Seventy years of selective postwar history

With regard to Pacific War amnesia and distortions, however, the Japanese are not alone. Rana Mitter made a great contribution to historiography when he wrote China's War with Japan, 1937-1945:

The Struggle for Survival, which deals in detail not only with China's war against Japan, but its overall contribution to World War II generally.

Again, ask the reasonably educated man or woman in the street anywhere, which were the allied powers during World War II and she or he will probably respond: Russia, Britain and the United States. The enemies were, of course, Germany, Italy and Japan.

No mention of China? Among the many facts that come out of Mitter's book is the war the Chinese waged against Japan - the huge number of lives it sacrificed - permitted the United States to concentrate on winning the war in Europe before moving to end the war in the Pacific.

This is rarely acknowledged. China has been to a considerable extent air-brushed out of the history books. The reason, of course, is that the Chinese turned communist shortly after the war ended - hence they became the United States' enemy.

This coming August will mark a series of key Pacific War anniversaries: the 70th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, of course, the 70th anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

Cody's novel includes scenes before and during the war, in the United States, Japan and Northeast China, and events such as the 1942 Doolittle air-raids.

However, the highlight and most dramatic chapter describes in amazingly terrifying detail the American bombardment of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945 that reduced the city to rubble and cost an estimated 100,000 lives, one of the worst atrocities of World War II. The number of people killed in Dresden was less than 20,000.

Ask a reasonably educated American at a university and he is more than likely not to have the foggiest idea what his country did to Tokyo in March 1945 - and probably does not care. His Japanese counterpart may know, though he will stay stoically silent and endure.

Tokyo's more assertive foreign policy and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's nationalism notwithstanding, Japan will not want to risk alienating the United States, is not the time, its ally, and potential savior, against a rising Chinese behemoth.

The United States has been completely complicit in the historiographical distortions of the Pacific War. Before and after cannot easily be separated, nor can past and future.

The present historical perceptions - or perhaps more accurately - misperceptions of the past conflicts in the Pacific do not augur well for the future.

The author is an emeritus professor of international political economy at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The Globalist

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