From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day

Here is the first compact history of the U.S. armed forces in the greatest conflict in world history - a lucid and balanced account by two authoritative military historians. Examining the strategy, logistics, high command, operations, and home-front aspects of the World War II campaign, D. Clayton James and Anne Sharp Wells narrate the story in slightly more than two hundred pages, with a clarity and perspective that virtually any reader will appreciate. "The Second World War was history's largest war in numbers of nations and ground, sea, and air personnel," the authors write.^ "It was the first truly global war, with active theaters of operations in the Atlantic, Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, North Africa, Northwest Africa, China, India, Burma, Southeast Asia, and virtually all of the Pacific." James and Wells cover all the theaters in which American forces were involved, from the Battle of the Atlantic in April 1941 to the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. As well as describing the major campaigns and battles, and analyzing strategy and tactics, From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day contains crisp portraits of major military leaders and a background of political, diplomatic, economic, and social developments in the warring nations. The book also recounts the role of women and minorities in the military; the relation of armed forces personnel to the American home front; the impact of technology; and breakthroughs in communications intelligence.^ The authors evaluate both the virtues and flaws of the American command and the performance of its units, as well as the functioning and malfunctioning of the Allied coalition. In a final chapter, they sum up the impact of the war on American society and suggest that it is time to lay to rest the romanticized view of World War II that followed in the wake of the inconclusive Korean War and the bitter setback of Vietnam. "Far from being the best and most glorious of wars," they write, "it was the worst and most horrible."