Tennozan offers a remarkable account of the battle of Okinawa, the largest land-sea-air engagement in history. It examines the disastrous collision of three disparate cultures--American, Japanese, and Okinawan--and provides the context for understanding the decision to drop the atomic bomb. 41 photographs.

Sergeant Steve Maharidge returned from World War II an angry man. The only evidence that he'd served in the Marines was a photograph of himself and a buddy tacked to the basement wall. On one terrifyingly memorable occasion his teenage son, Dale, witnessed Steve screaming at the photograph: “They said I killed him! But I didn't kill him! It wasn't my fault!” After Steve died, Dale Maharidge began a twelve-year quest to face down his father's wartime ghosts. He found more than two dozen members of Love Company, the Marine unit in which his father had served. Many of them, now in their eighties, finally began talking about the war. They'd never spoken so openly and emotionally, even to their families. Through them, Maharidge brilliantly re-creates Love Company's battles and the war that followed them home. In addition, Maharidge traveled to Okinawa to experience where the man in his father's picture died and meet the families connected to his father's wartime souvenirs. The survivors Dale met on both sides of the Pacific Ocean demonstrate that wars do not end when the guns go quiet—the scars and demons remain for decades. Bringing Mulligan Home is a story of fathers and sons, war and postwar, silence and cries in the dark. Most of all it is a tribute to soldiers of all wars—past and present—and the secret burdens they, and their families, must often bear.

'Soon after becoming the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, MacArthur ordered all Japanese weapons confiscated and destroyed. This order includes swords, even Shinto temple swords of great beauty and value. Some of these art swords, called nippon-to, are documented national treasures. At the same time, Japanese secret societies, such as Showa and the Kanesuka Brotherhood, are to sell them to bigtime foreign collectors for the lucrative profit they will bring. The Johkai Priest of the nearby Sengaku-ji Temple and his assistant, Yoshida Nobu, have asked us to smuggle two extremely valuable swords out of Japan and keep them hidden until political conditions are favorable for their return.' Charged with smuggling priceless swords out of Japan to protect them from being destroyed by Allied forces or sold on the black market by criminal organizations, Blaz Carvajal, Ragnor Ragnvold, and Magwitch Russell conceal the swords and transport them back to the United States for safekeeping. Among the swords is the Hachiman Taro, invaluable Samurai sword from the sixteenth century. Showa, a Japanese secret society, sends Watanabe, a brutal, Japanese POW guard, to retrieve the swords from the trio. Once in the United States, Watanabe covertly tracks down the swords' locations. Can Blaz, Ragnor, and Magwitch keep the swords from falling into Showa's hands? What lengths of brutality will Showa go to retrieve the swords? Who will emerge victorious in the battle for the blades? Follow the path of the swords in the history-rich, action-packed Hachiman Taro: Firstborn of the God of War.

Taking the example of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima as a case in point, Francis Winters analyzes the ethics of warfare, demonstrating how the examples of World War II hold relevance to the contemporary world. The volume examines the ethics of Japan's refusal to surrender and seeks to balance the verdict of responsibility for Hiroshima by extending the analysis to the ethics of the end of the war. It also illustrates how two displays of American naval and munitions power had an impact on Japan comparable to the September 11, 2001 assaults on America. Linking his study with two contemporary films on Iwo Jima, the author illustrates how the 1940s were an era of costly triumph that can still inspire national pride in American citizens. Unique in concept and approach, this volume will have relevance to scholars interested in both historical and contemporary politics, US-Japan relations as well as foreign policy and the ethics of warfare.

This historical account of humanity's 5000 year history of recorded conflict looks at ancient wars, modern conflict, and everything in-between.

In the history of the twentieth century, the role of the military intelligence services in the competition among nations is still murky. Among the world's foremost intelligence services, those of Imperial Japan remain the least known. Few stories are as compelling as those surrounding the Japanese Army's Nakano School. From 1938 to 1945, the Nakano School trained more than 2,000 men in intelligence gathering, propaganda, and irregular warfare. Working in the shadows, these dedicated warriors executed a range of missions, from gathering intelligence in Latin America to leading commando raids against American lines in Papua New Guinea, in the Philippines, and on Okinawa. They played major roles in operations to subvert British rule in India, and they organized Japanese civilians into guerrilla units that would have made the invasion of Japan a bloodbath. One graduate used his Nakano commando training to elude U.S. and Philippine military patrols until emerging from the jungle nearly thirty years after the war's end. In the decades after World War II, graduates of the school worked to obtain from the United States and Russia the release of imprisoned war criminals and the recovery of lost territory, including Okinawa. Based on archival research and the memoirs of Japanese veterans, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano shines a much-needed light into the shadows of World War II and postwar Japanese affairs.