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Jan 04, 2025
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ARHI 818 - War Without Mercy: World War II in the Pacific3 credits
World War II began in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of China and didn’t end until 1945 with the final defeat of Germany and Japan with the loss of upwards of 60 million lives. Most histories of World War II concentrate on the war in Europe and the Allies’ efforts to defeat Hitler. While one cannot argue that the war in the Pacific has been ignored, it does receive less attention than the various European campaigns, particularly in popular culture and general audience histories of the war. Yet the war in the Pacific was very different than in Europe–almost from the very beginning no quarter was given and few prisoners were ever taken on either side. In this it more resembles the war between Russia and Germany than the American experience in Europe. The Pacific War was the largest geographic conflict in history. Across the huge expanses of the Pacific, the two most powerful navies in the world found themselves locked in a death struggle. The war was fought in every possible climate, from Arctic conditions in the Aleutians, to the appalling heat and swelter of the South Pacific. For these reasons alone the war is worthy of study, but many other questions persist. Why did the Pacific war degenerate into a war without mercy? Why are many Asian nations still angry at Japan about the war and how it is portrayed in modern Japan? Why does the debate over the morality of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan still rage? Clearly, racism played a part–as evidence, consider the execution of Allied POWs by the Japanese while American planes were dropping bombs on Tokyo on the final day of the war. We will take advantage of the exciting new scholarship over the past 15 years (such as the full exposure of the torture and massacre of 300,000 Chinese civilians in the Rape of Nanking, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of slave laborers in the Japanese-held Netherlands East Indies, and the latest scholarship on the last days of the Japanese war government) to explore these issues and others, including what were the causes of the war, what was combat like in the Pacific, and what is the legacy of the Pacific War for today’s world, and how does it differ, it at all, from the legacy of the War in Europe.
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