Horror in the East: The Japanese at War 1931-1945 Book

You wouldn't necessarily want to live inside the head of Laurence Rees, author of Horror in the East, but you could well argue that its should be compulsory for everyone to spend at least a few hours in his company. Beginning with the brutality of the conflict between Japan and China in the 1930s and ending with the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Horror in the East is a compelling account of the atrocities of war and, as with his sister volume The Nazis: A Warning from History, Rees has searched long and hard to find vivid and, at times mind-numbing, eyewitness accounts of man's inhumanity to man--not least from the recruits who were forced to kill restrained Chinese prisoners in bayonet practice. For many popular historians, incidents such as the Rape of Nanking are simply labelled evil, thereby relieving them of the responsibility of thinking about what happened and trying to understand what motivates people to behave in such a way. Rees is too intelligent and fair-minded an historian for this; instead he explores how the Japanese army changed from a culture where prisoners of war were treated with civility and respect during the First World War to one where cruelty and barbarism ruled. Rees lays the blame squarely on the conformity demanded by the Emperor Hirohito and stresses that the Japanese army were often as brutal to their own as they were to their enemies. He also makes the point that revisionists tend to airbrush history to suit their own ends. Far more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than died in either of the nuclear attacks, but the stain of Tokyo has long since been submerged under the more emotive mushroom clouds. At the time Rees wrote Horror in the East, these attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were among the most powerful images of war in the world's history; already they have been superseded by the footage of the September 11, 2001 strikes on the World Trade Center in New York City. At times like these, when the need for objectivity and fair mindedness is at a premium, historians, such as Rees, are like gold dust. --John CraceRead More