Konoe Fumimaro And The Failure Of Peace In Japan 1937 1941

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Konoe Fumimaro and the Failure of Peace in Japan, 1937-1941

Author : Kazuo Yagami
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786422424
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Konoe Fumimaro and the Failure of Peace in Japan, 1937-1941 by : Kazuo Yagami

Download or read book Konoe Fumimaro and the Failure of Peace in Japan, 1937-1941 written by Kazuo Yagami and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2006-02-16 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blame for a country's mistakes often falls on its leaders. In some cases, however, a leader's greatest mistake is to promote the mistaken goals of his people. Was this the case in World War II Japan? This book considers that question in the story of Konoe Fumimaro, who served as Japan's prime minister during one of the most difficult periods of the country's history. This historical biography is a balanced account of Konoe and his service as prime minister before and during World War II. Governing from 1937 to 1941, Konoe played a key role in the struggle to develop Japanese foreign policy. Beginning with Konoe's education and political training, the author then explores the general mood of 1930s Japan and traces Konoe's rise through the political ranks, including his first term as prime minister, his decision to step down, and his eventual comeback. Especially emphasized is how the man himself affected this period of Japanese history. In his relentless work regarding Japanese-American diplomacy, he attempted to change the destructive course on which Japan was bent. Defeated in essence by his own military and its growing autonomy, Konoe nevertheless took the Japanese defeat to heart. The final chapter examines Konoe's war experience and its aftermath, which culminated in his suicide.

The Us-Japan Relation in Culture and Diplomacy

Author : Kazuo Yagami
Publisher : Balboa Press
ISBN 13 : 1504395794
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis The Us-Japan Relation in Culture and Diplomacy by : Kazuo Yagami

Download or read book The Us-Japan Relation in Culture and Diplomacy written by Kazuo Yagami and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2018-02-16 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines how the United States and Japan—despite their sharp differences in cultural, historical, and geographical backgrounds—established a bilateral and clear linkage with each other by exploring their encounters with one another over more than one-and-a-half centuries with close focus on culture and diplomacy. The author desires that this examination contributes to an establishment of a better understanding of the relationship between the two nations, which aims to clarify stereotyped ideas and misunderstandings that from time to time can lead two nations to a confrontation against each other. Moreover, this study sheds new light on determining twenty-first century relations between the United States and Japan and putting an end to the nearly three-decades-long uncertainty in their relationship.

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942

Author : Richard B. Frank
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324002115
Total Pages : 784 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 by : Richard B. Frank

Download or read book Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 written by Richard B. Frank and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sweeping epic.… Promises to do for the war in the Pacific what Rick Atkinson did for Europe.” —James M. Scott, author of Rampage In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.

Hitler's Great Gamble

Author : James Ellman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0811768481
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (117 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler's Great Gamble by : James Ellman

Download or read book Hitler's Great Gamble written by James Ellman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-09-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, one of the turning points of World War II. Within six months, the invasion bogged down on the outskirts of Moscow, and the Eastern Front proved to be the decisive theater in the defeat of the Third Reich. Ever since, most historians have agreed that this was Hitler’s gravest mistake. In Hitler’s Great Gamble, James Ellman argues that while Barbarossa was a gamble and perverted by genocidal Nazi ideology, it was not doomed from the start. Rather it represented Hitler’s best chance to achieve his war aims for Germany which were remarkably similar to those of the Kaiser’s government in 1914. Other options, such as an invasion of England, or an offensive to seize the oil fields of the Middle East were considered and discarded as unlikely to lead to Axis victory. In Ellman’s recounting, Barbarossa did not fail because of flaws in the Axis invasion strategy, the size of the USSR, or the brutal cold of the Russian winter. Instead, German defeat was due to errors of Nazi diplomacy. Hitler chose not to coordinate his plans with his most militarily powerful allies, Finland and Japan, and ensure the seizure of the ports of Murmansk and Vladivostok. Had he done so, Germany might well have succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union and, perhaps, winning World War II. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources (including many recently released), Hitler’s Great Gamble is a provocative work that will appeal to a wide cross-section of World War II buffs, enthusiasts, and historians.

Representing Empire

Author : Ying Xiong
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004274111
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Representing Empire by : Ying Xiong

Download or read book Representing Empire written by Ying Xiong and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Representing Empire Ying Xiong examines Japanese-language colonial literature written by Japanese expatriate writers in Taiwan and Manchuria. Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Chinese sources, Representing Empire reveals not only a nuanced picture of Japanese literary terrain but also the interplay between imperialism, nationalism, and Pan-Asianism in the colonies. While the existing literature on Japanese nationalism has largely remained within the confines of national history, by using colonial literature as an example, Ying Xiong demonstrates that transnational forces shaped Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century. With its multidisciplinary and comparative approach, Representing Empire adds to a growing body of literature that challenges traditional interpretations of Japanese nationalism and national literary canon. “Representing Empire is an outstanding accomplishment, at once making clearer and complicating our understandings of the literary worlds of Manchuria and Taiwan, and the greater imperial empire within which all were transformed. ... add[s] substantially to the ways in which Japan’s empire and twentieth century East Asian history more generally might be interpreted.” Norman Smith, University of Guelph, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center Publication (February, 2015)

Thought Crime

Author : Max M. Ward
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478002743
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Thought Crime by : Max M. Ward

Download or read book Thought Crime written by Max M. Ward and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism—what authorities deemed thought crime—to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.

A War It Was Always Going to Lose

Author : Jeffrey Record
Publisher : Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1597975761
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (979 download)

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Book Synopsis A War It Was Always Going to Lose by : Jeffrey Record

Download or read book A War It Was Always Going to Lose written by Jeffrey Record and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Makes sense of Japan's seemingly incomprehensible decision to go to war against the United States.

Accommodating Rising Powers

Author : T. V. Paul
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107134048
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Accommodating Rising Powers by : T. V. Paul

Download or read book Accommodating Rising Powers written by T. V. Paul and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses how to accommodate and integrate rising powers peacefully into the international order in the nuclear and globalized age.

China at War

Author : Hans van de Ven
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674983505
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis China at War by : Hans van de Ven

Download or read book China at War written by Hans van de Ven and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told. Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the civil war from memory. Van de Ven argues that the war with Japan, the civil war, and its aftermath were in fact of a piece—a singular process of conflict and political change. Reintegrating the Communist uprising with the Sino-Japanese War, he shows how the Communists took advantage of wartime to increase their appeal, how fissures between the Nationalists and Communists affected anti-Japanese resistance, and how the fractious coalition fostered conditions for revolution. In the process, the Chinese invented an influential paradigm of war, wherein the Clausewitzian model of total war between well-defined interstate enemies gave way to murky campaigns of national liberation involving diverse domestic and outside belligerents. This history disappears when the realities of China’s mid-century conflicts are stripped from public view. China at War recovers them.

Pearl

Author : Daniel Allen Butler
Publisher : Casemate
ISBN 13 : 1612004431
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis Pearl by : Daniel Allen Butler

Download or read book Pearl written by Daniel Allen Butler and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Simultaneously sweeping and intimate . . . an eminently readable and engrossing account of the actions that pulled America into the Second World War.” —Parks Stephenson, producer, The Fight for Owens Pearl: December 7, 1941 is the story of how America and Japan, two nations with seemingly little over which to quarrel, let peace slip away, so that on that “day which will live in infamy,” more than 350 dive bombers, high-level bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navy did their best to cripple the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet, killing 2,403 American servicemen and civilians, and wounding another 1,178. It’s a story of emperors and presidents, diplomats and politicians, admirals and generals—and it’s also the tale of ordinary sailors, soldiers, and airmen, all of whom were overtaken by a rush of events that ultimately overwhelmed them. Pearl shows the real reasons why America’s political and military leaders underestimated Japan’s threat against America’s security, and why their Japanese counterparts ultimately felt compelled to launch the Pearl Harbor attack. Pearl offers more than superficial answers, showing how both sides blundered their way through arrogance, over-confidence, racism, bigotry, and old-fashioned human error to arrive at the moment when the Japanese were convinced that there was no alternative to war. Once the battle is joined, Pearl then takes the reader into the heart of the attack, where the fighting men of both nations showed that neither side had a monopoly on heroism, courage, cowardice, or luck, as they fought to protect their nations. “An engrossing read on a well-tread but important subject. Pearl will interest readers new to this history and satiate military historians.” —Air & Space Power Journal

The Fascist Effect

Author : Reto Hofmann
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801456363
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fascist Effect by : Reto Hofmann

Download or read book The Fascist Effect written by Reto Hofmann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Fascist Effect, Reto Hofmann uncovers the ideological links that tied Japan to Italy, drawing on extensive materials from Japanese and Italian archives to shed light on the formation of fascist history and practice in Japan and beyond. Moving between personal experiences, diplomatic and cultural relations, and geopolitical considerations, Hofmann shows that interwar Japan found in fascism a resource to develop a new order at a time of capitalist crisis. Hofmann demonstrates that fascism in Japan was neither a European import nor a domestic product; it was, rather, the result of a complex process of global transmission and reformulation. Far from being a vague term, as postwar historiography has so often claimed, for Japanese of all backgrounds who came of age from the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism conjured up a set of concrete associations, including nationalism, leadership, economics, and a drive toward empire and a new world order.

Prince Saionji

Author : Jonathan Clements
Publisher : Haus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1907822232
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Prince Saionji by : Jonathan Clements

Download or read book Prince Saionji written by Jonathan Clements and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prince Saionji Kinmochi (1849-1940). The Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference did not have the Japanese prime or foreign ministers with them as they had only just been elected and had plenty to do back home. The delegation was instead led by Prince Saionji, the dashing 'kingmaker' of early 20th-century Japanese politics whose life spanned the arrival of Commodore Perry and his 'black ships', the Japanese civil war, the Meiji Restoration, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, and the rise of Japanese militarism. Unlike many of the conservatives of his day, Saionji was a man with experience of international diplomacy and admiration for European culture. Brought up in the days of the last Shogun, he became an active supporter of Japan's new ruling regime, after the Shogun was overthrown in a civil war, and a leading figure in the post-Restoration reform movement. In 1869 he founded the institution that would become the Ritsumeikan University - literally, 'The place to establish one's destiny'. He was sent to France for nine years to investigate Western technology and philosophy, and served for a decade as a Japanese ambassador in Europe. Returning to Japan, he served twice as Minister of Education and later became prime minister before resigning to become a revered elder statesman. Japan entered the First World War on the Allied side, seizing German possessions in China and the Pacific. In the closing days of the war, Japanese military forces participated in the Siberian Intervention - an American-led invasion of eastern Russia against Communist insurgents. At the Conference Saionji's presence was initially regarded by the Japanese as a sign that Japan had become a fully-fledged member of the international community and accepted on an equal footing with the Western Powers. His delegation introduced a controversial proposal to legally enshrine racial equality as one of the tenets of the League of Nations. The Japanese were also keen to grab colonies of their own, and went head-to-head with the Chinese delegation over the fate of the former German possession of Shandong. When Shandong was 'returned' not to China but to its Japanese occupiers, riots broke out in China. Despite Saionji's statesmanship and diplomacy, the Treaty of Versailles was regarded by many Japanese as a slap in the face. Saionji's influence weakened in his last years, while his party was dissolved and amalgamated with others.

In the Cauldron

Author : Lew Paper
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1621578976
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (215 download)

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Book Synopsis In the Cauldron by : Lew Paper

Download or read book In the Cauldron written by Lew Paper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The underbrush through which Mr. Paper cuts his way . . . would be challenging for any writer. But Mr. Paper, with an eye for character and an easy narrative style, manages to keep his subject interesting. . . . And even though we know how it’s all going to end, Mr. Paper manages to add a measure of suspense to his narrative — a tribute to his abilities as a writer.” —The Washington Times This is not just another book about Pearl Harbor. It is the story of Joseph Grew, America’s ambassador to Japan, and his frantic effort in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack to orchestrate an agreement between Japan and the United States to avoid the war he saw coming. It is a story filled with hope and heartache, with complex and fascinating characters, and with a drama befitting the momentous decisions at stake. And more than that, it is a story that has never been told. In those months before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan and the United States were locked in a battle of wills. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic sanctions were crippling Japan. America's noose was tightening around Japan's neck — but the country's leaders refused to yield to American demands. In this cauldron of boiling tensions, Joseph Grew offered many recommendations to break the deadlock. Having resided and worked in Tokyo for almost ten years, Grew understood what Roosevelt and his administration back home did not: that the Japanese would rather face annihilation than endure the humiliation of surrendering to American pressure. The President and his administration saw little need to accept their ambassador’s recommendations. The administration’s policies, they believed, were sure to succeed. And so, with increasing urgency, Grew tried to explain to the President and his administration that Japan’s mindset could not be gauged by Western standards of logic and that the administration’s policies could lead Japan to embark on a suicidal war with the United States “with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.” Relying on Grew’s diaries, letters and memos, interviews with members of the families of Grew and his staff, and an abundance of other primary source materials, Lew Paper presents the gripping story of Grew’s effort to halt the downward spiral of Japan’s relations with the United States. Grew had to wrestle with an American government that would not listen to him – and simultaneously confront an increasingly hostile environment in Japan, where pervasive surveillance, arbitrary arrest, and even unspeakable torture by Japan's secret police were constant threats. In the Cauldron reads like a novel, but it is based on fact. And it is sure to raise questions whether the Pearl Harbor attack could have been avoided.

Japan's Holocaust

Author : Bryan Mark Rigg
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1637586892
Total Pages : 438 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis Japan's Holocaust by : Bryan Mark Rigg

Download or read book Japan's Holocaust written by Bryan Mark Rigg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s Holocaust is a comprehensive exploration of Japan’s mass murder and sexual crimes during the Pacific and Asian Wars from 1927 to 1945. Japan’s Holocaust combines research conducted in over eighteen research facilities in five nations to explore Imperial Japan’s atrocities from 1927 to 1945 during its military expansions and reckless campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific. This book brings together the most recent scholarship and new primary research to ascertain that Japan claimed a minimum of thirty million lives, slaughtering far more than Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Japan’s Holocaust shows that Emperor Hirohito not only knew about the atrocities his legions committed, but actually ordered them. He did nothing to stop them when they exceeded even the most depraved person’s imagination, as illustrated during the Rape of Nanking as well as many other events. Japan’s Holocaust will document in painful detail that the Rape of Nanking was not an isolated event during the Asian War but rather representative of how Japan behaved for all its campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific from 1927 to 1945. Mass murder, rape, and economic exploitation was Japan’s modus operandi during this time period, and whereas Hitler’s SS Death’s Head outfits attempted to hide their atrocities, Hirohito’s legions committed their atrocities out in the open with fanfare and enthusiasm. Moreover, whereas Germany has done much since World War II to atone for its crimes and to document them, Japan has been absolutely disgraceful with its reparations for its crimes and in its efforts to educate its population about its wartime past. Shockingly, Japan continues, in general, to glorify is criminals and its wartime past.

The Currents of War

Author : Sidney L. Pash
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813144248
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis The Currents of War by : Sidney L. Pash

Download or read book The Currents of War written by Sidney L. Pash and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1899 until the American entry into World War II, U.S. presidents sought to preserve China's territorial integrity in order to guarantee American businesses access to Chinese markets -- a policy famously known as the "open door." Before the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Americans saw Japan as the open door's champion; but by the end of 1905, Tokyo had replaced St. Petersburg as its greatest threat. For the next thirty-six years, successive U.S. administrations worked to safeguard China and contain Japanese expansion on the mainland. The Currents of War reexamines the relationship between the United States and Japan and the casus belli in the Pacific through a fresh analysis of America's central foreign policy strategy in Asia. In this ambitious and compelling work, Sidney Pash offers a cautionary tale of oft-repeated mistakes and miscalculations. He demonstrates how continuous economic competition in the Asia-Pacific region heightened tensions between Japan and the United States for decades, eventually leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Pash's study is the first full reassessment of pre--World War II American-Japanese diplomatic relations in nearly three decades. It examines not only the ways in which U.S. policies led to war in the Pacific but also how this conflict gave rise to later confrontations, particularly in Korea and Vietnam. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, this book offers a new perspective on a significant international relationship and its enduring consequences.

Margin of Victory

Author : Douglas MacGregor
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
ISBN 13 : 1612519970
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (125 download)

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Book Synopsis Margin of Victory by : Douglas MacGregor

Download or read book Margin of Victory written by Douglas MacGregor and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Margin of Victory Douglas Macgregor tells the riveting stories of five military battles of the twentieth century, each one a turning point in history. Beginning with the British Expeditionary force holding the line at the Battle of Mons in 1914 and concluding with the Battle of Easting in 1991 during Desert Storm, Margin of Victory teases out a connection between these battles and teaches its readers an important lesson about how future battles can be won. Emphasizing military strategy, force design, and modernization, Macgregor links each of these seemingly isolated battles thematically. At the core of his analysis, the author reminds the reader that to be successful, military action must always be congruent with national culture, geography, and scientific-industrial capacity. He theorizes that strategy and geopolitics are ultimately more influential than ideology. Macgregor stresses that if nation-states want to be successful, they must accept the need for and the inevitability of change. The five warfighting dramas in this book, rendered in vivid detail by lively prose, offer many lessons on the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.

Japan 1941

Author : Eri Hotta
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0385350511
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (853 download)

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Book Synopsis Japan 1941 by : Eri Hotta

Download or read book Japan 1941 written by Eri Hotta and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.