Menu
To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945
Top of the pile
90
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
99/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
John C. McManus
Publisher:
Dutton Caliber
Date:
May 2, 2023
The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months--or years--of fight the enemy has left.
What The Reviewers Say
The key to any campaign-level work is the balance between small-scale fighting and the big picture. Mr. McManus achieves this by serving up vignettes from senior commanders before plunging into the fighting front. In taking stories from both ends of the command chain, on both sides of the battlelines, he allows the squalor and violence of the Pacific War to take coherent shape as part of a broader, history-changing epic.
The author’s accounts of combat against the never-surrender Japanese army make an invasion of the Japanese home islands seem like the fiery depths of hell. Although he all but ignores the debate ever since over the use of atomic bombs, his prose leaves little doubt that any home island invasion would have had more fatalities for both sides than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
An infantryman’s view of warfare at its dirtiest and bleakest.
