Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan. (New York: The Free Press, 1985)
Published in 1985, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan is still the preeminent tome on the Pacific Theater of Operations in World War II. The book functions as a comprehensive narrative and veritable encyclopedia that gives equal attention to every facet of the war. From pre-Pearl Harbor planning to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri, Spector provides the reader with a sense of the grand scope of the war in the Pacific. The author, a marine veteran of the Vietnam war, is a renowned scholar of 20th century warfare. He is currently a Professor of History at George Washington University following multiple distinguished positions in government service and academia. The impetus for this book came when the late Professor Louis Morton, just before his untimely death in 1976, selected the author to write it. It serves as yet another lasting legacy of Morton’s impact on the field on military history.
Throughout, Spector focuses on dual themes of logistics and leadership. He argues that the war was less about strategy and more about resource allocation. Logistics, therefore, drove decision making by General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz toward the most efficient use of their limited resources, primarily fuel. As each commander moved along their respective routes toward Japan, nearly every choice revolved around devising ways to get critical means to the fight. Human resources were also vital as by mid-1942, after the United States turned the momentum and the Japanese abandoned their offensive strategy after the Battle of Midway, the conflict settled into a bitter war of attrition.
Spector’s second theme, leadership, centers on the competing personalities of MacArthur and Nimitz and the division of the Pacific into two separate theaters. MacArthur’s status as a public figure made him a necessary choice as a commander, even following his hasty retreat from the Philippines. Meanwhile, an intense inter-service rivalry dissuaded the army and navy from entrusting their forces with the other service. Thus the establishment of two different invasion routes to Japan, while leaving no single authority in charge, solved potential public relations and bureaucratic problems by appealing to MacArthur’s hubris and Nimitz’s prudence. The Pacific War demonstrated how the services could ignore their differences in pursuit of victory.
Superior industrial strength and the capacity to organize it into military power allowed the United States to overwhelm the Empire of Japan and secure victory in the forty-four-month war of attrition. The Japanese lost, Spector unsurprisingly concludes, “because of the superior training, experience, equipment, and numbers of the Americans.” (p. 560) Spector does not take a position on the use of the atomic bomb, preferring to outline the arguments for and against its employment. He concludes by describing the perspective of those doing the fighting rather than their leaders. To the infantrymen, marines, and sailors fighting a desperate enemy in its last throes, the use of the atomic bomb was a welcome respite from what they viewed as almost certain death.
Spector weaves official records with personal papers, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies to describe everything from high-level decision making to the battlefield environment. Working mostly out of the National Archives Modern Military Records Branch and the U.S. Naval Historical Center, he also uses official military histories from each Allied nation. The chapters contain endnotes, in addition to an included essay on sources, that gives the reader a better understanding of the intricacies of the author’s research. The book is decidedly American oriented, but Spector also uses Japanese documents declassified just before he began this project to give some Japanese perspective to his work.
This book is central to the historiography of the war in the Pacific and maintains its place today. Spector’s prose keeps everything in context, elaborating where needed but moving through the war at an appropriate pace for the scale of the operations. For such a convoluted and complicated theater, he manages to make the war understandable for the average reader, which is what makes this book so valuable. Because of its readability and remarkable collection of sources, this book is best for audiences who wish to better understand American involvement in the Pacific Theater of Operations. For historians, this book is still the standard text for anyone studying the Pacific Theater of Operations. The strength of this book is its comprehensiveness, which makes it an ideal starting point for a more deeply-rooted study of the Pacific War.