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War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | 
 enlarge | Author: John W. Dower
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy Used: $3.00
You Save: $13.95 (82%)
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Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 49100
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0394751728
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.531
EAN: 9780394751726
ASIN: 0394751728
Publication Date: February 12, 1987
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Condition: BOOK SLIGHTLY BENT. (Airport Place Books does not ship on Saturdays and Sundays. We are unable to ship to "The Republic of Korea".)
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Amazon.com Review
Dower's premise in War without Mercy is a startling one: Though Western allies were clearly headed for victory, pure racism fueled the continuation and intensification of hostilities in the Pacific theater during the final year of World War II, a period that saw as many casualties as in the first five years of the conflict combined. Dower doesn't reach this disturbing conclusion lightly. He combed through piles of propaganda films, news articles, military documents, cartoons--even entries in academic journals in researching this book. Though his case is strong, Dower minimizes other factors, such as the protracted negotiations between the West and the Japanese.
Product Description
Now in paperback, War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War -- race -- while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerful, moving, and even-handed history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan."Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers "a lesson that the postwar generations need most...with eloquence, crushing detail, and power."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 29 more reviews...
 Fascinating and informative, but overstated July 31, 1999
74 out of 89 found this review helpful
Overall, this book presents a side of the Second World War with which most Americans are unfamiliar and may find shocking. It does a valuable service in exposing many of the prejudices of the time and especially in showing how those prejudices were at least partly responsible for the string of debacles endured by U.S. and other allied forces in the war's opening stages. It also does a very good job of giving the reader a glimpse of the kind of thinking that was prevalent in Japanese society prior to and during the war. In this sense it is an extremely important work and is highly recommended to anyone with a serious interest in the Pacific Theater. However, having said that, I will also say that the author overplays his hand and puts far too much emphasis on the role of racism, portraying it as the primary cause of the war and of the evils that transpired during its execution. As a result, it has a tendency to explain away a good many complex issues that deserve a fuller treatment. It also falls prey to one of the great pitfalls of almost all modern analyses of relations between Japan and America, namely the idea that in order to be balanced one must give equal weight to both sides in any argument. As a result, one might come away from reading this book with the idea that Japan and the United States were essentially of equivalent culpability and that their respective leaders were of a moral kind. This is an absolutely absurd notion, and one that seems to have taken root in more and more of the academic work that is being published recently. Nowhere is Dower's judgment with regard to the impacts of racism more questionable than in his conclusion, where he tries to explain away contemporary (1980's) trade frictions as the result of race hatreds. This pathetic and obvious red herring does little more than to serve as an apologia for a Japanese elite that has been doing anything its it power to prevent its very real and well documented (see Karel Van Wolferen's "The Enigma of Japanese Power," Clyde Prestowitz's "Trading Places," and Pat Choate's "Agents of Influence" for more) outrages with regard to its bilateral trade relationship with the United States from coming to light. Nonetheless, as I wrote earlier, I do recommend it for anyone with an interest in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War, but with the caveats that it should under no circumstances be treated as a comprehensive work and that its aforementioned shortcomings be kept in mind as one reads it. When Dower sticks to the subject of his book, without engaging in too much reckless speculation, he suceeds admirably in creating a readable and sometimes shocking history, boldly exposing in a way that few other books have even attempted, the dark side of "The Good War."
An excellent book - but beware the bias January 11, 2001
Pablo Herk (San Francisco, CA)
27 out of 34 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book which contributes a unique perspetive on way the Pacific war was fought. The good - Mr. Dower provides a fresh looking not only at the American view of the Japanese, but the more interestingly, the Japanese wartime view of the American, other western, and asian occupied peoples. The bad -Mr. Dower seems think racism explains everything. Why did we drop the A-bomb? Racism. Why were so few Japanese prisioners taken? Racism. Why did US airman shoot Japanese pilots who bailed out and not (for most part) German piots ? Racism. Why were western POW's mistreated? Racism. You get the idea. The problem is it just ain't so. The war was nasty and brutish because the Japanese leaders wanted it that way. They made the decision not to allow their soldiers to surrender (it was against the Japanese Military code), to deny western POW's access to red cross packages, and medicine, to execute airman who bombed Japan, to encourage japanese pilots to shoot US airman who bailed out, and to use Gas and biological warfare whereever they thought it to their benefit. Given the "kill or be killed" attitude of the japanese military, it was inevitable the war would be "without mercy". Please read the books "Blood and Bushido" or "Taken Captive" for another understanding of Japanese attitudes. Finally, Every American knew that if they lost the war without mercy would have been followed by a Japanese "peace without mercy". The amazing thing is that the western soldiers took Japanese prisoners, treated them well, and behaved generously toward Japanese civilians. Indeed, the USA treatment of Japan after the war proves how limited Mr. Dower's explaination is.
 Rubbish pure and simple February 25, 2004
Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel)
22 out of 71 found this review helpful
This book claims that America was involved in a racist war during the last year of the pacific conflict. This premise is wrong, pure and simple and the book does not rpove its won thesis. The book uses examples of American wartime propaganda to show how `racist' the Americans were. But what about the Japanese? The Japanese committed genocide in Nanking China, they forced millions of Koreans into slavery, including massive sexual slavery. The Japanese tortured and cut the heads off and performed Nazi-like experiments on the POWS in their custody. The Japanese committed atrocities against every people they controlled from the Phillipinos to the Vietnamese. But these racist doctrines are ignored in this book because the book is totally one sided in its `hate America' claim that everything America did in the Pacific was wrong. Apparently the 15 nations that America helped liberate didn't feel the same racism that this book claims existed because from Haiphong harbor in the west to Manila the peoples of Asia celebrated the coming of the Americans and English and other free peoples who pushed the Japanese back to the Island they had launched the war from 20 years earlier. History and facts show this book to be pure anti-American polemics rather then the `groundbreaking' ideas that it claims to represent. The only ground that is broken is the ground of truth and honesty.
 One-sided crap November 28, 2003
Matthew F. Cockerham (Charlottesville, Virginia United States)
20 out of 74 found this review helpful
This book attempts to look at all the American "attrocities" made during the Pacific War, but seems to forget everything committed by the Japanies. The 'attrocities committed by the americans involved such awful acts as making propagandist films and capturing people alive. What is neglectfully mentioned in this book are some of the Japanese atrocities like using American and Japanesee POWs for medical experiments, and things like the Bataan Death March, which killed more POWs than died in Allied possesion in the entire war in all theaters. I have discussions with multiple history professors at college about this book, and the nicest thing any of them can say about it is that it is "one-sided." Don't read.
Words without mercy July 11, 2001
Michael G. Jackson (Olympia, Washington USA)
18 out of 32 found this review helpful
Mr. Dower's nearly unreadable text should be avoided at all costs. This book got lots of press attention when it was first published but it's simply not a serious work. Written in a supermarket tabloid style the author reaches many unfounded conclusions and "discovers" that General Sherman was right: "War is Hell". Along the way he seeks to prove that the war in the Pacific was a racial attack by the U.S. on the Japanese and that if the U.S. had been less evil we could have waged a much more kindly and gentle war. The authors careful selection of facts prearranged to support his far-fetched ideas fail to hold together.
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