Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. By Max Hastings. (New York: Knopf, 2008. xxviii, 615 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-307-26351-3.)
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/27694680
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
ResumoMax Hastings is a distinguished British newspaperman knighted in 2002. Most of his two dozen books focus on World War II, but he has also written books on Ulster, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Falklands war, the Entebbe raid, hunting, and country fairs. This, his first on the Pacific war, was published in London with the title Nemesis. In his introduction, he writes, “‘Retributive justice’ is among the dictionary definitions of nemesis” (p. xix). (Perhaps Hastings or his publisher figured “Nemesis” was too erudite a title for the U.S. market.) This is a massive tome, huge also in intent: to “portray a massive and terrible human experience, set within a chronological framework” (p. xix). Hastings writes in an engaging style, with grace and enough acid (for example, in his diatribe against Douglas MacArthur) to keep general readers engaged. But scholars will beware. Hastings pooh-poohs bibliography (“an author's peacock display,” p. 559) and treats quotations cavalierly: “I have taken the liberty of adjusting quoted Japanese speech and writing into English vernacular” (p. xxi), a practice that offends me when he “adjusts” my translation (p. 369ff). Sometimes he identifies quotations in endnotes, sometimes not. His index does not have entries for significant topics, such as fascism, oil, racism, resources, or the battleship Yamato. He does not footnote arguments, so we cannot know if he has read Ienaga Saburō on the war, Gar Alperovitz or Barton Bernstein on the bombing of Hiroshima, or Ivan Morris or Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney on kamikaze. He has favorites: Ronald Spector (“that princely historian,” p. xxi) and Richard Frank (“brilliant historian of the Pacific,” p. 557). The scholars I spotted in his index are those two plus John Dower, Saki Dockrill and Lawrence Freedman, Stanley Falk, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Robert Newman, and Christopher Thorne. He does not read Chinese or Japanese or Russian; in the case of Russian, his translator was also his researcher (p. 558). But according to Hastings, his inability to read the original sources is not a problem because, “in modern China, as in Russia and to some degree Japan, there is no tradition of objective historical research” (p. xxii). He lapses into orientalism: “To a Western mind …” (p. 166); “But Western societies …” (p. 172). He dismisses early the idea that U.S. or British racism was a cause, not an effect, of the Pacific fighting; there is no “moral equivalence between the two sides” (p. 9). Most Japanese “decisively reject … the concept of self-analysis” (p. 549); “the nation is guilty of a collective rejection of historical fact” (p. 550). Neither of these grand concluding statements merits a source. His statistics do not always bear scrutiny; for example, Hastings places the success of kamikaze hits at both “around one in seven” (p. 171) and one in five (p. 393), though most accounts put the success rate far lower.
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