burning out cities with incendiaries, then using nuclear weapons–to be excellent. He points out what people in 1945 knew: much of Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden had been reduced to ashes, with few second thoughts in London or Washington; Japanese treatment of Chinese civilians was well known, and their cruelty toward Allied POWs was becoming apparent. Attitudes at the time were not tinted by our experience of Japan as a peaceful nation, nor by our painful awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons to our own lives. At the same time, he is even-handed, telling how physicists such as Leo Szilard, belatedly aware of the genie they had unleashed, sought vainly to forestall the dropping of the bomb. And he emphasizes how the ultimate decision to end the war lay with the Japanese: even after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Russian entry into the war, the majority of the Japanese high command still favored fighting on at any cost. It was only when Hirohito belatedly showed courage that the tide turned.
If there is one fundamental problem with Retribution, it is that the book is too long. 550 pages will daunt some (potential) readers. And though I praise Hastings for adding so many voices–he interviewed scores of surviving veterans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, American, British, etc.–to make the book come alive, these vignettes weigh it down. All too often he simply drops three or four paragraphs of testimony from American pilots, Chinese civilian victims, or others into a chapter without their adding much to its message. In addition, there are a few errors that careful fact-checking could have prevented. Naval history is a field I know well, so I noticed that he wrongly credits the USS Pennsylvania with 16-inch guns, the Japanese at Samar with 15-inch guns, and describes destroyer Shigure as a heavy cruiser. None of these is a significant mistake, but they reduce a reader’s confidence in a book. On the balance, however, this is a good book, especially for American readers. It covers aspects of the Pacific war–Burma, Manchuria, Australia–not often given much space in American accounts. And, more than anything else, Hastings always keeps the political and human-rights issues involved in the war clearly in sight.
