“Oh really!” an academic acquaintance said to me the other day, when he heard that Max Hastings had written a huge new book on the fall of Japan in world war two, just three years after his gigantic Armageddon about the collapse of Germany; “Isn’t he prolific!” He did not mean this as a compliment. He was of the opinion that the value of a history book exists in direct proportion to how long it takes to write. He, for example, was planning to take up to 10 years to convert his thesis into book form.

It is an attitude we should take seriously. After all, two of the best books on Japan, Herbert P Bix’s Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and John W Dower’s War Without Mercy, were the product of years of scholarship by academics who immersed themselves in Japanese culture. It is a mistake, however, to think that a book of genuine worth on this period of history cannot also be produced more quickly and by someone who does not write and speak in oriental tongues. Because Hastings’s Nemesis is a triumph.

The key to the book’s success lies not in its accessibility, nor in its vivid portraits of the key figures in the drama – although it has both – but in something else entirely: the author’s supremely confident ambition. Another historian might have decided to write a book on the battle of Okinawa, or the American fire-bombing campaign against Japan, or the decision to drop the nuclear bomb, or any one of 50 other subjects from this period. But no, thinks Hastings, brimming with chutzpah, I’ll do the whole lot and show how it all fits together as a single vast narrative.

The self-confidence that allowed Hastings to pursue the idea of the book as a whole spreads into a series of unambiguous judgments he feels able to make on the detail. He is, for example, not overfond of General Douglas MacArthur (“MacArthur’s belief that his critics were not merely wrong, but evil, verged on derangement”), and has clear views about Lord Louis Mountbatten (“of boundless ambition and limited intellect, his grand title as supreme commander meant little... ‘Dicky’ was not a great man, but like many prominent actors in the dramas of the second world war, he strove manfully to do his part in great events”).

Inevitably, given the bravado of the writing, people will disagree with some of Hastings’s views. Having filmed a number of veterans of the Japanese Imperial army a few years ago, I think that he underestimates the consequences of the culture of vicious bullying at the core of Hirohito’s armed forces. When this violent coercion was combined with the pervasive need in Japanese society to conform in order to protect oneself and one’s family, it created an environment in which, for example, many of the Kamikaze cannot truly be said to have “volunteered” for suicide missions — if by “volunteered” we mean “exercised genuine free choice”. Hastings, I think, sometimes believes ordinary Japanese were motivated by honour, when in reality many did what they did because of threat.

But these are relatively inconsequential details (and to a large extent matters of individual interpretation) alongside the wealth of judgments Hastings gets spot on. What is essential, for instance, in any attempt to understand this period properly, is to set the allied conflict with Japan against the background of the simultaneous war in China, where the Imperial Army was fighting in an atmosphere of atrocity and blatant criminality that stands comparison with the crimes of the Nazis on the Eastern Front. The scale of destruction wrought by the Japanese was immense: at least 15m Chinese died, perhaps as many as 25m.

Yet this most vital war has been ignored by many western historians who prefer to write about the more accessible “war in the Pacific” that featured the reader-friendly western allies rather than the hard-to-penetrate complexities of Chinese wartime politics. Not so Hastings, who takes care to contextualise what happened in the Pacific and Burma with the appalling actions of the Japanese in China.

Perhaps even more important, by setting the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 against the evolution of the American fire-bombing campaign that targeted the largest Japanese cities the previous spring, Hastings demonstrates why relatively little thought was given to the initiation of the nuclear age. Few today realise that more died in the fire-storm created by American B29s in Tokyo on March 10, 1945 than perished at Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attack. (100,000 in Tokyo, 70,000 at Hiroshima.) So at the time it was possible to believe that the decision to use nuclear weapons was not one of principle, since Japanese women and children had already been incinerated in vast numbers by conventional bombs. And Hastings — a firm supporter of the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan — reserves some of his most strident writing to condemn not the Americans for destroying so many civilians, but the Japanese for not surrendering before the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima. (“The prevarication which characterised the conduct of Japan’s leaders in the summer of 1945 represented an appalling betrayal of hundreds of thousands of its soldiers, sailors and airmen who had died in recent campaigns designed to buy time for their country.”)

Thus, essentially, Hastings thinks the Japanese government brought nuclear destruction upon itself. But while it is a controversial way of dealing with the history, the case he makes for this interpretation is persuasive. It would, perhaps, be compelling if only the Americans had formally warned the Japanese of the shattering power of their new weapon before use. But despite this cavil, who can disagree with the author’s view that “technological determinism is an outstanding feature of great wars”? In the context of this war, that meant that once the nuclear bomb existed it was going to be used. The only people who could have stopped the destruction were the Japanese themselves — by surrendering.

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this book in Japan; especially since I have met a number of intellectuals there who insist that “Hiroshima was a war crime just like Auschwitz”. How will they respond to Hastings’s belief that “when America stood on the brink of absolute victory over a nation which had brought untold grief and misery upon Asia, why should not the enemy bear the burden of acknowledging his condition, and indeed his guilt”?

Allied to Hastings’s provocative, insightful judgment is some fine writing about the experience of battle — the chapter on the naval battle at Leyte Gulf, the largest in modern history, is particularly impressive. (“It was as if,” he writes of the Imperial Navy, “the Japanese high command was offering its enemies a feast in successive courses, each scaled to fit American appetites, with convenient pauses for the cleansing of palates.”) Put all these elements together — the ambition, insight, sureness of touch — and you have a book of real quality. Yes, Hastings is prolific — and a good thing, too.

NEMESIS: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings
HarperPress £25 pp674

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