JAPAN AT WAR, 1931-1945

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

Japan's long war:

The Hiroshima files:

The Japanese Army Air Force files:

Why's a Zero?

Kamikaze, cannibals, & other mysteries:

Books & stuff:

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Question? Comment? Newsletter? Send me an email. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford