Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald H. Spector
Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald H. Spector
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Eagle Against the Sun
The American War With Japan

Author: Ronald H. Spector

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 23 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/18/2019


Synopsis

Historian Ronald H. Spector, drawing on declassified intelligence files, an abundance of British and American archival material, Japanese scholarship and documents, and the research and memoirs of scholars, politicians, and the military men, presents a thrilling narrative of American war in the Pacific.

Spector reassesses U.S. and Japanese strategy and offers some provocative interpretations. He shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was less a product of strategic calculation and more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition.

Combining impeccable research with electrifying detail, Spector vividly recreates the major battles, little-known campaigns, and unfamiliar events of this brutal 44-month struggle.

About Ronald H. Spector

Ronald H. Spector, professor emeritus of history and international relations, George Washington University, is a graduate of Johns Hopkins and Yale. His first permanent job was as a Marine NCO in Vietnam. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a lieutenant colonel in 1997. Spector has been a Fulbright Visiting Professor in India, Israel, and Singapore. From 1986 to 1989 he was the director of Naval History for the Navy Department. He is the author of seven books, including Eagle Against the Sun and In the Ruins of Empire. In 2012 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Military History.


Reviews

This book, often viewed as a “classic,” was published in 1985 as a part of the Macmillan “Wars of the United States Series.” It covers the war with Japan from its antecedents to and beyond the surrender of Japan in 1945. (There are, at present, 14 books in the series, which seem either to address sp......more

The existence of the strong and stable independent nations of Asia is perhaps the most important and lasting legacy bequeathed by the men and women who perished in the American-Japanese war. Still not sure what led me to this book? That's a common refrain on my end. I did realize that especially in t......more

Goodreads review by Kym

This is a book that covers the Pacific and Asian theater of World War Two and while it mostly focuses on the United States and Japan it does manage to give some pages to the other players in this complicated and ever lasting conflict. At times it seems to want to go further into the discussions abou......more

Goodreads review by Erik

Dad was involved in the invasion of the Philippines so I've long held an interest in that theater of the war. From this, a military history, I wasn't expecting much--maybe some mention of Dad's unit (yes), his command (yes) and his ship (no), certainly a third opinion about the Pearl Harbor attack (......more