"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.
