Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

Rain of Ruin

Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 6 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 6 weeks

A leading historian of World War II sheds new light on the purposes and impact of the U.S. incendiary and atomic bombing of Japan's cities in 1945.

With the development of the B-29 "Superfortress" in summer 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. In 1945 Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned the city's most densely populated sector, killed some 85,000 residents, and left more than one million homeless. The attack was part of a months-long campaign of incendiary bombing that destroyed almost two-thirds of Japan's cities. The two atomic blasts in August killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them civilians. The bombing brought a destabilizing devastation that, combined with a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, induced Japan, as they put it, to terminate the war.

Many at the time and since have credited American air power, and especially the two atomic bombs, with Japan's surrender. But Richard Overy tells a different, more dimensional story. Drawing on his expertise on the war and its bombing campaigns, he delivers a precise recounting of these aerial attacks, and a balanced, informed assessment of how and why they occurred. Overy is astute on the Allied decision-making, and, notably, integrates the Japanese leadership as well. He ably navigates the dramatic endgame of the war, which featured factional infighting within the Japanese cabinet, a scramble by American officials to formulate an acceptable version of "unconditional surrender," and the crucial role played by the emperor, Hirohito. The atomic bombing emerges as impactful but not decisive in this rich, multilayered history

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      February 1, 2025
      Historical account of the policies and strategies underlying the air war over Japan. Overy, a British historian of World War II, does good service straightaway by showing that Britain, though "often overlooked in accounts of Japanese defeat," was active in it: Winston Churchill approved the use of the atomic bomb, and, freed after Germany's surrender, British bomber squadrons were on their way to join the Americans in the last months of the war in the Pacific. That war was long foreseen: For decades before Pearl Harbor, American and British war planners had gamed out numerous scenarios about fighting Japan, including the use of warplanes well before such warplanes even existed: "The doctrinal shape of the future bombing campaign against Japan was already developed long before there was any capability of achieving it." It wasn't until 1943, writes Overy, that the possibility began to emerge of land-based air facilities capable of putting planes in the sky over Japan. Once that became a reality with the capture of Saipan and other islands in 1944, America was ready to engage in a campaign of terror bombing that specifically targeted civilian populations--to which Overy attaches racist views of the Japanese as less than human. (QuothLife magazine in May 1945: "hating Japs comes natural---as natural as fighting Indians once was"). By Overy's view, the atomic bombings were an extension of the firebombing of Japan's cities--and even those two bombs were not the foremost causes for Japan to finally capitulate. Interestingly, Overy notes in closing that the German and Japanese bombings of civilians earlier in the war were not raised in war crimes trials "because British and American air forces had done exactly that, and deliberately, in the last years of war, abandoning the restrictions on targeting civilians in force when the war began." A fresh and persuasive outlook on one of the great moral crossroads in world history.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading