Wednesday book

I recently finished reading Eri Hotta's Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, which explores the political and diplomatic situation in Japan leading up to Japan's attacks on the UK, US and the Dutch East Indies in early December 1941. Ms Hotta gives a thorough look into the Sino-Japanese War of the 1930's and how failures of leadership led to unplanned expansion of that war, inept diplomacy, increasingly painful sanctions from the US, and a gamble on a wider Pacific War that virtually no one in the Japanese government thought was going to be winnable except through blind luck.( Read more... )