Best Books on World War Two in the Pacific

The war in the Pacific is less familiar to most European readers than the war in Europe, but in scale, complexity, and human cost it was every bit as significant. Japan's empire stretched from Manchuria to Burma to the central Pacific. The United States built the largest naval force in history to destroy it. Millions of soldiers, sailors, and civilians died across a theater that encompassed half the globe. The Pacific War also raises questions that the European theater does not: What drove Japan's expansion? How did a small island nation with limited natural resources build an empire that took four years and enormous American industrial power to defeat? And how do we understand the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in light of what preceded them? ## The Scope of the War Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 is where most American accounts begin. But Japan had been at war in Asia since 1931, when it invaded Manchuria, and since 1937, when full-scale war with China began. The Rape of Nanjing in 1937-1938, in which Japanese troops killed somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, and committed mass rape and torture, was the most notorious atrocity of a war that produced many. It is barely known in the West. The Pacific War as Americans experience it began with Pearl Harbor and ended with the atomic bombings. The war as Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, and other Asian populations experienced it began earlier, lasted longer, and cost far more lives. ## Essential Reading **"The Pacific War: The Strategy, Politics, and Players That Won the War" by John Costello** is one of the most comprehensive single-volume accounts of the entire conflict. Costello covers the strategic decisions on both sides, the naval battles, the island campaigns, the home fronts, and the final collapse of Japan with equal attention. He is particularly good on the Japanese side, drawing on Japanese sources that American accounts often underuse. **"With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" by Eugene Sledge** is the finest memoir to come out of the Pacific War. Sledge was a Marine who fought in two of the war's most costly battles. His account is precise, unsentimental, and morally serious. He describes what combat in the Pacific actually looked, smelled, and felt like, the heat, the mud, the smell of rotting bodies, the psychological disintegration of men under prolonged bombardment, with a clarity that no official history can match. It was one of the primary sources for Ken Burns's documentary "The War." ## The Naval War The Pacific War was above all a naval war. The battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf were the largest naval engagements in history. Midway in June 1942, in which American codebreakers gave the U.S. Navy advance warning of the Japanese plan and the American carrier force sank four Japanese fleet carriers in a single morning, turned the tide of the war six months after Pearl Harbor. **"Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan" by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya** is unusual because it is written from the Japanese perspective. Fuchida led the Pearl Harbor air attack and witnessed Midway. The book explains how Japan planned the operation, why the Americans succeeded in their ambush, and how Japanese doctrine and decision-making contributed to the catastrophe. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Midway as more than an American triumph. ## The Island Campaigns The island-hopping strategy that carried American forces from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945 was not inevitable. Early debates within American command produced two competing approaches: the Army under MacArthur wanted to advance through New Guinea and the Philippines; the Navy under Nimitz wanted to advance through the central Pacific. Both campaigns were pursued simultaneously, which stretched Japanese defenses but also strained American resources. The individual island battles were extraordinarily brutal. Japanese doctrine called for fighting to the last man rather than surrendering. The result was that the casualty ratio on the Japanese side in battle after battle was nearly total. At Iwo Jima, the Marines suffered over 26,000 casualties, and only 216 of the island's 22,000 Japanese defenders survived. ## The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb No aspect of the Pacific War generates more debate. The standard American justification is that the bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) saved lives by making an invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary. The projected casualty estimates for such an invasion ran from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Critics argue that Japan was already close to surrender, that the Soviet declaration of war on Japan (August 8, 1945, between the two bombings) was more decisive than the bombs, and that the bombings constituted deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Both positions have serious historical arguments behind them. What is not in dispute is the scale of the destruction: roughly 200,000 dead in the two cities, mostly civilians, with radiation effects killing more for years afterward. ## What the War Changed The Pacific War remade Asia. The American occupation of Japan produced a demilitarized, democratic country that became one of the world's largest economies within thirty years. Korea, divided at the 38th parallel between Soviet and American occupation zones, remains divided today. The collapse of European colonial power in Southeast Asia during the Japanese occupation created the conditions for independence movements in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, and elsewhere. The war's reverberations shaped the Cold War in Asia from Korea to Vietnam. ## Further Reading Browse more military history and World War Two books at [/category/history](/category/history)