“My war aim is to win.” Georges Clemenceau’s retort when asked to define France’s war aims during the first world war had the great advantage of simplicity. The same might be said of the objectives of the United States and its allies in the Pacific War.

Yet the actual closing of the ring ultimately depended on factors that were largely beyond the power of the Americans. The greatest problem that Washington faced centered less on fighting against a determined, valiant enemy than on getting the war cabinet in Tokyo to reckon with the inevitable and admit that the game was up.

Years of warfare across the entire Asian continent and the Western Pacific had led by 1944 to what could only be the eventual defeat of Japan. The end game was hardly in doubt, yet no one had much idea how and when this might be achieved.
How the war progressed to its inevitable end is the theme of Max Hastings’ latest work. It is a near-impossible attempt to describe the outlines of the war on the ground, in the air, on the water and under the Pacific ocean, while also telling what it felt like to individual participants on Leyte, in the jungles of Burma, on Iwo Jima, in Manchuria and when flying B-29s over Tokyo.

The book is best seen as a one-volume description of the very different theaters of the Pacific War. The details stand out. We see, for example, Admiral Ernie King being described by his daughter as “always angry,” hear the gallows humor of Lt-Gen Shigenori Kuroda saying contemptuously in 1944 : “Why bother about defense plans? The Philippines are obviously indefensible” and learn how Mao organized drug smuggling and hoodwinked American liberals who regarded his regime as everything that Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government was not.

The separate chapters are written with verve and plenty of bile. No commander, whether American, British, Chinese or Japanese, escapes with his reputation enhanced from the Hastings’ version of military history. The accusations fly fast and furious. The British-Indian forces advance too slowly in Burma, General Walter Krueger hesitates to move his Sixth Army in the battle of Leyte and Douglas MacArthur gets it in the neck for even thinking of recapturing the Philippines. You begin to wonder if armchair-general Hastings could have done much better given supply problems, weather and terrain.

Look out also for pen portraits of “Big Chief” MacArthur and “Dicky” Mountbatten, described by Hastings as “of boundless ambition and limited intellect,” as well as the frank remark by General Yamashita at the very end of the war that Japan had failed as an occupying power in Asia since “we simply haven’t tried to understand other societies.”

In a cast of thousands, there are also walk-on parts for the future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, the late George Macdonald Fraser, who would go on to fame as the author of the “Flashman” series, and Admiral McCain, whose son may end up in the White House before long. On the Japanese side, there is also reference to Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the man whose war would not finally end until decades later, and the gory details of the “kill all, burn all, destroy all” approaches to the lengthy China campaigns that began years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Australian readers should be warned, too, that Hastings has some nasty things to say about the Diggers and the last months of the war on both the Pacific and home fronts. The Aussie soldiers and the dockers in Sydney are held by Hastings to have been pretty half-hearted in their contributions to ending the fight against Imperial Japan.

“Nemesis” combines both a standard account of the very different wars in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, China and the brief but vital Manchurian fighting with a vast amount of oral history. We get both bottom-up and top-down histories that provide a constant reminder of the nastiness at the sharp end and the day-by-day political complexities of attempting to end the war. Allied victory through unconditional surrender turned out to be mighty involved and lengthy process.

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