Last Great Victory: The End of World War II - Softcover

Stanley Weintraub is Evan Pugh Professor of Arts and Humanities at Penn State.

From July 15, the day the Big Three assembled at Potsdam, through August 15, the day Emperor Hirohito euphemistically admitted to his subjects that the war "developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage," the epochal climax to World War II ran its course. Weintraub presents this riveting, globally framed, blow-by-blow account of those 30 days, patterned after his popular Long Day's Journey into War: December 7, 1941 (1991). Four years later, gigantic events are remembered: millions of Germans flee from the vengeful Communists; a million or so Russian POWs in Western custody are forced back to Stalin's care and to certain imprisonment or death; the dictator negotiates his steely version of realpolitik with Truman and Churchill and Atlee; the Trinity test lights up Alamogordo ("the Second Coming in Wrath," Churchill called it); the Enola Gay annihilates Hiroshima; the Russians pour into Manchuria; and Hirohito makes a decisive intervention to stop his government's dithering about surrender--sparking a suicidal revolt by the ultramilitarists. Weintraub paces the stories so well that even though we know what will happen, it feels as if anything could happen--even the projected invasions of Kyushu and Honshu. Ranging through this material like a master historical novelist, Weintraub intensifies the powerful impact of this, the real historical thing. Libraries need not have every anniversary title pushed forward by the publishers, but they must have this one. Gilbert Taylor