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Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume I: July 1937-May 1942 by Richard B. Frank
cloudss's review against another edition
dark
informative
medium-paced
4.0
looking forward to next volume. well thought out and researched overview of the start and early years of the asian pacific theater of wwii. good primer for those who only know of pearl harbor and atomic bombs. most interesting parts were of chinese and japanese command choices (and aus tbh) as majority are unknown to those with a us history background. the complexity of the english empire and its defense were highlights as well.
statman's review against another edition
4.0
This is the first in a planned trilogy. This first volume covers the beginning of the war between China and Japan and its expansion until the peak of Japanese occupation throughout the Asia area. Include the conquests of Burma, Malaysia, China, Phillipines and Pearl Harbor. Goes into a lot of details and really gives you a sense of the broad scope of what was happening relative to the European theater of war.
anti_formalist12's review against another edition
5.0
An excellent start. Provides the pacific conflict with global scope and fascinating detail. Well-told and thoroughly enthralling, even for those who already feel like they know a lot about the conflict.
simonmee's review against another edition
4.0
"You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls."
Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali polymath responding to Japanese overtures of a "Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere", shines a light on the subject matter of Tower of Skulls:
Asia
and skulls
Chinese Finger Trap
Between 1933 and 1943, Japan would directly invest more capital in Manchukuo than Britain devoted to India in two hundred years of imperial rule.
China is popularly portrayed in histories as a place Japan got stuck in, like the mud to the side of a rural road you attempted to u-turn over. There's a passiveness to descriptions of Chinese resistance and an understating of China’s importance to Japan. Frank's explicit goal is to remedy that.
Tower of Skulls achieves this, running from the Xi’an Incident to the Wuhan Revival to the defence of Changsha. Praise for Chiang Kai Shek's strategic insights perhaps gets over-elevated over his failings, but its defensible in the context of him being a loser in most texts. Frank adds local factoids to the narrative, such an amended Chinese building code demanding stone and brick rather than wood and bamboo to reduce destruction due to Japanese bombing.
Frank provides good historiographical summaries where appropriate, such as the deaths during the "Rape of Nanjing". Frank generally isn't working from primary texts so I would be careful about considering any of his judgements determinative, but they are at least good for overviews. Frank can also be quite cutting of commanders and strategies which, if nothing else, is fun to read.
There’s plenty of coverage of the Pacific part of 1937-1941 but in terms of military campaigns, Frank’s narrative is interesting but not revelational, other than perhaps some of the reporting:
In Europe, the gallantry of airmen and sailors in these attacks would have been legendary; here it garnered virtually no notice.
Hidden Goal
Frank wrote [b:Downfall|4998|Downfall The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire|Richard B. Frank|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388366272l/4998._SY75_.jpg|8535], which is one of the leading books for the pro-atomic bombing argument. I believe that, with this trilogy, Frank is consciously or subconsciously going to take another shot at it using the wider timeframe to restate his position. Because it is not explicit and Frank is not over-the-top or obviously unbalanced in his narrative, I may be reading the tea leaves too closely. That he mentions that the factory that provided the Japanese with the torpedoes for Pearl Harbor lay right under the Nagasaki bomb is intended as a historical curiousity, so I may be doing too much with the parts I do read as indicative.
Japanese Brutality
Estimates of Chinese military and civilian deaths ran as high as 250,000 - if this figure is correct, it would likely exceed fatalities from the atomic bombs.
Measuring which Axis Power (and perhaps the Soviets – Frank really doesn’t like them) committed the “worst war crimes” in quality or quantity tends to be a fool’s errand, but Frank raises a good point or two. Up to 22 June 1941, both Japan and the Soviet Union were far and away the worst mass murderers, Japan with approximately 7.5 million Chinese deaths to its name. The death rates amongst prisoners of war are notably high and repeated, such as the survival rates of the sailors of sunken Allied ships or on the Bataan “Death March”.
There are also descriptions of specific atrocities against prisoners of war and civilians, the details of which are unnecessary here. In the totality of World War Two, the numbers are not always large for, as Frank writes, smaller batches of prisoners often fared the worst. The reader is left with a visceral revulsion to these events and Japanese conduct of the war (in fairness, Frank does praise Japanese feats of arms in battle).
It is my suspicion that Frank is priming the pump as to the brutality of the Asian-Pacific war right from 1937. Frank is within his rights to write about them: there’s no serious scholarly denial that these events happened, nor do I see them as particularly out of context. It is then a much smoother path of escalation to unleashing nuclear hellfire.
If Frank is doing what I suspect he is, he does still need to link the clearly criminal actions of the Japanese military to the punishment of atomic annihilation inflicted on Japanese citizens. After all, the Tokyo trials existed to punish the commanders in charge. The only half-hearted attempt I have read so far is an amorphous reference that the Japanese public would not be willing to accept defeat in China.
Moral Cowardice and Adventurism
The senior ordnance officer provided his verdict on the division's equipment as it marched off to battle: he killed himself.
Frank lays into Japan’s uncontrollable military adventurism in 1931 and 1937 (against China), 1939 (against the Soviet Union) and 1940-41 (against Vichy France). The theme Frank emphasises is that the Japanese military repeatedly cut across diplomatic efforts, even when the odds against success by way of force were clear, as the unfortunate ordnance officer realised. Frank, drawing heavily on earlier works, wants to make clear that war against the Allied powers took the same approach.
The numbers demonstrated that the most favorable ratio between Japan and the United States would be 76 percent. It would occur at the end of 1941.
The position Frank takes is that Japan, faced with unsustainable American economic pressure, took the hardest possible (and military dominated) line in negotiations with the United States to lift certain embargoes. The proposals required China’s defeat or abandonment by America. The critical element is that Japan would choose war rather than resile from its position even though, as Frank sets out, they knew that their chances were virtually nil. At best they would be at 76 percent of the fleet of a superpower that could generate war materials at will (and on top of that Japan would face the Royal Navy!). Frank considers the actions of Japan’s leaders to be moral cowardice, refusing to accept that they would lose.
Now think to 1944-1945. Again, there was resistance in the military to diplomatic action, in that case surrender to the Allies. Accounting for the context of Japan’s decision to declare war, how realistic were their overtures to the Soviets to end it? What terms would Japan have accepted prior to the atomic bombing (or, for completeness, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria)?
That is the direction I believe Tower of Skulls is pointing us. Frank wants to show that Japan had a long history of military leadership divorced from reality, and only the threat of absolute destruction would force surrender. I will be interested to see if I am guessing right when he comes to book three and whether the arguments Frank made in Downfall receive an update.
So while Tower of Skulls enters a crowded field, there are a couple of major themes that make it worth reading.
Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali polymath responding to Japanese overtures of a "Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere", shines a light on the subject matter of Tower of Skulls:
Asia
and skulls
Chinese Finger Trap
Between 1933 and 1943, Japan would directly invest more capital in Manchukuo than Britain devoted to India in two hundred years of imperial rule.
China is popularly portrayed in histories as a place Japan got stuck in, like the mud to the side of a rural road you attempted to u-turn over. There's a passiveness to descriptions of Chinese resistance and an understating of China’s importance to Japan. Frank's explicit goal is to remedy that.
Tower of Skulls achieves this, running from the Xi’an Incident to the Wuhan Revival to the defence of Changsha. Praise for Chiang Kai Shek's strategic insights perhaps gets over-elevated over his failings, but its defensible in the context of him being a loser in most texts. Frank adds local factoids to the narrative, such an amended Chinese building code demanding stone and brick rather than wood and bamboo to reduce destruction due to Japanese bombing.
Frank provides good historiographical summaries where appropriate, such as the deaths during the "Rape of Nanjing". Frank generally isn't working from primary texts so I would be careful about considering any of his judgements determinative, but they are at least good for overviews. Frank can also be quite cutting of commanders and strategies which, if nothing else, is fun to read.
There’s plenty of coverage of the Pacific part of 1937-1941 but in terms of military campaigns, Frank’s narrative is interesting but not revelational, other than perhaps some of the reporting:
In Europe, the gallantry of airmen and sailors in these attacks would have been legendary; here it garnered virtually no notice.
Hidden Goal
Frank wrote [b:Downfall|4998|Downfall The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire|Richard B. Frank|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388366272l/4998._SY75_.jpg|8535], which is one of the leading books for the pro-atomic bombing argument. I believe that, with this trilogy, Frank is consciously or subconsciously going to take another shot at it using the wider timeframe to restate his position. Because it is not explicit and Frank is not over-the-top or obviously unbalanced in his narrative, I may be reading the tea leaves too closely. That he mentions that the factory that provided the Japanese with the torpedoes for Pearl Harbor lay right under the Nagasaki bomb is intended as a historical curiousity, so I may be doing too much with the parts I do read as indicative.
Japanese Brutality
Estimates of Chinese military and civilian deaths ran as high as 250,000 - if this figure is correct, it would likely exceed fatalities from the atomic bombs.
Measuring which Axis Power (and perhaps the Soviets – Frank really doesn’t like them) committed the “worst war crimes” in quality or quantity tends to be a fool’s errand, but Frank raises a good point or two. Up to 22 June 1941, both Japan and the Soviet Union were far and away the worst mass murderers, Japan with approximately 7.5 million Chinese deaths to its name. The death rates amongst prisoners of war are notably high and repeated, such as the survival rates of the sailors of sunken Allied ships or on the Bataan “Death March”.
There are also descriptions of specific atrocities against prisoners of war and civilians, the details of which are unnecessary here. In the totality of World War Two, the numbers are not always large for, as Frank writes, smaller batches of prisoners often fared the worst. The reader is left with a visceral revulsion to these events and Japanese conduct of the war (in fairness, Frank does praise Japanese feats of arms in battle).
It is my suspicion that Frank is priming the pump as to the brutality of the Asian-Pacific war right from 1937. Frank is within his rights to write about them: there’s no serious scholarly denial that these events happened, nor do I see them as particularly out of context. It is then a much smoother path of escalation to unleashing nuclear hellfire.
If Frank is doing what I suspect he is, he does still need to link the clearly criminal actions of the Japanese military to the punishment of atomic annihilation inflicted on Japanese citizens. After all, the Tokyo trials existed to punish the commanders in charge. The only half-hearted attempt I have read so far is an amorphous reference that the Japanese public would not be willing to accept defeat in China.
Moral Cowardice and Adventurism
The senior ordnance officer provided his verdict on the division's equipment as it marched off to battle: he killed himself.
Frank lays into Japan’s uncontrollable military adventurism in 1931 and 1937 (against China), 1939 (against the Soviet Union) and 1940-41 (against Vichy France). The theme Frank emphasises is that the Japanese military repeatedly cut across diplomatic efforts, even when the odds against success by way of force were clear, as the unfortunate ordnance officer realised. Frank, drawing heavily on earlier works, wants to make clear that war against the Allied powers took the same approach.
The numbers demonstrated that the most favorable ratio between Japan and the United States would be 76 percent. It would occur at the end of 1941.
The position Frank takes is that Japan, faced with unsustainable American economic pressure, took the hardest possible (and military dominated) line in negotiations with the United States to lift certain embargoes. The proposals required China’s defeat or abandonment by America. The critical element is that Japan would choose war rather than resile from its position even though, as Frank sets out, they knew that their chances were virtually nil. At best they would be at 76 percent of the fleet of a superpower that could generate war materials at will (and on top of that Japan would face the Royal Navy!). Frank considers the actions of Japan’s leaders to be moral cowardice, refusing to accept that they would lose.
Now think to 1944-1945. Again, there was resistance in the military to diplomatic action, in that case surrender to the Allies. Accounting for the context of Japan’s decision to declare war, how realistic were their overtures to the Soviets to end it? What terms would Japan have accepted prior to the atomic bombing (or, for completeness, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria)?
That is the direction I believe Tower of Skulls is pointing us. Frank wants to show that Japan had a long history of military leadership divorced from reality, and only the threat of absolute destruction would force surrender. I will be interested to see if I am guessing right when he comes to book three and whether the arguments Frank made in Downfall receive an update.
So while Tower of Skulls enters a crowded field, there are a couple of major themes that make it worth reading.
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