The Pacific War: The Strategy, Politics, and Players that Won the War - Hardcover

In this book, a veteran and respected military author opens the history of WWII in the Pacific to a broader and deeper view.  Going beyond the usual accounting, William B. Hopkins investigates the strategies, politics, and personalities that shaped the conduct of the war.  His regional approach to this complex war conducted on land, sea (and significantly by America, undersea), and air explores not just the whats and hows but, more significantly, the critical and often ill-considered whys of this multifaceted conflict.

When Bill Hopkins returned home from the Pacific war, this 3rd Marine Division veteran knew very little about how the battles against Japan were won or lost—not surprising for a participant. As years passed, Hopkins learned quite a bit about how the battles in the Pacific were won and lost, especially from the American point of view, as massive histories of the war were published along with memoirs of a number of the most senior military commanders. However, in the grim calculus of war, why these battles were fought and how the decisions were made at the strategic and operational level in the Pacific remained much less clear.

The success of the Nazi war machine, the vaunted wehrmacht, made the fight against Germany first priority for the Allies. Indeed, the United States had been providing substantial material support to Great Britain’s war with Germany long before Pearl Harbor. The Soviet Union didn’t even declare war against the Japanese until August 8, 1945, two days after Hiroshima, one day before Nagasaki, and only a week before VJ Day, when Japan surrendered on August 15.

Still, the remarkable string of Japanese victories over the five months following Pearl Harbor—the Philippines with Bataan and Corregidor, Hong Kong, the “invincible” fortress of Singapore, Java Sea, and so on—compelled America to take action. The U.S. effort was on the rise in the Coral Sea in early May 1942, followed by the miracle at Midway in June and the invasion on a shoestring of Guadalcanal by the 1st Marine Division in August.

Victory at Midway and the ultimate success of the Guadalcanal campaign proved to be the turning points in the Pacific War, and finally the U.S. Navy, Army, and Marines were on a march across the Pacific that would end with Allied victory three years later. Most students of the war know that there were two paths across the Pacific: the Central Pacific campaign under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz that island-hopped from Guadalcanal to Okinawa while bringing the Japanese fleet to battle and defeating it, and General Douglas MacArthur’s campaign from New Guinea to the Philippines.

But why were there two separate American operations in the Pacific, how did the politics in Washington and elsewhere affect the conduct of the war, and who were the players and what parts did they play? Author William B. Hopkins answers these questions and more in The Pacific War: The Strategy, Politics, and Players that Won the War.