Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Japan
American leaders called the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki our 'least abhorrent choice,' but there were alternatives to the nuclear attacks.
As defeat became inevitable in the summer of 1945, Japan's government and the Allies could not agree on surrender terms, especially regarding the future of Emperor Hirohito and his throne.
When judging the morality of the use of atomic weapons in World War II, observers typically focus on Japanese deaths, while ignoring the far-larger number of non-Japanese casualties.
In the spring of 1945, American bombing raids destroyed much of Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities, killing at least 200,000 people, without forcing a surrender.
Editor’s Note: David Dean Barrett is a military historian, specializing in World War II.
The U.S. government managed to hide the magnitude of what happened in Hiroshima until John Hersey’s story appeared in the New Yorker, driving home the truth about America’s new mega-weapon.
Editor's Note: Lesley M.M.
The “divine wind” began in October 1944 as the Japanese defended against MacArthur’s assault on the Philippines. The Americans who witnessed these first attacks were horrified and shaken, but it was only the beginning.
Editor's Note: James P. Duffy, the author of over a dozen books mostly on military history, wrote “No One Returns Alive“ in our Fall 2017 issue about the critical but often-overlooked New Guinea campaign.
A preeminent author recalls his experience as one of America's first combat historians, among a handful of men who accompanied soldiers into the bloodiest battles to write history as it was being made.
Fresh from Williams College’s history program, the author entered World War II as a 24-year-old combat historian, earning four combat medals and a Bronze Star.
A preeminent author recalls his experience as one of America's first combat historians, among a handful of men who accompanied soldiers into the bloodiest battles to write history as it was being made.
Fresh from Williams College’s history program, the author entered World War II as a 24-year-old combat historian, earning four combat medals and a Bronze Star.
A young man from Queens jumps into the thick of World War II intelligence activities by translating secret Japanese messages
IN HIS MARVELOUS MEMOIR, Flights of Passage, my friend and onetime colleague Samuel Hynes, a Marine Corps combat aviator in World War II, writes that the war is the shared secret of his generation—those young men who came of age between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945.
Was he the Beast of Bataan, or was his true war crime defeating Douglas MacArthur in Manila and on Corregidor? Here is a troubling look at the problems of military "justice."
Stationed near Nagasaki at the close of the war, a young photographer ventured into the devastated city and stayed for months.
Donald Kagan, a historian of the ancient world believes that, in every era, people have reacted to the demands of waging war in surprisingly similar ways, and that, to protect our national interests today, Americans must understand the choices that soldiers and statesmen made hundreds and even thousands of years ago.
An overheard remark sent the author off on a years-long quest to discover the truth about a man whose power to inspire both rage and reverence has only grown after his death.
As a ten-year-old boy, the author had a role to play in bringing Douglas MacArthur’s vision of democracy to a shattered Japan.
On August 30, 1945, just days after Japan capitulated, ending World War II, Douglas MacArthur first set foot on the island nation, to set up temporary headquarters at the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama, and to set in motion a unique experiment that, little more than three and a ha
The author entered the conquered capital days after the surrender to meet high officers of the Imperial Navy.
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1945, I was a naval officer in Norfolk, Virginia contemplating my inevitable return to the Western Pacific, when two bombs were dropped, the Soviets entered the war, and the Japanese emperor prevailed on his government to thr
Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command that simply was not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki.
I am of the generation that actually can remember Pearl Harbor (I was 19 when the radio flashed the news), and the strangest thing about its 50th anniversary is that it came so fast. I seem to have mislaid a half-century somewhere.
The Japanese had made my tune their own.
The Japanese had surrendered. I was hurried from Manila to Tokyo in my capacity as a junior officer investigating war crimes.
How Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture sent an eccentric Russian mystic on a sensitive mission to Asia and thereby created diplomatic havoc, personal humiliation, and embarrassment for the administration.
Early in 1934, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A.
Early in the century, a young American accurately predicted Japan’s imperialism and China’s and Russia’s rise. Then, he set out to become China’s soldier-leader.
In October 1941, Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright, journalist, politician, and wife of the magazine tycoon Henry Luce, had dinner with half a dozen army officers in their quarters on top of an ancient Spanish fort beside the harbor of Manila.
These World War II airmen had one of the most dangerous missions of all, piloting unarmed cargo planes over the Hump - the high and treacherous Himalayas.
Cookie Byrd is punching my card. We’ve just met in the convention center at Harrah’s, in Reno.
In a conflict that saw saturation-bombing, Auschwitz, and the atom bomb, poison gas was never used in the field. What prevented it?
Forty years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing at least 110,000 and possibly 250,000 Japanese, and speeding that nation’s surrender.
Two letters from a Navy lieutenant to his wife tell the story of the last hours of World War II.
YOKOSUKA 9·4·45
My dear:
She was the last major American warship sunk during World War II, and her sinking was the single worst open-sea disaster in our naval history. How could it have happened?
On July 16, 1945, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis departed the California coast for the Pacific island of Tinian. On board was a heavily guarded top-secret cargo destined to end the war.
It is early 1945. An American bomber crew is anxiously nearing the now familiar islands of the Japanese Empire. Flak begins to burst around the plane as the target comes into view.
A marine correspondent recalls the deadliest battle of the Pacific war
EDITOR’S NOTE: In October, 1944, the U.S.
During three harrowing years as a prisoner of the Japanese, an American woman secretly kept an extraordinary journal of suffering, hope, ingenuity, and human endurance
The famed aviator recalls the dramatic bombing raid he led on Tokyo early in World War II.
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