ASIAN ARMAGEDDON 1944-45

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Third and last book in the War in the Far East trilogy continues and completes the narrative of how a US-led coalition of nations defeated Japan through a series of cataclysmic encounters. Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle ever, was testimony to the paramount importance of controlling the ocean, as was the fact that the US Navy carried out the only successful submarine campaign in history, reducing Japan's military and merchant navies to shadows of the former selves. Meanwhile, fighting continued in disparate geographic conditions on land, with the chaos of Imphal, the inferno of Manila, and the carnage of Iwo Jima forming some of the milestones on the bloody road to peace, sealed in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The nuclear blasts at the end of the war made one observer feel as if he was 'present at the creation.'

Indeed, the participants in the events in the Asia Pacific region were present at the creation of a new and dangerous world. It was a world where the stage was set for the Cold War and for international rivalries that last to this day, and a new constellation of powers emerged, with the outlines, just over the horizon, of a rising China.

War in the Far East offers a general history of WWII in the Asia Pacific, beginning long before Pearl Harbor and encompassing a far wider group of actors to produce a complete account of this epic conflict.