Ye Olde Staging Point

As some of you may know, I enjoy reading books of military history, particularly when the topic has something to do with World War II. Lately (that is, in the last year or so), I've made my way through a number of books about different aspects of the Pacific War and have learned quite a bit in process. A few of the observations that have struck me as I've read up on the topic:

• It is almost impossible for me to comprehend the sheer horror of the fighting that took place on tiny islands throughout the Pacific. As the saying goes, war is hell--but this part of the war seems to have taken place on a particularly nasty circle of the Inferno. Even if 99% of a typical soldier's experience was spent sitting around bored on the deck of a ship or doing uneventful guard duty, the 1% which involved slogging across bomb-cratered, malaria-infested beaches and jungles while doing battle with invisible, seemingly invincible enemies sounds like pretty much the worst experience I can conceive of a human being enduring.

  The strangeness of my own historical situation makes reading about this all the more surreal: here I am, sitting on my back porch on a summer day sipping a Mountain Dew, reading calmly about how US landing craft launching an amphibious assault on Tarawa got stuck on coral reefs before reaching the beach and sat there for hours taking Japanese fire until nearly every single man had been blown to pieces or drowned in the bloody shallows. And that was before they even set foot on the island.

  This sort of thing is so far removed from my life experience, I don't even know quite how to process it.

• You would think that the prospect of a massive, all-out war against an implacable foe would inspire military leaders to put aside differences and egos and work together... but you'd be wrong. On the other hand, maybe it's natural to expect that in such a critical, high-pressure time, people will fight furiously to make sure that we don't ruin everything by doing the "wrong thing." There were an awful lot of unknowns and firsts in the Pacific War.

• Interestingly, all of the historians I've read on the Pacific War come more or less to the conclusion that the use of the atomic bomb was an appropriate decision to make, historically speaking (or, if not appropriate, at least highly defensible). The most interesting take on the question of the atomic bomb that I've read thus far has been in George Fiefer's Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb. In the book, Fiefer argues that the battle of Okinawa was simply so horrific in terms of casualties (more civilians died at Okinawa than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that it left Allied leadership desperate to pursue any course of action that might offer an alternative to an invasion of mainland Japan--an invasion that, extrapolating from the experience of Okinawa, had the potential to be the biggest bloodbath in history. (The book is also interesting in that it devotes considerable attention to the plight of the native Okinawans, chronicling their cultural near-annihilation first by Japanese occupation and then by the actual US-Japanese fighting on the island.)

  If anyone can recommend a historical counterbalancing point of view arguing that the atomic bomb wasn't a defensible action, I'd be really interested in reading it.

• Before I began reading up on this topic, I was under the very vague impression that after Midway, the Japanese navy just sort of withered away, never to trouble the Americans again--which made the whole US victory seem to rest on one rather lucky event. On the contrary, Midway seems really to have been the beginning, not the end, of the Pacific struggle in earnest; I've now read about the dozens upon dozens of brutal naval battles that occurred nearly every time US forces advanced to their next objective. It seems to have taken the Imperial Japanese Navy a lot longer to die than I thought--they pulled off plenty of victories, minor and major, throughout the year or two after Midway, even as the tide turned against Japan's efforts.

  As a related side note, it is interesting to read about the rapid evolution of American naval tactics and technology throughout the war. The US was markedly inferior in many aspects of technology, training, and tactics at the beginning of the war, but American forces can be observed slowly but steadily adapting to counter (and ultimately overcome) Japanese superiority in each of those categories. That process of adaptation--and the way that wars so often coincide with huge leaps forward in technology--is part of what makes military history so interesting to me.

• Among the books I've read on this subject, in case you're interested:
  
  
  
  • The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July-August 1945 by Stanley Weintraub (an interesting look at the frantic planning, negotiations, and decisions made in the final weeks of the war with Japan, on both sides of the conflict)
    
  • Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb by George Fiefer (mentioned above)
    
  • A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II by Gerhard Weinberg (one of the best comprehensive World War II histories I've read)
    
  • Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (a look at Japan's political and cultural situation in the immediate aftermath of the war)
    
  • Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan by Ronald Spector (a more straightforward military history; still reading this one)
    

Thoughts? Any books to add to my reading list on the topic?