“World War II in the Asia Pacific created the modern world,” writes Peter Harmsen in the beginning of Volume 3 of his War in the Far East, which examines the final twenty months of the War in the region and its immediate aftermath. The United States emerged from the war as the leading world power, and the defeat of Japan led to a renewal of civil war in China, the coming to power of the Chinese communist regime, and ultimately China’s emergence as the world’s other superpower. And China’s rise, Harmsen contends, is “the defining event of the 21st century.”
Harmsen has worked as a foreign correspondent for Bloomberg, the Economist, and the Financial Times, and in this book he demonstrates a keen eye for detail and an impressive interpretative approach to historical events. And while there is nothing “new” in the history Harmsen writes about, his take on events and personalities is often refreshing, sometimes provocative, and always interesting.

He begins with the brutal fighting on Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain in January 1944, where Japanese soldiers hid in the jungle waiting to ambush American Marines. The combat was especially ferocious at a shallow stream with steep banks that Marines later dubbed “Suicide Creek”. The Americans won “with a mixture of tactical acumen, technological prowess, and individual valor”. Very few prisoners were taken, which became commonplace during the Asia-Pacific fighting.
Next came American landings on the Marshall Islands and nearby atolls— Roi, Namur, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk. Harmsen notes that Japanese officers later said that the fall of Truk “broke their back in the Pacific.” Any thought of offensive operations on Japan’s part vanished. But Japanese defenders thereafter burrowed into the ground, forcing the Americans to force them out mostly by killing them.
Meanwhile, MacArthur’s army continued its impressive forward movement on New Guinea on its way to the Philippines. To the author’s credit, he recognizes that MacArthur, for all his personal flaws, “was a master of the art of war.” And Harmsen notes that during the Asia-Pacific War, American army and navy officers were winnowed-out “in a brutal Darwinian fashion”. MacArthur and Nimitz and Halsey survived the winnowing process because they won victories, which is what war is all about. Harmsen does not neglect to praise the efforts of British commanders in the theater, especially Major General Orde Wingate and William Slim in the China-Burma region.
Harmsen notes that the only place where Japan continued to rack-up victories was China. In April 1944, Japan launched Operation Ichi-Go, which took the Chinese armed forces by complete surprise. Nearly 150,000 Japanese soldiers crossed the Yellow River, while airplanes bombed Chinese soldiers and civilians. It was, Harmsen writes, “the last successful major offensive of any Axis power.” There was intense fighting in Wuhan (much in the news these days), Changsha, and Hengyang. Japan’s opponents in China were rivals (Nationalists and Communists) in a postponed civil war, each fighting the Japanese with one hand while jockeying for power inside China with the other hand.
As the war proceeded to Biak, Saipan (the loss of which, some Japanese military leaders saw, meant the war was lost), Tinian, Guam, and Peleliu, Japan’s hopes of victory faded, but they fought on. Harmsen writes that the decisive battles included Leyte Gulf, the Philippines, and the beginning of the strategic bombing campaign on Japan’s home islands, including the subsequent firebombing of Tokyo. But the bloodiest battles for the soldiers on both sides were yet to come: Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And it was the casualties of those two battles, which included deadly kamikaze attacks on American ships, that persuaded top US military leaders and President Truman that the dropping of the two atomic bombs was a better way to end the war than invading Japan’s main islands. Harmsen does not question that judgment.
By war’s end, Harmsen notes, China had become a sideshow, yet in hindsight what happened there after the war would have long-term consequences that are still with us today. When Japan was defeated in August-September 1945, the civil war in China was renewed. As Harmsen notes, the formal end of the Second World War did not end the fighting in the Asia-Pacific. The struggle for power between the Nationalists and Communists continued. The United States aided the Nationalists, while the Soviet Union aided the Communists. Yet Harmsen notes that the Americans also attempted to mediate the conflict in a fruitless effort to produce a coalition government. And, he notes, “the Communists were winning friends in parts of the US diplomatic and military establishments just as many American journalists compared them favorably with the Nationalists.” Some so-called China experts in the State Department depicted Communist rule in parts of China as “an egalitarian paradise” and spoke highly of Mao Zedong.
The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War was closely followed by the outbreak of the Korean War and the end of French colonial rule in Indochina, which eventually led to America’s increased involvement in Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War. As Harmsen notes, “[t]he war did not end for everyone in 1945.”
Indeed, Harmsen’s broader view of the war in the Far East sees the Japanese-American War as “part of a much larger half-century-long narrative stretching from the civil wars of China of the 1920s all the way to the [American] evacuation of Saigon in 1975.” I suspect that is how the peoples of the Asia-Pacific see it, too.
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