The Last War of Empires - Japan and the Pacific War 1941-1945

This is a book about war - its build-up, its enactment, and its consequences. The focus is on the Pacific War of 1941-45 between Japan and the American-led Allies, but the wider perspective looks at warfare between empire-building powers in a shrinking modern world. The war in the Pacific eventually encompassed a land and oceanic space much greater than that of the European war. Its key battles were sea battles, clashes of aircraft carrier-borne warplanes where the mother ships often never saw their opponents. Its land battles were more personal encounters and were more costly in battle losses than equivalent sized encounters elsewhere, and they were accompanied by massacres and murders on both sides. Many books have been written on the Pacific theatre of World War Two, but this book distinguishes itself by placing the Pacific conflict in the context of the ambitiously imperialist modern histories of the United States and, in particular, Japan. It avoids the automatic attribution of all blame to the loser and introduces little-known facts such as the Japanese attack on British forces in Malaya, ninety minutes before Pearl Harbour and draws attention to downplayed issues such as the extent of American imperialism in the Pacific...