World War II Database

Edited by Daniel Marston, The Pacific War: From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima is a collection of essays written by various historians that, collectively, describes the Pacific War. To start the book, Professor Dennis Showalter provided an excellent first essay that introduced the readers the initial expansion of the Japanese Empire in the early 1900s and how Japan's regionalism led to the war in China starting in 1937 and the war in the Pacific starting in 1941. Personally, I was also very happy to see Dr. Ken Kotani contributing with the essay on the Pearl Harbor attack, given his expertise on Japanese military planning and intelligence.

Out of the total of thirteen essays, I enjoyed two of them particularly. One of them was "The ANZAC Contribution" by Professor David Horner, who devoted 15 or so pages on the Australian and New Zealand forces in the Pacific War. Although these two nations were dwarfed by the United States, their contributions were enormous in terms of the sizes of their home nations and could not be forgotten. "Across the Reef" by retired United States Marine Corps Colonel Joseph Alexander was an eye opener for me. He introduced the birth of modern amphibious warfare dating back to WW1, and the lessons that military tacticians learned. With those lessons, amphibious tactics developed into the the masterful yet rarely seriously opposed Japanese landings early in the war, to the complex combined armed operations the the Americans conducted at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

A few of the articles were less than spectacular, particularly those marred by minor mistakes, such as the misidentification of aircraft types, and the general statement that the Aleutians invasion was merely a diversion force and a strategic mistake without speaking of the political reasons why Yamamoto included this secondary campaign.

The Pacific War: From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima would serve as an excellent guide to those who knew the basics of the Pacific War but looked for something a bit deeper.