A new addition to the very popular Images of War Series. As with other volumes in this series, its great strength is the quality and rarity of the images that illustrate the concise text, all at a very aggressive cover price – Highly Recommended.
NAME: Images of War, Rising Sun At War, The Japanese Army 1931-1945, Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives FILE: R2488 AUTHOR: Philip Jowett PUBLISHER: Pen & Sword BINDING: soft back PAGES: 175 PRICE: £14.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: Sino-Japanese War, Manchurian occupation, WWII, World War II, World War 2, Second World War, Pacific theatre, Indo-China, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Aleutian Islands
ISBN: 1-47387-488-2
IMAGE: B2488.jpg BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/k5t65ux LINKS: DESCRIPTION: A new addition to the very popular Images of War Series. As with other volumes in this series, its great strength is the quality and rarity of the images that illustrate the concise text, all at a very aggressive cover price – Highly Recommended. Much that has been written about Japanese expansion in the 20th Century has concentrated on the rapid early Japanese advances into territory of European colonization, the Pacific island chains, Pearl Harbour, and the relentless push back by the Allied amphibious forces to the dropping of the atomic bombs. Inevitably, this places the main focus on naval and air battles. In the process, the Japanese Army is often a bit player to the Navy and Aviation forces. That produces an inaccurate picture of what happened. Japan had been held in the Middle Ages, a society of isolation, that began to awake in the late 19th Century. Its naval victory over Russia was the first shock for a world that knew little about Japan. As Japan learned to industrialize and consider a more active place in the world, it soon discovered a number of barriers to its development. The greatest challenge was in obtaining the raw materials it needed at an acceptable price. That created opportunity for the Army to campaign for territorial expansion and the process was well underway by 1931. Japan had to control Manchuria and expand into China, a bitter war, filled with atrocities and spreading into conflict with the Soviet Union. The Japanese had been able to advance across China without too much difficulty, but the Soviet Union proved a more difficult opponent that was able to force a peace on Japan. The Army then looked at the prospects of taking control of the Pacific Islands and Indo China. After Pearl Harbour, Japan felt invincible and swept all before it, but the war was never likely to achieve all that had been hoped for. In the end, Japan was unable to achieve enough victories to force a peace treaty on the countries it invaded and that inevitably meant that it would be out-produced in armaments by the US and the Allied nations, blocking further expansion and then seeing an inexorable advance by the Allies towards the Japanese home islands and eventual unconditional surrender to the Allies. This book provides a very good picture of the Japanese Army during these eventful years. The images are first class and the text provides a clear view of the progression of events.