The worst of friends

In this his latest book Max Hastings aims not so much to write another history of the war in the Pacific but to describe ‘a massive and terrible experience, set in a chronological framework’. It is a companion volume to his Armageddon which did much the same for the last phase of the war in Europe; but the experiences he describes are yet more terrible, and the framework will be even less familiar to British readers. The book does indeed concentrate on the truly terrible experiences of those caught up in the war, whether they were American marines, British prisoners of war, Chinese peasants, Japanese kamikaze pilots, or even Russian soldiers rushed across Siberia from a war they had just won to fire the last shots in one they had never even heard about; for one of the many merits of this book is that it gives due attention to the war on the mainland of Asia as well as the far better known campaigns in the Pacific.