User:Nick-D/reviews
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I have a strong interest in the final stages of World War II, but am often frustrated by the surprisingly limited literature on the topic. Happily, there seems to be a minor boom in works on the topic, but major gaps still exist.
1945: World War II's forgotten year? |
The literature on the war tends to be focused on the period 1940-1944. There are lots of good reasons for this, as these were the years where the outcome of the conflict was in the balance (1940-42) and then decided (1943-44). It's fair to say that as a result this period will be of most interest to readers given that it's when the most dramatic events of the war occurred.
However, overlooking 1945 comes at a cost. By focusing on the earlier periods of the war, our understanding of the important question of why the Allies won (to quote the title of Richard Overy's excellent book) is incomplete. In part, this is because contributes to the frequent over-estimation of the performance of the German and Japanese armed forces and under-appreciation of how capable the Allied militaries became - by 1945 the Red Army was probably the most powerful army in human history up to that time, and the US Navy the most powerful fleet. In addition, it leads to gaps in our understanding of the human costs of the war - the folly of the German and Japanese governments' decision to fight on in the face of certain defeat was a crime against their own people, and led directly to millions of avoidable deaths and vast human misery. The increasing brutality of the Axis governments and the relief felt by most citizens of these countries at the end of the war can also be over-looked.
A result of the relative neglect of 1945 is that some of the key campaigns have only ever been properly covered in the official histories produced in the decades immediately after the war. For instance, when researching the Air raids on Japan article I found that the 1953 USAAF official history Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki provided the only truly comprehensive and account of the massive bombing campaign conducted against Japan, and was also generally the most reliable work on this topic. Similarly, Gavin Long's Final Campaigns which was first published in 1963 remains the one and only detailed account of the Australian Army's operations in the year. The same holds true for the important campaigns in Germany, the Philippines and South East Asia. While these books remain of great value, they are now in many aspects dated and the topics they didn't cover (for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison describes many of the US Navy's major carrier operations against the Japanese home islands only briefly in his semi-official history) have never been properly addressed by other authors.