Military Book Buzz

Buy Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Author:  Max Hastings  

Book Description:  By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory would be achieved remained to be seen. The ensuing drama—that ended in Japan’s utter devastation—was acted out across the vast stage of Asia, with massive clashes of naval and air forces, fighting through jungles, and barbarities by an apparently incomprehensible foe. In recounting the saga of this time and place, Max Hastings gives us incisive portraits of the theater’s key figures—MacArthur, Nimitz, Mountbatten, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. But he is equally adept in his portrayals of the ordinary soldiers and sailors—American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese—caught in some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns.With unprecedented insight, Hastings discusses Japan’s war against China, now all but forgotten in the West, MacArthur’s follies in the Philippines, the Marines at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria. He analyzes the decision-making process that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which, he convincingly argues, ultimately saved lives. Finally, he delves into the Japanese wartime mind-set, which caused an otherwise civilized society to carry out atrocities that haunt the nation to this day.

Retribution is a brilliant telling of an epic conflict from a master military historian at the height of his powers.

Buy The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945

Published: September 11, 2007 (Knopf )

Author:  Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns

Book Description - This book is loaded with photographs, maps, and testimonials from civilians and service people alike. It encompasses both the European and Pacific theaters of war, as well as the home front. The narrative is rich and easy to read, and the photographs show just what it was like to be in battle or work on an assembly line back home. The personal accounts from the front add an element of actually being in the fighting to the book. Of particular interest to was the story of the Army’s 442nd infantry. This unit was composed entirely of Japanese-Americans who fought in the European theater. Other points of interest include an informative section on the movement of Japanese-Americans to relocation camps inside the United States, war bond drives conducted throughout the war, and, mainly, the brutality of combat in both the European and Pacific theaters.

 
Buy Hunt for Nazi Spies

Published:  30 Dec 2007 (University Of Chicago Press; Tra edition)
Author:  Simon Ketson
Book Description - From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers.

Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist.

Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.

Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; Tra edition (December 30, 2007)