Japan War History

In the turbulent twilight of the Samurai era, when Japan was gripped by the Boshin War, one woman rose to embody the spirit of bushido with unparalleled courage and indomitable will. "Nakano Takeko" is an exciting historical biography that delves into the life and legacy of Nakano Takeko, the extraordinary female warrior whose name became synonymous with bravery and honor.

In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose 63-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix describes what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status.

China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back 1,500 years. But today, their relationship is strained. China's military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan's brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years, less than 10 percent of each population had positive feelings toward the other, and both countries insist that the other side must deal openly with its history before relations can improve. Ezra Vogel's China and Japan examines key turning points in Sino-Japanese history.

Following the disastrous Java Sea campaign, the Allies went on the offensive in the Pacific in a desperate attempt to halt the Japanese forces that were rampaging across the region. With the conquest of Australia a very real possibility, the stakes were high. Their target: the Japanese-held Soloman Islands, in particular the southern island of Guadalcanal. Hamstrung by arcane pre-war thinking and a bureaucratic mind-set, the US Navy had to adapt on the fly in order to compete with the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, whose ingenuity had fostered the creation of its Pacific empire.

From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb. Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely have the secrets been as vital as they...

A stirring narrative of World War II's final major battle—the Pacific war's largest, bloodiest, most savagely fought campaign—the last of its kind. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just...

This work takes listeners to two countries ravaged by World War II, Poland and Japan, recounting the wartime experiences of teenagers Bogdan and Seiko. Bogdan’s family abandoned its home in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and fled to Warsaw, where Bogdan fought for the Polish Home Army in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. During this brutal conflict, as Poles tried to oust occupying Germans, Bogdan sustained severe injuries, and after the Germans crushed the Uprising, he endured seven POW camps. On the other side of the globe, in Hokkaido, Japan, Seiko’s country went to war against the U.S.

Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and offers some provocative interpretations. He shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was less a product of strategic calculation and more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition.

The dramatic account of one of America's most celebrated - and controversial - military campaigns: the Doolittle Raid. In December 1941, as American forces tallied the dead at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt gathered with his senior military counselors to plan an ambitious counterstrike against the heart of the Japanese Empire: Tokyo.

In 1908, at the age of two, Henry Pu Yi ascended to become the last emperor of the centuries-old Manchu dynasty. After revolutionaries forced Pu Yi to abdicate in 1911, the young emperor lived for 13 years in Peking’s Forbidden City, but with none of the power his birth afforded him. The remainder of Pu Yi’s life was lived out in a topsy-turvy fashion: fleeing from a Chinese warlord, becoming head of a Japanese puppet state, being confined to a Russian prison in Siberia, and enduring taxing labor.

This illuminating study explores the ways in which the shattering defeat of the Japanese in World War II, followed by over six years of American military occupation, affected every level of Japanese society. The author describes the countless ways in which the Japanese met the challenge of "starting over", from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes, fears, and activities of ordinary men and women in every walk of life.

In a rare combination of comprehensive coverage and sustained critical focus, this book examines Japan's progress through its entire history to its current status as an economic, technological, and cultural superpower. A key factor is a pragmatic determination to succeed. Little-known facts are also brought to light, and the latest findings used.

In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.

On the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, two acclaimed historians chronicle the remarkable stories behind the surrenders that ended the world’s most catastrophic global conflict. In May 1945 and then again in August and early September, the seemingly endless World War II finally...

A powerful, unsparing new history of World War II, recasting the conflict as a brutal struggle for survival among declining and ascendant imperial powers In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires...

United States of Japan is set in a gripping alternate history where the Japanese Empire rules over America with huge robots. Is resistance possible in the form of subversive video games? Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons, a group of rebels fighting for freedom.

There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever. In this absolutely riveting account of a key moment in the history of World War II, one of America's leading naval historians, Craig L. Symonds, paints an unforgettable portrait of ingenuity, courage, and sacrifice.

War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War - race - while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan."

This landmark study was first published in English by the Naval Institute in 1955. Widely acknowledged for its valuable Japanese insights into the battle that turned the tide of war in the Pacific, the book has made a great impact on American readers over the years. Two Japanese naval aviators who participated in the operation provide an unsparing analysis of what caused Japan's staggering defeat.

Written by Robert Leckie, whose wartime exploits are featured in the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg HBO miniseries The Pacific, Strong Men Armed is the perennial bestselling classic account of the U.S. Marines' relentless drive through the Pacific during World War II.