Battle to the death

MAX HASTINGS (Harper Press, £25)

The controversy will ever remain over the devastating loss of life and sheer horror of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there was a backdrop to it: the firestorming of Tokyo earlier in the year by American Superfortresses, in which an even greater number of civilians died (100,000). In this compulsively readable companion volume to Armageddon, Hastings's account of the death throes of Germany, he argues that Japan should have surrendered much earlier and thus is responsible for the terrible consequences.

My own research in Japan showed that its ordinary people were living in a cocoon towards the end of the war as American assault troops were poised to invade their home islands. Fuelled by propaganda, they still believed in Japanese invincibility and old women and children were being trained in the use of sharpened bamboos to resist a major thrust in the southern island of Kyushsu. The top command was militarily obsessed and it was tantamount to treason - as in Hitler's Germany - to suggest surrender. It took courage for a reluctant Hirohito, cloaked in his divinity, to surrender under the weight of nuclear power.

Hastings's book is vast in scope and the detail of warfare. He ranges from the assault on Iwo Jima to the great campaign in Burma under Slim, as well as the triumph of American seamanship and the pure folly of the Japanese admirals in Leyte Gulf. One of the triumphs of the book is Hastings's assessment of the war in China, where Chiang Kai Shek's forces played a more pivotal role than Mao's Communists. And Hastings reveals the little-known attempts of the Russians to grab Far Eastern spoils in the final days of the war.

Hastings is a man of literary action. Only the Japanese steeped in the code of Bushido might rail against his judgments. But the fact is that their atrocities (particularly in China where 15 million died) and "fight to the last man" philosophy exemplified in their Pacific island defences were modes of extremism alien to civilisation, only justified by their brutal political history. What emerges is a super-power book that matches the vast arena of the subject.

The command is as intriguing as the battles such as Okinawa, where the kamikaze pilots wreaked dive-bombing venom on American warships - Hastings reckons the pilots acted more under threat than honour. Here is MacArthur, obsessed with a personal mission of vengeance, and Mountbatten who shines through as an ambitious commander but of "limited intellect".

Above all, it was a war that the Japanese would never win against the technological might of America. Hastings goes so far as to say that even Pearl Harbor was a "failure". An explosive mix of extraordinary valour and tragedy is presented with clarity and penetrating analysis in a book for military enthusiasts to shun at their peril.