Battle Of The Pacific. Purnell's History of the World Wars Special

Издание полностью на английском языке.

Like so many others before it, the Battle of the Pacific was a very old-fashioned sort of conflict. The United States had imposed an oil embargo on Japan in response to the latter's aggression in China in the '30s. But, introduced suddenly to the 20th Century from a background of feudalism, Japan was hungry for industrial resources to fuel its drive along the newly-discovered road to material affluence.
Consequently, in 1941, Japan’s leaders decided on a course of economic expansion by the acquisition of territory in the Pacific island ring and South-East Asia. As a result, for six months after Pearl Harbor the Japanese Empire expanded in a series of breathtaking military victories leading to the fall of the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines.
Unfortunately for Japan, though, her strategists had overstepped their ability to defend these vast areas of newly-won territory. The weakening of the Imperial Fleet at Coral Sea, its failure at Midway, the reverses of
Guadalcanal and America’s limitless military resources had all sealed the fate of Japan by the end of 1942.
This certainty, however, meant nothing to thegarrisons of Tarawa, Luzon, iwo Jima, Okinawa and all the other blood-soaked specks on the map of the South Pacific where losses to both sides were invariably appalling . . . and the outcome of the battles equally inevitable. It meant nothing, either, to the Kamikaze pilots who crashed their planes onto Allied warships, or to the crew of the Yamato, sacrificed in a hopeless suicide mission off Okinawa.
But such fanaticism horrified the Allies. It made them realise that the cost of taking Japan by force would be stupendous. The result was the birth of a new age over Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . and a sudden end to the Second World War.
This book, in words and pictures, first-hand accounts and illustrations by John Batchelor, tells the story of that war fought in the remote expanse of the Pacific.

CONTENTS
Pearl Harbor; A Blow for Empire The fight for Wake Blitzkrieg of tie Rising Sun Battle of the Coral Sea Battle of Midway
Guadalcanal: Japan's First Land Defeat
Guadalcanal: The Sea Battles
The Road to Victory: Guadalcanal to Okinawa