Michael W. Myers - Böcker

About the Allies’ victory in the Pacific in WWII, it goes almost without question that Japan’s defeat was inevitable in the face of overwhelming American military might and economic power. But the outcome, Michael W. Myers contends, was actually anything but inevitable. This book is Myers’s thorough and deeply informed explanation of how contingent the “foregone conclusion” of the war in the Pacific really was.However disproportionate their respective resources, both Japan and the Allied forces confronted significant obstacles to ultimate victory. One the two sides shared, Myers shows, was the lack of a single individual with the knowledge, vision, and authority to formulate and implement effective strategy. Both exercised leadership by committee, and Myers cogently explains how this contributed to the contingent nature of the conflict. A remarkable exercise in logical methods of strategic thinking, his book analyzes decisive campaigns in the Pacific War, examining the economic and strategic challenges that both sides faced and had to overcome to achieve victory. Japan, for instance, had two goals going into the war: to expand the boundaries of what they termed the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and to end their long and frustrating war in China. These goals, as Myers shows us, had unforeseen and devastating logistical and strategic consequences. But the United States faced similar problems—as well as other hurdles specific to a nation not yet on full war footing.Overturning conventional historiography, The Pacific War and Contingent Victory clarifies the proper relationship between freedom and determinism in historical thinking. A compelling retelling of the Pacific war that might easily have been, the book offers historical lessons in thinking about contemporary American foreign policy and American exceptionalism—most saliently about the dangers of the presumption of American ascendancy.

This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes.Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a “unified Japan” and its “illegal war” or “race war,” early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the “performance of Japaneseness,” the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever.Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.