Book Review: 'Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire'
American military history - as well as that of our adversaries - is full of controversies. And even though the Second World War is a rare case where the morality of the Allied cause is indisputable, the nature of the conflict and the fateful decisions made by the Axis and Allies still stir up heated debates about how it was fought - and how it was brought to an end. As historian Richard B. Frank writes in his introduction to Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, "[h]ow World War II ended in the Pacific remains one of the great controversies in American - and Japanese - history. At the center of this controversy is the atomic bomb. Indeed, almost all accounts of this period position atomic weaponry as the hub around which other considerations orbit. This approach, however, profoundly fails to recreate history as it originally unfolded." As a result of this fixation with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mythology has been created in both the U...