The real theatre of war

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia was the second world war’s greatest event. The Asian theatre, much of it water, was seven times larger than the European theatre. America’s mobilisation was the most complex in history, Japan’s crimes among the most sadistic. Metaphysically, the atomic consummation altered our relationship to our habitat.

Yet only three comprehensive, single-volume accounts of the war in Asia have appeared — until now the most recent being Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun in 1985. Hirohito’s War by Francis Pike sets a new standard: oceanic in scope, comprehensive in detail, subtle in dissection, magisterial in organisation and consistently readable. Pike re-balances our view of the war — it emerges as Hirohito’s crime as much as Hitler’s — and transforms our understanding of its origins and outcomes.

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Europe’s catastrophe derived from the failure to manage the expansion of Germany; Asia’s from the failure to manage the implosion of China in the early 1800s.