Hideki Tojo

Focusing on 45 military leaders from four continents and 13 countries, spread across four centuries, this study paints, for the first time, a collective, comparative portrait of high-ranking military officers. The authors develop an interactional theory of military leaders, stressing the interplay between sociodemographic variables, psychological dynamics, and situational factors. They examine age and birthplace, socioeconomic status, family life, ethnicity and religion, education and occupation, activities and experiences, and ideologies and attitudes. They find military leaders to be a remarkably coherent and homogeneous group of men propelled toward the military by a combination of nationalism, imperialism, relative deprivation, love deprivation, marginality, and vanity.

David Williams was an editorial writer for The Japan Times.

Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific from 1937 to 1945 remains a subject of great interest, yet the wartime Japanese army remains little understood outside Japan. Most published accounts rely on English-language works written in the 1950s and 1960s. The Japanese-language sources have remained relatively inaccessible to western scholars in part due to the difficulty of the language, a difficulty the author, who reads Japanese fluently, surmounts.

In a series of searching examinations of the structure, ethos, and goals of the Japanese military establishment, Edward J. Drea offers new material on its tactics, operations, doctrine, and leadership. Based on original military documents, official histories, court diaries, and Emperor Hirohito's own words, these twelve essays introduce western readers to fifty years of Japanese scholarship about the war and Japan's military institutions. In addition, Drea uses recently declassified Allied intelligence documents related to Japan to challenge existing views and conventional wisdom about the war.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack Imperial Japanese contingents overran large areas of Southeast Asia and the Pacific until checked by U.S. forces at Midway and Guadalcanal. This book demonstrates how America and the British Commonwealth were able to evolve and apply a victorious strategy in very difficult military circumstances. The Pacific struggle is put in its full international context. Events in China, Anglo-American diplomatic efforts to bring Russia into the war against Japan, and the development and decision to use the atomic bomb are all described. The Japanese response to strategic reverses during 1944-45 is related, as is the way that Emperor Hirohito personally intervened with his militarist government in August 1945 to end the Pacific War. The result of all these converging events was the "Journey to the Missouri" made by the Japanese government and High Command on 2 September 1945 when the instrument of surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay. An epilogue describes how this uniquely bitter struggle,had a successful sequel in the occupation of Japan.