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. But the strategic framework that gave rise to these experiences is equally striking and if not terrible, then certainly bizarre.

In the first place, the victorious allies in this conflict were united by little except mutual contempt. The Americans despised the British whom they believed, with some justification, to be simply fighting for the restoration of an empire that they themselves were equally determined to destroy. The US navy did its best to exclude the royal navy from any participation in the Pacific war; though it has to be said that its contribution, when it ultimately made one, was rather pathetic. For the US army the only point of the British campaign in Burma was to open a route to help Chiang Kai-shek whose armies, they believed, would liberate the Chinese mainland and provide the necessary launching pads for an invasion of Japan: their commanders in south-east Asia, first ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell and then the anglophobe Albert Wedemeyer, were explicit in their loathing of their British colleagues and their contempt for the Chinese.