title: Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War: Was Defeat Inevitable?
author:  James B. Wood 
description: <span><span>[Wood&#39;s] carefully constructed arguments stem from a wide reading and understanding of the war&#39;s historic literature, and his suggested alternative courses of Japanese actions are entirely credible . . . [his] careful examination of alternative possibilities in the Pacific War is an impressive example of good counterfactual history.</span></span> (Col. Stanley L. Falk <i>The Journal of the Australian Society of Archivists</i>)<br /><br />Wood has raised many provocative points worthy of debate. Recommended. (<i>CHOICE</i>)<br /><br />This impressive counterfactual analysis demonstrates that the course of the Pacific War was not set in stone. Wood demonstrates, through careful analysis of alternatives actually discussed by Japan's leaders, that the decision to go to war was not an exercise in national suicide. Instead, specific choices closed a window of opportunity for Japan to have bought more time and might well have altered fundamentally the war's conclusion. (Dennis E. Showalter, Colorado College; author of Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century)
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  ### Annotation
  
  In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese
  navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana Islands
  and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower marked a pivotal moment
  in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the
  increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in
  the Pacific had entered its endgame.
  
  
  Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when President Franklin Delano
  Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of
  the campaign against Japan, *Twilight of the Gods* brings to life the
  harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the
  largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to
  return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the
  Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers
  burned down Japanese