Very useful and balanced book making clear both sides were far from saints amid wartime pressures ( )

Dower labels WWII a race war, and notes that apart from the genocide of the Jews, "racism remains one of the great neglected subjects of World War Two." He sets out to remedy that omission in this National Book Critics Circle Award book. Dower documents racism on both sides: he claims that in the West, Japanese were saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries. The Japanese as well, he writes, elabored notions of "purity" and outsiders into "a parable of Japanese destiny and a paradigm of race relations." Dower gives interesting examples of how prejudice and racial stereotyping on both sides frequently distorted evaluations of each other's intentions and strengths or weaknesses. Also, he points out, race hate fed atrocities, which in turned fanned the fires of race hatred. As Dower suggests, "[t]he dehumanization of the Other contributed immeasurably to the psychological distancing that facilitates killing, not only on the battlefield but also in the plans adopted by strategists far removed from the actual scene of combat." Unfortunately, the lessons Dower tries to impart remain timely, and undigested.

(JAF)

Race and Power in the Pacific War: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower begins "War Without Mercy" with an amusing account of his inspiration for the book: While working on a history of postwar Japan, Dower wrote a sentence noting how quickly and easily the virulent race hatred of the war years dissipated during the American occupation. Of course, he then had to include another sentence explaining the racial aspects of the war itself, which quickly became a paragraph, then a section, then a chapter, and finally this book, "War Without Mercy". The original history of postwar Japan, meanwhile, sat unfinished on a shelf.

The main criticism of "War Without Mercy" given by other reviewers is that it is too narrow to serve as a comprehensive history of the war -- in particular that it tries to explain the entire conflict only through race and does not devote enough attention to Japanese atrocities and war crimes. This criticism unfortunately misses the point of Dower's book: he is studying racism itself, but for some reason many of his critics seem to think he is trying to use it to explain all and sundry. "War Without Mercy" is not and makes no pretense of being a book about the Pacific War in general or even about atrocities and war crimes themselves. Instead it started as a mere tangent in a larger work and focuses on racial aspects of the war between Japan and the United States, especially the images each side used to describe the other and the war itself, along with some study of how they evolved after the fighting stopped.

As a history of race and power in the Pacific War, "War Without Mercy" is superb: well-organized, clearly written and offering interesting insights. It is divided into four sections, the first of which establishes the importance of the subject by showing how it contributed to the unique ferocity of the war in the Pacific: "Race hate fed atrocities, and atrocities in turn fanned the fires of race hate" (11). The second section studies American images of their Asian enemy, as apes, primitives, children, and 'little yellow savages', and of the war itself as a racial war between white and colored, while the third does the same for the Japanese side. Although the Japanese portrayed Europeans and Americans as decadent, impure, and downright demonic, they viewed their Asian neighbors in much the same contemptuous way as did Western imperialists. The final section explores the transition from war to peace, and the ways in which images and symbols were transformed: the apes became pets and the children became students, while on the other side the western demons shared their secret knowledge. At the same time, the negative images used during the war were transferred to the Soviet Union and (especially) Maoist China.

Meticulously documented, "War Without Mercy" reveals many fascinating aspects of the Pacific War commonly overlooked in more comprehensive studies. I was especially interested to read about contemporary concerns that American rhetoric of racial war would drive Chiang Kai-shek into an alliance with the Japanese (166-169), and that such language caused fully 18% of African-Americans to express "pro-Japanese inclinations" in a confidential poll conducted by black interviewers (174). "War Without Mercy" isn't a comprehensive history of the Pacific War, nor is it for everybody. It is, however, the best explanation I have seen of the merciless nature of the war itself and the psychology of the societies involved. If you have even the slightest interest in that subject, "War Without Mercy" will not disappoint. ( )

This book examines how the race card was played in the propaganda of "both sides" - the American and the Japanese - during the war in the Pacific during World War II. Most interesting (although deeply distressing) is the story of how the American armed forces deliberately used anti-Asian racism to motivate its Afro-American troops - themselves victims of systemic (but domestic, and therefore "acceptable") race prejudice. ( )