A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

If Japan had not surrendered after the double whammy of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki A-bomb attacks and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War, it is likely that: The 20th Air Force would have resumed its massive conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities (including Kyoto) until several atomic bombs became available in 1945 and 1946. (I believe a third A-bomb could have been dropped sometime after August 15, 1945 had the Japanese not agreed to surrender on that day.) The invasion of Kyushu, codenamed Olympic, would have been carried out on or around November 1, 1945. According to Alfred Coppel’s  The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan,  which was based on the actual American and Japanese war plans for the invasion, the Allied objective was to capture only enough of Kyushu to establish a series of naval and air bases there. These bases would then be used as part of the infrastructure for Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu. (Richard...

(C) 2007 Random House/Vintage In 2007, three years after the publication of Max Hastings’ “Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945,” the British imprint HarperPress published a companion volume about the end of World War II in the Pacific, “Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” Like its predecessor set in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), “Nemesis” is an examination of the various military and political maneuvers that led to the Allied (primarily American) victory against the Japanese Empire during the war’s closing months. When Knopf, Hastings’ U.S. publisher, released the book for the American market as “Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” In this highly readable 688-page tome, Hastings depicts the earthshaking events that led to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in vivid prose and clear-eyed analysis of the various campaigns and battles that culminated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hastings sets up his Pacific War chessboa...