Hastings provides two very partial readings in his account of Australia’s involvement: the incidents of combat refusal and the sacking of a small number of Australian officers on Bougainville; and a conflated account of the home front across the whole of the Pacific War that selects its examples carefully in order to mount a case. His account is based very largely on Australian sources. Hastings is by no means wrong in all that he says, in particular regarding the attitude of some soldiers in the final months of the campaign on Bougainville, or in a more general sense that the Army had been sidelined by General Douglas MacArthur and was engaged in tasks of little apparent strategic worth, and that the casualties incurred in this period were in vain. This was the subject of parliamentary comment in July 1945, though Hastings has missed this.

Much of this is old stuff in Australian historiography of the war: Peter Charlton, back in 1983, wrote an indictment of the final campaigns that went over much of this ground; David Horner has discussed the strategic decision-making; and Gavin Long’s final official volume dealt exclusively with these frustrating events. In late 2007 the Australian Army published a serious analysis of the combat behaviour and experiences of three militia battalions on Bougainville that confirms, in far greater detail, the circumstances that lead to incidents of combat refusal and command and control problems in the 7^th Brigade. These incidents did occur, but it is palpably untrue to claim, as Hastings does, that ‘they were by no means uncommon … in the last phase of the war’. Combat refusal was not unknown in the British Army in northwest Europe in the bleak winter of 1944–45, either, but that would provide a very slim base for a wholesale critique of 21^st Army Group.

In some areas Hastings is simply wrong, or insufficiently aware of the detail behind events. Although the book purports to deal with the final year of the war, in 1944–45, many of the examples given of industrial disruption and disharmony within Australia draw on the period 1942–43. Hastings seems unaware that Winston Churchill offered to return the 6^th and 7^th Divisions to the Far East at the beginning of 1942, rather than, as the author would have it, the Australian government insisting ‘on the return of all its soldiers from the Middle East’. It did insist on their return to Australia when Churchill attempted to reroute them to Burma, but that is another story.

Perhaps there was ‘sourness’ among the Allies at the ‘limited combat contribution being made by this nation of seven million people’, but given that around one Australian in seven was in uniform during the war, and that eighty per cent of men of military age served, what exactly does ‘limited’ mean? Compared to whom? Just over sixteen million Americans served in the armed forces, from a population in 1941 of just over 133 million. Britain’s population was close to forty-eight million, of whom 5.8 million served (to include subjects residing in His Majesty’s crown colonies). Of twenty Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians during the Pacific War, six were earned in 1945, so clearly some Australians were doing a bit of fighting. In late 1943 the government did reduce the Army’s strength, but Hastings chooses to see this as a response to ‘the unpopularity of military service’ rather than as a measure to try to rationalise the manpower needs of both the military and the economy, the latter severely strained by that stage, in the interests of meeting domestic needs and the obligations to feed and supply the Americans in the southwest Pacific Area and, to a lesser extent, to feed Britain.

Hastings’s account, while true in some of its essentials, falls well short of being the whole truth. But I suppose it helps to generate publicity. This is a shame, because, in all other respects, this is a very good book, and Hastings provides a well-rounded account of the horrific final year of the war against Japan that reintegrates important elements of the story often overlooked in Western histories. He gives considerable space to the war in China, a theatre generally ignored in most English-language accounts, and he has some harrowing accounts of the Soviet incursion into Manchuria in the last week of the war. The record of rape and violence against civilians that accompanied the Red Army’s march into eastern Germany earlier that year is matched by tales of similar excesses against the Chinese population, with far less justification. Remembering that China lost twenty million dead in the war, its ongoing neglect in the war’s historiography is inexcusable, and Hastings offers a valuable corrective.

Hastings is clearly across the recent historiography and the issues currently placed at centre-stage in scholarly debate, such as the importance of the American submarine campaign, the utility or otherwise of the assault on Iwo Jima, the bickering and personality clashes between senior officers within the Allied high commands, and the contentious debate over the rationale for using atomic weapons to end the war. He is no fan of MacArthur, noting the way in which democratic media organisations made celebrities of some undeserving commanders who then proved difficult to sack; and his critique of MacArthur’s shortcomings as a commander during the recapture of the Philippines is entirely reasonable. His summation of Yamashita’s skills in opposing the American invasion is likewise sound, as is his attempt to show the complexity of character of some senior Japanese personalities, such as General Kuribayashi and Lieutenant Colonel Nishi, defenders of Iwo Jima brought back into Western consciousness recently through Clint Eastwood’s memorable 2006 film.

The decision to use atomic weapons is given very even-handed treatment that will certainly not satisfy those who believe it to be an act of unmitigated evil. As Hastings notes, ‘At any time, by acknowledging defeat Japan could have secured peace, [and] escaped the atomic bombs. The fact that its leaders did not do so reflected their irrational choice, rather than American obduracy.’ He certainly does not discount the influence of emerging geostrategic concerns regarding the Soviets, but rightly argues that this is but one aspect of the broader context surrounding the development of the weapon and the decision to use it.

At the heart of his book, Hastings displays a deep liberal revulsion at the behaviour of the Japanese both on the battlefield and in occupation of much of Asia, and notes the ‘institutionalised’ nature of Japanese brutality, especially towards subject peoples such as the Chinese and Koreans.  He concludes by suggesting that the recent focus on observance at the Yasakuni shrine, while understandable, is misplaced, and that it is the failure of the Japanese people to acknowledge their history – in the way that several generations of post-war Germans have done – through denial and  a belief in the moral equivalence of the combatants and  their actions, that is the real cause for dismay. He is right, but there is little sign that the Japanese will distance themselves from the victim mentality associated with annual  Hiroshima Day observances and which remains the true barrier to an acceptance of their collective past.