The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan 1894-1945 (1988) By S.L.Mayer
 
In 1868, Japan emerged from feudalism and civil conflict as a comparatively undeveloped industrial state in an age of European imperialism in East Asia. Within a generation, Japan had risen to the ranks of the foremost industrial and military powers in the Western Pacific. A generation later, Japan had become the paramount power in East Asia, and her naval and air forces spread Japanese power across the Pacific. The formidable weapon built in the name of the Emperor swept across China and Manchuria; her air forces pummelled Pearl Harbor and Darwin; her armies marched to Singapore and the gates of India. Her navies seized some Aleutian islands and strafed the California coast. By 1942 the world had come to know the power of the most devastating force in the Pacific — the Japanese War Machine.

The force and power of the Japanese War Machine is told here by some of the world’s leading experts in guns, tanks, planes, and ships of World War II. The drama of Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, the take-over of the State by the Army, the invasion of China, the simultaneous attack on Malaya, Hawaii, the Philippines and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies is told in all the horror and shock the Japanese invader placed before Western eyes. The fall of Singapore and Hong Kong, the conquest of Burma and Indo-China took place within a hundred days. The flag of the Rising Sun ruled a maritime empire from the Russian border to the gates of Australia, from Burma to Midway.

But the strength of the Japanese War Machine depended on Japanese industrial power, which in the end, was no match for the United States and its Allies. The Japanese soldier, infused with the warrior code of Bushido fought hard and long in New Guinea’s jungles; as the struggle was brought closer to Japan’s home islands, the Japanese soldier fought on tenaciously in the Philippines and on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The air forces began suicide missions, the kamikaze, which drove into Allied aircraft, heroically and fanatically.. .but all too little, too late. The nuclear holocaust, which ended World War II, left a ruined Japan and a wrecked Japanese War Machine.

THE RISE AND FALL OF IMPERIAL JAPAN is the tragic and noble history of a gallant people led into a misguided war. The millions who suffered in Asia and the Pacific in the wake of the Japanese War Machine bear silent tribute to its folly.”
 
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
255 Pages
In Good condition