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    War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
    War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
    War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
    Audiobook13 hours

    War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

    Written by John W. Dower

    Narrated by Tim Campbell

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War-race-while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book . . . a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”

    Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most . . . with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 11, 2017
    ISBN9781541471245
    War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

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    Reviews for War Without Mercy

    4/5

    85 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A powerful case for the argument that racism played as big a role in the Pacific theater as it did in the European, but Dower devotes more of his resources to detailing American racism, leaving the Japanese sections more vaguely sketched out (we never get the perspective of the men on the ground as we do with the Americans). This may be because he's got to overcome the preconceptions of his primary readership (i.e., most Americans think of WWII as "the good war"), but it makes his argument seem a bit lopsided.
    • 4/5
      A history that points out that both the U.S. and Japan used racism and propaganda to serve their political needs during WW II.
    • 4/5
      This book relates the emotional and psychological environment of the Pacific war between the Allies and Japan. What it shows is that Japan and the US were/are the same: racist, using many of the same symbols, images and stories. However, the devil is in the details. Because Japan's metaphor of the Enemy was the demon, who could be benevolent or malevolent, there was a flexibility in defeat that allowed the former antagonists to form a new alliance in the face of a new demon: Communism. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      Dower investigates how the racial beliefs of Americans and Japanese contributed to the ferocity of WWII in the Pacific. Both sides committed atrocities, often aided by the belief that the other was a savage race. The Japanese portrayed the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch as venal, brutish, and impure; Americans saw the Japanese as vicious animals in need of extermination (with an interlude in which the Japanese were also frightening supermen, cunning and free of individual desire for life). Japanese soldiers massacred civilians and mistreated prisoners of war, and treated other Asians terribly because of an official ideology that the Japanese were to be the master/father race, while American soldiers took souvenirs of bones, teeth, and even skulls from the Japanese they killed—a picture of a woman with the skull her fiance sent her appeared in Life, and then reappeared in Japanese propaganda to demonstrate that Japan was in a fight to the death. Dower argues that the racial ideology of both sides was highly similar (though Japanese propagandists didn’t consistently use the animal imagery of the Americans, and focused more on Japanese purity/superiority than American inferiority). He also suggests that the war shows both how easily race hate can be stirred up and how it can, at least for a time, be ratcheted down, given how readily most Japanese accepted American occupation.
    • 4/5
      Very useful and balanced book making clear both sides were far from saints amid wartime pressures
    • 5/5
      Race and Power in the Pacific War: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower begins "War Without Mercy" with an amusing account of his inspiration for the book: While working on a history of postwar Japan, Dower wrote a sentence noting how quickly and easily the virulent race hatred of the war years dissipated during the American occupation. Of course, he then had to include another sentence explaining the racial aspects of the war itself, which quickly became a paragraph, then a section, then a chapter, and finally this book, "War Without Mercy". The original history of postwar Japan, meanwhile, sat unfinished on a shelf.The main criticism of "War Without Mercy" given by other reviewers is that it is too narrow to serve as a comprehensive history of the war -- in particular that it tries to explain the entire conflict only through race and does not devote enough attention to Japanese atrocities and war crimes. This criticism unfortunately misses the point of Dower's book: he is studying racism itself, but for some reason many of his critics seem to think he is trying to use it to explain all and sundry. "War Without Mercy" is not and makes no pretense of being a book about the Pacific War in general or even about atrocities and war crimes themselves. Instead it started as a mere tangent in a larger work and focuses on racial aspects of the war between Japan and the United States, especially the images each side used to describe the other and the war itself, along with some study of how they evolved after the fighting stopped.As a history of race and power in the Pacific War, "War Without Mercy" is superb: well-organized, clearly written and offering interesting insights. It is divided into four sections, the first of which establishes the importance of the subject by showing how it contributed to the unique ferocity of the war in the Pacific: "Race hate fed atrocities, and atrocities in turn fanned the fires of race hate" (11). The second section studies American images of their Asian enemy, as apes, primitives, children, and 'little yellow savages', and of the war itself as a racial war between white and colored, while the third does the same for the Japanese side. Although the Japanese portrayed Europeans and Americans as decadent, impure, and downright demonic, they viewed their Asian neighbors in much the same contemptuous way as did Western imperialists. The final section explores the transition from war to peace, and the ways in which images and symbols were transformed: the apes became pets and the children became students, while on the other side the western demons shared their secret knowledge. At the same time, the negative images used during the war were transferred to the Soviet Union and (especially) Maoist China.Meticulously documented, "War Without Mercy" reveals many fascinating aspects of the Pacific War commonly overlooked in more comprehensive studies. I was especially interested to read about contemporary concerns that American rhetoric of racial war would drive Chiang Kai-shek into an alliance with the Japanese (166-169), and that such language caused fully 18% of African-Americans to express "pro-Japanese inclinations" in a confidential poll conducted by black interviewers (174). "War Without Mercy" isn't a comprehensive history of the Pacific War, nor is it for everybody. It is, however, the best explanation I have seen of the merciless nature of the war itself and the psychology of the societies involved. If you have even the slightest interest in that subject, "War Without Mercy" will not disappoint.