Peter Wetzler's
Imperial Japan and Defeat in
the Second World War: The Collapse of an Empire is a tough read and an awfully expensive
one, but if you can persuade your library to buy a copy, you will find it one of the better
studies of how Japan reaped the whirlwind in its half-century to rule Asia. It consists of
five lengthy chapters, each of which tackles a contentious subject, starting with one that has
obsessed historians since 1945: How much responsibility did Hirohito himself bear for the
disaster? Quite a lot, Mr Wexler finds. He's especially hard on Herbert Bix's exculpatory
Hirohito and the Making of Modern
Japan. Then there was Prime Minister Tojo, executed as a war crminal. Mr Wexler makes the
case that Tojo wasn't a dictator on the line of Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin, but a man wholly
committed to the myth that Japan through its emperor was divinely ordained to dominate Asia and
perhaps the world, and who eagerly accepted blame for starting the war so that Hirohito would be
spared. But like the emperor, and like most of his colleagues in the Imperial Army and Navy,
he shared the guilt for launching a war against a nation superior in every respect except
the willingness of its citizens to throw their lives away in a hopeless cause.
I was especially interested in his chapter on the Kamikaze "human bullets," who supposedly volunteered to do just that. Mr Wetzler shows that many of them were forced to sacrifice themselves, and that they didn't accomplish much. Worst of all, he argues, the kamikaze and the "breaking crystal" suicide attacks on land convinced the United States that invading and occupying the home islands would cost the lives of 500,000 American soldiers and sailors, more than doubling the US death toll in the war to date. That calculation alone made Hiroshima and Nagasaki inevitable.
Peter Davies's
Ho Chi Minh Trail 1964-73:
Steel Tiger, Barrel Roll, and the secret air wars in Vietnam and Laos isn't an easy read,
at least not for anyone unaccustomed to eating military code names for breakfast. Here's the
start of a typical photo caption: "An AC-119K firing a minigun. A 20kW xenon searchlight is
visible in the rear opening, with the AN/APQ-133 beacon tracking radar fairing ahead of the
door." Still, writer Peter Davies and illustrator Adam Tooby have crafted a valuable history
of the transportation web that, more than anything else, enabled North Vietnam to bring the
blessings of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin to its southern neighbor and eventually,
with differing success, to Laos and Cambodia as well. It was an astonishing accomplishment,
and it set the model for overcoming American forces for the next half-century, including in
Afghanistan today. I was amused to see Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake in the
bibliography, Ms Fitzgerald being among those who assured us during the Vietnam War that the
"National Liberation Front" was a wholly local resistance movement with no connection to
Hanoi. But in Mr Davies's account we read that "Infiltration movements were initiated [in
North Vietnam] in June 1959 and by 1963 over 40,000 insurgents and their weapons had
traveled south." The courage of American pilots pitting warplanes designed for the Second
World War against North Vietnamese peasants driving Russian trucks and firing Russian
anti-aircraft guns never ceases to humble me. (One of my college classmates went missing
over Laos, flying a Douglas Skyraider on a "Sandy" rescue mission.) The photographs alone
are an education, and Mr Tooby contributes some impressive paintings of warplanes in
action over the trail, which by 1975 had become a network of asphalt highway thousands of
miles in length. Blue skies! — Daniel Ford
Question? Comment? Newsletter? Send me an email. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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