Coming from Richard Overy in March 2025

[Edward]

Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan
(Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin - 6 March 2025) - UK
(W. W. Norton & Company - 4 March 2025) - US
by Richard Overy Ph.D.
224 pages w/ 8 pages of b&w illustrations
£25.00
$26.99 US

"A leading historian of World War II sheds new light on the purposes and impact of the U.S. incendiary and atomic bombing of Japan’s cities in 1945.

With the development of the B-29 “Superfortress” in summer 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. In 1945 Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned the city’s most densely populated sector, killed some 85,000 residents, and left more than one million homeless. The attack was part of a months-long campaign of incendiary bombing that destroyed almost two-thirds of Japan’s cities. The two atomic blasts in August killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them civilians. The bombing brought a destabilizing devastation that, combined with a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, induced Japan, as they put it, to terminate the war.

Many at the time and since have credited American air power, and especially the two atomic bombs, with Japan’s surrender. But Richard Overy tells a different, more dimensional story. Drawing on his expertise on the war and its bombing campaigns, he delivers a precise recounting of these aerial attacks, and a balanced, informed assessment of how and why they occurred. Overy is astute on the Allied decision-making, and, notably, integrates the Japanese leadership as well. He ably navigates the dramatic endgame of the war, which featured factional infighting within the Japanese cabinet, a scramble by American officials to formulate an acceptable version of “unconditional surrender,” and the crucial role played by the emperor, Hirohito. The atomic bombing emerges as impactful but not decisive in this rich, multilayered history."

The Author
"Richard Overy is Honorary Research Professor of History at the University of Exeter and one of Britain's most distinguished historians. His major works include The Dictators, winner of the 2005 Wolfson Prize, The Morbid Age and The Bombing War, which won a Cundill Award for Historical Excellence in 2014. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts."

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/4625...overy-richard/

[waldo_pepper]

Thank you for the notice, it is definitely on the must read list.
Regards
Bill