Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008
The Cruelest War
By Ian Buruma
Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45
by Max Hastings
Knopf, 615 pp., $35.00
What does it mean when you read that at least fifteen million Chinese died during the war with Japan? Or that 'around three-quarters of a million Filipinos, Japanese and Americans would pay with their lives' for General Douglas MacArthur's dream of 'liberating' the Philippines (then still a US colony)? Or that 'in the course of the war 116,000 of 122,000 seamen serving Japan's pre-war merchant fleet were killed or wounded, mostly by American submarines'? Or that 'the 9 March 1945 American bomber attack on Tokyo killed around 100,000 people, and rendered a million homeless'?
Review, 3900 words
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