sections:
Pacific Fury will be the first book to give a complete overview of the Pacific War from a largely Australian perspective while sacrificing none of its political significance or historic importance. It will take the reader inside the Imperial Palace, Tokyo, the White House, the Lodge, Canberra, and General MacArthur’s ‘Bataan’ headquarters in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as providing graphic eyewitness accounts of the frontline fighting, and life on the Home Front and in the Occupied Territories.Drawing on interviews with dozens of participants, their diaries, memoirs and photographs, as well as the official archives of the United States, Australia, Japan, China, Britain, Singapore, Malaya and the Philippines, Pacific Fury will chart the origins and course of the conflict through highly personalised accounts.
Divided into six easy-to-follow sections – 1. The Rising Sun, 2. The Darkest Days, 3. The Turning Tide, 4. Afternoon Light, 5. The Sinking Sun and 6. Atomic Sunset - the book will provide a new and special look at the conflict, with fresh sources of information in many key areas. This gripping narrative will vividly portray the role of Japanese militarists in provoking war with China; Japan’s expansion into Vichy-held Indochina after the fall of France in 1940; her sneak attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941; and the almost simultaneous attacks on Malaya, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Midway Island, Guam and Wake Island. It will re-examine the Allies’ unpreparedness for a Pacific conflict and follow the rout in the jungles of Malaya, the fall of Singapore and the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, the building of the Thai-Burma Railway and other horrors of the Japanese occupation that enslaved more than 200 million people.
It will report on the destruction of Japan’s plan to capture Port Moresby and launch an invasion of the Australian mainland in two epic naval battles in the Coral Sea and at Midway Island in which Allied code-breakers gave the Allied Navy a huge advantage and carrier-borne air power was the deciding factor. The book will follow the fight-back in Papua-New Guinea and the Solomon Islands; the rivalry between Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur for control of the Allied war machine; the Battle of Leyte Gulf (the biggest sea battle in history) and the retaking of the Philippines; the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa with appalling loss of life, the Tokyo firestorms, and the war’s horrendous climax in the world’s first – and only - nuclear holocaust.
Even today – more than 60 years after the War in the Pacific ended - a surprising number of issues are still being resolved: for example, the true identity of the American pilot who shot down Admiral Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943 was only confirmed in May 2006 and it has recently been shown that most of the so-called kamikaze suicide pilots were not actually volunteers but impressed conscripts.
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