Empires on the Pacific Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Empires on the Pacific Book

This text aims to smash the standard narrative of World War II in the Pacific theatre showing America's aim to replace Britain as East Asia's New Imperial Power.Read More

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  • Amazon Review

    This revisionist history of the Second World War's Pacific theater announces that "the familiar story" we all know in which "the good guys beat the bad guys" isn't really true. In Empires on the Pacific, Robert Smith Thompson describes the "more complicated" version: "Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was not unprovoked," and the war wound up becoming a mere extension of American imperialist aims that had been in place before the shooting started. The United States had two goals in fighting the war. It wanted to crush Japan's military might (a success) and turn China into a post-war ally (a failure). Thompson also wades into more familiar debates, arguing, for instance, that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary because the Japanese would have surrendered anyway. It must be said that these views won't sway all readers, but they may appeal to many, especially those who admired Day of Deceit by Robert B. Stinnett. --John Miller

  • Product Description

    Empires on the Pacific smashes the standard narrative of World War II in the Pacific theater, showing America's aim to replace Britain as East Asia's New Imperial Power. Robert Smith Thompson offers a long overdue explanation of what America's war against Japan was really about--in a word: China. The over-reaching British Empire was waning yet unwilling to relinquish its foothold in China, while an increasingly ambitious Japan was determined to dominate the region by conquering China. Enter the young upstart, America. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt and for the United States, the war with Japan had little to do with revenge for Pearl Harbor. Japan would have to be vanquished so that it would never again be an imperial rival.

    Thompson's recasting of the Asian conflict profoundly alters our understanding of World War II in the Pacific and of what followed in Korea and in Vietnam. Revisionist history at its best, Empires on the Pacific is a far-reaching book that requires us to re-evaluate what we thought we knew about twentieth-century American history and what many still consider our last "good war."

  • 0465085768
  • 9780465085767
  • Robert S. Thompson
  • 27 November 2002
  • Basic Books
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 448
  • Reprint
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