You Can T Fight Tanks With Bayonets

A startling omission from the extensive literature on the Pacific events of World War II is an analysis of Allied psychological operations. Allison B. Gilmore makes a strong case for the importance of psychological warfare in this theater, countering the usual view of fanatical resistance by Japanese units. Gilmore marshals evidence that Japanese military indoctrination did not produce soldiers who were invulnerable to demoralization and the survival instinct.

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.

Excerpted from Niall Ferguson’s sprawling bestseller The War of the World, The Abyss now stands on its own as one of the most thrilling short histories of World War I ever written. This is not a conventional military history about battles and generals. Rather, The Abyss examines how World War I saw the birth of total war—fought between societies as much as armies—and must therefore be understood in terms of the financial crises it unleashed, the multinational empires it destroyed, and the hateful ideas it propagated. The most remarkable thing about the war, Ferguson shows us, is how shockingly unexpected it was. At a time when economic integration and technology seemed to be rendering war between great powers impossible, World War I was the moment when that process went into reverse and the lethal forces of ethnic disintegration took over. Now, on the cusp of the 100th anniversary of its outbreak, we can see World War I as much more than just four years of industrialized slaughter. Weaving together the economics of empire and the ideology of race—and featuring an original preface by the author as well a teaser from his new paperback Civilization—The Abyss is world history at its finest.

Fighting The Enemy, first published in 2000, is about men with the job of killing each other. Based on the wartime writings of hundreds of Australian front-line soldiers during World War II, this powerful and resonant book contains many moving descriptions of high emotion and drama. Soldiers' interactions with their enemies are central to war and their attitudes to their adversaries are crucial to the way wars are fought. Yet few books look in detail at how enemies interpret each other. This book is an unprecedented and thorough examination of the way Australian combat soldiers interacted with troops from the four powers engaged in World War II: Germany, Italy, Vichy France and Japan. Each opponent has themes peculiar to it: the Italians were much ridiculed; the Germans were the most respected of enemies; the Vichy French were regarded with ambivalence; while the Japanese were the subject of much hostility, intensified by the real threat of occupation.

"This book tells the story of an unusual group of American soldiers in World War II, second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served as interpreters and translators in the Military Intelligence Service."--Preface.

This volume examines the development of the 'way of the samurai' (bushidō), which is popularly viewed as a defining element of the Japanese national character and even the 'soul of Japan' - to provide an overview of modern Japanese social, cultural, and political history.

This book highlights the significance of North­–South connections as a part of transpacific history. The little-known stories it tells of such “vertical” encounters across the Pacific Ocean complicates established historical narratives which focus instead on “horizontal” connections between the United States and Asia.

“An “insightful and informative” overview of the role of tanks in combat from the First World War to the present day (Dennis Showalter, author of Armor and Blood). The story of the battlefield in the twentieth century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare, Jeremy Black, a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History, offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. First introduced onto the battlefield during World War I, tanks represented the reconciliation of firepower and mobility and immediately seized the imagination of commanders and commentators concerned about the constraints of ordinary infantry. The developments of technology and tactics in the interwar years were realized in the German blitzkrieg in World War II and beyond. Yet the account of armor on the battlefield is a tale of limitations and defeats as well as of potential and achievements. Tank Warfare examines the traditional narrative of armored warfare while at the same time challenging it, and Black suggests that tanks were no “silver bullet” on the battlefield. Instead, their success was based on their inclusion in the general mix of weaponry available to commanders and the context in which they were used. “An excellent overview of the subject.” —Alaric Searle, author of Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History