Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Save your money; this is a ludicrous book, poorly written, disjointed, and riddled with factual errors large and small. Even Thompson's main premise, that the U.S. was just another evil imperialist power seeking to subjugate the helpless Chinese, is not made clear until the last chapter, and never really supported by any reasoned arguments or new facts. The most jarring aspect of the book for me, were the numerous errors and instances of invented history. For example, to support the assertion that the Pearl Harbor attack was not unprovoked, Thompson takes a study done by some Army Air Force officers in late 1940 and blows it up into a plot by the U.S military and government to use B-17's to firebomb Japanese cities, presumably without warning. He even supplies details about bases to be used and asserts that the Japanese "somehow" found out about the plot and resolved to attack the U.S. as a result!
Thompson obviously didn't research this very well, as he would have found that, in December, 1940, the Army Air Force had only a handful of early model B-17's, 58 to be exact, and did not consider them combat worthy. They were being used for pilot and crew training, equipment testing, and development of strategic bombing doctrine. The bases Thompson mentions, Kunming, China, Singapore, Cavite in the Phillipines, Hong Kong, Guam, and Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians were, with the exception of Guam, all well beyond the B-17's combat range.
The author makes one egregrious error after another; on pages 121 and 122, he describes the sinking of the British capitol ships Prince of Wales and Repulse, claiming that "nearly 1,000" Japanese planes "from nearby carriers" attacked the two ships and that a British destroyer was dragged down with the Prince of Wales when she sank. Somehow these facts seem to have eluded other historians. Every other source I have seen, says the British did not lose any destroyers that day and the bulk of the Japanese carrier fleet, the six largest fleet carriers, was still in the central Pacific, returning from the Pearl Harbor attack. At any rate, the Japanese Navy could muster a total of only about 650 carrier aircraft from all of their carriers combined, in December, 1940. Most sources agree that the somewhat less than one hundred planes that attacked the Prince of Wales and Repulse were all land-based. One wonders where Thompson found his "facts", and why they are so at odds with other accounts.
The author also weighs in on the atomic bomb controversy at the end of the war, claiming it wasn't necessary to drop them, since the Japanese were trying to surrender anyway. This position has been rather thoroughly demolished by Richard B. Frank's research. The Japanese weren't trying to surrender so much as negotiate a cease-fire, not on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, but on their own terms. Terms which would have left the militarists in power and led to another war in the next generation.
I picked up this book in the hopes of reading about some new research or at least a new interpretation of existing knowledge: I got neither. It is sorely disappointing to see the same tired, and mostly discredited, arguments offered up as a "truly important and complex new interpretation" of the Pacific War. That is one thing this book is not.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Empires on the Pacific: World War II and the Struggle for the Mastery of Asia
0 comments:
Post a Comment