War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (January 2007)

Ulrich Straus. The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. . $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-98336-3.

Reviewed by: Joseph Robert White, Department of History, University of Maryland University College.

Humanity in a "War without Mercy"

In The Anguish of Surrender, Ulrich Straus contributes the first monographic history of Japanese prisoners of war in Western Allied custody during World War II.[1] Through the use of U.S. National Archives documents, Japanese memoirs (all but three unavailable in English), correspondence with former POWs, and thirty-five interviews, the author complements works by John Dower, Allison Gilmore, John Lynn, and Arnold Krammer.[2] While touching on the Soviet Union and China, and mentioning the post-VJ Day surrenders, Straus focuses upon the 35,000 Japanese captives taken by the Western Allies between December 8,1941 and August 15, 1945, 5,000 of whom were held in the continental United States. Straus's account brings nuance to our understanding of the Pacific War, recounting the rare instances of Japanese surrender and documenting the POWs' generally humane treatment in Allied custody. Periodically living in Japan for twenty-one years, the author brings a lifetime of study of Japanese culture and language to this book. He served with the Army Translation and Interpretation Service (ATIS) during World War II, translated German and Japanese documents at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and held various diplomatic posts in Japan.

The first chapter, "Prisoner Number One," highlights the special plight of Japanese POWs through the case of Sakamaki Kazuo. Deployed on the evening of December 6, 1941 near Pearl Harbor, Sakamaki's midget submarine ran aground. Captured on December 8, Sakamaki faced interrogation and the fear of ostracism in Japan. Being the lone Japanese POW in U.S. captivity for over a year compounded his sense of shame. Emerging as a leader at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, the largest U.S. camp for Japanese POWs, he went on to a distinguished career with Toyota; nonetheless, he encountered unwelcome publicity as Japan's first captive of World War II ...

REVIEW: Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Japanese Story of the Battle of Midway.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (July 2006)

Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. _ Shattered Sword: The Japanese Story of the Battle of Midway_. Dulles: Potomac Books, 2005. xxvi + 613 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, appendices, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 1-574-88923-0.

Reviewed for H-War by Jonathan D.Beard, Science Writer, Photo Researcher

The Battle of Midway:  A Needed Corrective

If this excellent book had been published fifty years ago, two generations of English-speaking historians would have been spared countless errors, large and small, about what happened at Midway.  As it is, _Shattered Sword_ corrects those mistakes--about the proximate and
fundamental causes of the Japanese defeat--and then puts the battle and the larger failure of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) into perspective ...