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Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (2006)

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America became the first (and so far only) nation to use atomic weapons against an enemy. Since then, the world has wrestled with questions about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Did the A-bombs save American and Japanese lives by hastening Japan’s surrender? Could the war have ended differently, with less loss of life? Did the U.S. hope to strike terror in Stalin’s heart as much as in Emperor Hirohito’s? How much did President Truman know about the bombs, and what did he think about their ethical implications?

These questions do not belong only to armchair generals and academics. They belong to all inhabitants of this world of nuclear proliferation. How do we find the answers to these important, emotional, divisive questions? How do we separate facts from convictions and recreate the events that led to the destruction of two Japanese cities, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and the start of the Cold War?

For starters, we can read Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s magnificent page-turner, Racing the Enemy. Hasegawa gives us a riveting, month-by-month, day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute narrative of the end of the war in the Pacific. The story that emerges is very much a global one. Hasegawa gracefully moves us from Washington to the Crimea, from Moscow to occupied Manchuria, from Tokyo to the Kuril Islands. His assiduous attention to detail—to the treachery of time zones, to diplomacy lost in translation, to treaties made and violated—puts us in the thick of momentous and terrifying events. Rival factions in the Japanese bureaucracy debate how to end the war with honor, Stalin plots territorial acquisition, and the U.S. government rejects diplomatic overtures in favor of an unprecedented show of force.

And what of the A-bombs? According to Hasegawa, Japan surrendered primarily due to the threat of Soviet invasion; the shared fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki merely provided a palatable public rationale. The bombs signaled to Stalin that time was not on his side, and led him to hurriedly instigate the almost-forgotten final land battle of World War II. Truman could have profitably pursued a negotiated, conditional peace, but for political and personal reasons he tacitly supported the use of the weapons of mass destruction.

Racing the Enemy is high political drama grounded in Japanese, Soviet, and U.S. archival material. It will not be the final word on the end of the war, but it is a powerful and authoritative volume that all subsequent debate on the subject should reference. No one with even a passing interest in the Pacific theater, atomic warfare, or the early Cold War can afford to miss it.

The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariés (1982)

by Zach Doleshal

History is full of dying, but before this book was published historians rarely concerned themselves with how a society thinks about death. We have lists upon lists of casualty counts in all manners of battles throughout the ages but we have little understanding of the ways the idea of death has changed over time. Philippe Ariès’ monumental work, The Hour of Our Death, was something of an exception, as it offers rare insight into European representations of death from the eleventh century to the twentieth. Beautifully written and admirably translated, the work takes the reader through a dizzying array of cemeteries, epic poems, and deathbeds to provide a view of the ever-evolving place of death in European society. After reading it, one will never look at death the same way again.

The book rests on the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, which means that Aries is attempting to find similar artifacts across a range of sources and regions that show the “unconscious expression of the sensibility of the Age.” In order to do so, he follows three themes through one thousand years: individual versus collective memorials, ideas of transitions between life and death (or “tame” death versus “wild” death), and the physical proximity between the dead and the living. The result is an eloquent description that conveys the mutability of western attitudes toward death.

And yet, Ariès anchors his continually evolving coffins with commonalities. For example, “the idea of sleep is the most ancient, the most popular, and the most constant image of the beyond.” Death as sleep, as a neutral state of repose, uninterrupted calm and peace, is a belief that survived despite the best efforts of the Catholic Church, which sought to persuade society of the soul’s mobility after death. But Ariès finds recumbent figures in literature and statuary from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries to document the persistence of the idea of death as sleep. Likewise, Ariès finds the monuments themselves, from the Mediterranean to England and from Spain to Germany as having a “genetic unity of forms,” which suggest an ongoing tension between the Christian liturgy and an older, pan-European idea of death as the big slumber.

The second half of the book concentrates on a different tension when Ariès presents a dramatic break in attitudes toward death with the advent of the twentieth century hospital death. For Ariès, the modern hospital death is an “absolutely new type of dying” because, quite simply, people lost control over their own deaths. For thousands of years death was a moment that could be foreseen by the soon-to-be deceased, and considered best spent in the company of friends and family, who were to provide a serene point of departure while the dying person gave orders and advice. In the modern era, Ariès argues, it became a moment of machines and professionals who kept the dying in ignorance of their condition, in sterile rooms far from the public’s attention. This loss of mastery to Ariès meant that death became a moment of diminished consequence. In the past, each death was a critical event in an ongoing, communal, struggle against evil spirits where each person’s salvation was a social project. Now, in a society striving to avoid it, death has become a hollow, empty affair. Ultimately, Ariès’ book makes a case against the modern hospital death. For him, writing in 1977, dying had been increasingly marginalized in proportion to society’s loss of faith.

A pioneering work on the study of death when it was first published; Ariès’ book remains an important read today because it was at the forefront of the natural death movement. His condemnation of contemporary practices pushed social activists to develop more humane practices and historians to think about death as an important subject, with its own questions of rights and social justice. Anyone curious about the evolving conceptions of dying would do well to start at The Hour of Our Death.

Latin America’s Cold War by Hal Brands (2010)

by Michelle Reeves

In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S. foreign policy literature. Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored. He argues that the origins of the chaos and instability that ravaged Latin America during the Cold War owed less to U.S. interventionism than to the prevailing confluence of local, regional, and global dynamics.

Though the burgeoning Cold War atmosphere did little to discourage the power grabs of authoritarian leaders, their actions were determined less by U.S. prodding and more by elite backlash against the extension of middle- and working-class power that had occurred earlier in the 1940s. The democratic opening of the World War II period gave way to the consolidation of dictatorship during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Cuban Revolution dramatically altered the landscape of Latin American politics, and here as well, Brands challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the Cuban-Soviet alliance. Castro’s turn toward the Soviets was driven by ideological and political considerations and occurred well before the disintegration in U.S.-Cuban relations. The real story of the 1960s is not, as most historians would have it, the extent of outside interference in Latin America, but rather the insurmountable difficulties that foreign interventionist powers confronted in attempting to expand their influence throughout the region. Brands locates the source of the intense conflicts of the 1970s in the widening ideological gulf between proponents of National Security Doctrine, who sought to eliminate all shadings of leftism, and advocates of liberation theology, which in its most extreme form embraced Marxism as a tool of social justice. The right-wing extremism of the 1970s was a backlash against the guerrilla violence and leftist radicalism of the 1960s.

The revolution in Nicaragua, far from being exemplary of hemispheric trends, in fact owed its success to four distinct though interrelated factors that combined to render the situation in that country unique. Not only was the Nicaraguan system deteriorating from the late 1960s, but the guerrillas had learned enough from the travails of their predecessors to earn substantial support from among the agrarian population. Moreover, the insurgents enjoyed significant foreign backing, not only from Moscow and Havana, but from other Latin American nations as well. Finally, the Carter administration, by means of a confused and incoherent foreign policy, effectively weakened or destroyed the traditional levers of U.S. influence in Nicaragua. The period of revolutionary ferment in 1980s Central America, when viewed through the lens of foreign intervention, reveals the meddling of several players; external intervention, writes Brands, “was not a one-sided affair.”

The wave of democratization that swept the region in the 1980s was rooted in many causes but had much to do with the relationship between dictators and the radical left. In Central America, the strength of the guerrilla insurgencies forced a measure of liberalization, while in South America the destruction of the extreme left deprived the military regimes of their legitimacy. The debt crises of the 1980s, however, were the most determinate factor in democratization, as they provided the pretext for prying open the economies of Latin America to neoliberal reforms. In the final analysis, the course of the Cold War in Latin America was shaped not only by the zero-sum struggle between Washington and Moscow for ideological and strategic dominance in the global south, but by conflicts over internal political dynamics and power structures, the extent – and more importantly, the limits – of U.S. influence, and the emergence of the Third World as both a political bloc and a rhetorical device. Brands has made an impressive and valuable contribution to our understanding of the Cold War in Latin America, and while his interpretation may spark controversy in certain academic circles, this reviewer fervently hopes that he will succeed in driving the debate forward, rather than prompting a rehash of hackneyed claims about the primary responsibility of the United States for Latin America’s problems.

The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor (2010)

by James Jenkins

The War of 1812 was not a war between two nations, but rather a civil war, in which “brother fought brother in a borderland of mixed peoples.” Alan Taylor focuses on the U.S.-Canada borderland, which stretched from Detroit to Montreal. Before the war, the distinctions between British subjects and American citizens in the region remained uncertain. The British asserted that their empire’s subjects remained subjects for life, precisely when a stream of Irish people were migrating to the United States. Moreover, immigrants from the United States made up the majority of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). Although the War of 1812 resulted in a stalemate from a diplomatic or military perspective, it gave closure to the contested border and resulted in the emergence of the United States and Canada as modern nation-states.

Taylor identifies four components that made the War of 1812 a civil war. First, The Republican-led American government vied with Britain over who would control Upper Canada. Yet, the U.S.’s poorly trained military struggled to occupy even a sliver of Canadian territory. Taylor describes how supply lines, propaganda, and prisons all played pivotal roles in the war’s outcome. Second, American Federalists sympathized with Britain. Most Federalists opposed the war and some even contributed to Britain’s war effort by smuggling, spying and threatening secession. Moreover, the United States never waged a significant campaign on the upper St. Lawrence River because Federalists in Ogdensburg, NY used their political influence to block such a strategy. Possessing the St. Lawrence River would have weakened all of Upper Canada, which relied on the seaway for supplies. But Republican politicians from western New York and Kentucky successfully lobbied to make the Detroit and Niagara Rivers the primary American fronts. Third, Irish republicans who had immigrated to the United States renewed a failed rebellion in Ireland by enlisting in American forces. But, they also faced Irish soldiers who had joined the royal army, pitting Irishman against Irishman.

Taylor describes a fourth aspect to the civil war: the involvement of Native peoples. Many Indians joined British forces in the hopes of stopping further U.S. settlement in the Ohio Valley. However, Native peoples are curiously peripheral to Taylor’s narrative, and he instead highlights their ability to terrify untrained American soldiers and provide fodder for anti-British propaganda. Taylor’s emphasis on imagined Indians leaves some paradoxical questions unanswered. For instance, he argues that American General William Henry Harrison’s troops considered arming Indians to be racial treason. Yet Taylor has little to say about the two hundred some Native people who joined Harrison’s forces. In addition, Taylor offers almost no biographical details on Native individuals. Those wishing for the next chapter of Taylor’s The Divided Ground (2006), which places the Haudenosaunee at the center of the American Revolution, will be disappointed.

Despite this shortcoming, Taylor’s borderland approach and assiduous research make for a welcome revision to an often overlooked war. The Civil War of 1812 should appeal to a large audience thanks to Taylor’s engaging narratives and elegant writing style.

Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis by James G. Blight & Philip Brenner (2002)

by Aragorn Storm Miller

Throughout the Cold War and the decade that followed it, historians assumed that Cuban and Soviet leaders cooperated closely in the events associated with the Cuban missile crisis. Havana and Moscow, so went the conventional wisdom, put their lots together in a challenge against U.S. hemispheric predominance but, when the stakes veered towards nuclear war, both backed away and gladly compromised with Washington. In the last several years, however, it has become clear that much division existed between the Soviet Union and allies such as Cuba. This book reveals the extent to which the Cuban missile crisis increased U.S.-Soviet cooperation and discredited the Soviet Union in the eyes of emerging communist powers like Cuba and China. Ever fearful of a U.S. invasion, Cuban leader Fidel Castro eagerly accepted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s offer to place nuclear missiles and a Soviet garrison in Cuba, but Castro played no role whatsoever in the process that led to the missiles’ removal. Indeed, he learned of the U.S.-Soviet agreement over the radio, only days later receiving official notification in a letter from his Soviet sponsors. While Washington and Moscow vowed never to let a peripheral power like Cuba bring them to the brink of Armageddon, Castro and the Cubans pledged to spearhead a revolutionary movement throughout the developing world that would owe nothing to either the capitalist West or the brand of communism peddled by the USSR.

Psychological insecurities played at least as big a role the decision making process in Havana, Washington, and Moscow, as did sober, rational considerations that one might expect from the leaders of nations. During the build-up to the crisis, for example, Kennedy and Khrushchev’s behavior was informed by fears of underestimation. For his part, Castro viewed the missiles as proof that he had gained admission as an equal into the family of socialist nations. When both Soviet and U.S. leaders suggested that the Cubans were irrational and immature actors on the world stage, such apparent paternalism only drove Cuba further in the direction of revolutionary leadership throughout Latin America. For understanding the dynamics of foreign relations—both during the Cold War and more generally—Sad and Luminous Days is an informative and entertaining read.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses (2002)

by Yana Skorobogatov

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, takes readers beyond the familiar categories of the Soviet-American Cold War. In the wake of decolonization, as charismatic national leaders emerged across Africa – from Algeria to Zaire – statesmen in Washington and Moscow waited anxiously to see if the new governments would align with democracy or communism. Enter Cuba: a small, poor, underdeveloped island that saw the western hemisphere’s
first successful Marxist revolution just ninety miles away from U.S. shores. Driven by a sense of Third World, post-colonial comradery, Cuban guerrillas staged socialist interventions in Africa in the name of Marxism and anti-imperialism. This book’s depiction of their successes and failures, coupled with Soviet and American reactions to such brazen undertakings, makes for a refreshing literary adventure in Cold War international history.

Conflicting Missions distinguishes itself from traditional Cold War histories by challenging the assumption that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. monopolized ideological intervention in the post-war era. While many readers of twentieth century history are quick to recall Soviet revolts in Budapest and Prague, as well as American operations in Vietnam and Chile, few realize how independently and ardently Cuba took to its own project of global socialist indoctrination during the Cold War. Cuba, striving to fill the aid vacuum left behind by the Soviet government’s growing disinterest funding sub-Sahara African liberation movements, led a leftist movement in Angola against the U.S.’s covert backing of rival regimes. What makes this story so remarkable was the failure of U.S. intelligence to perceive Cuba’s presence in the country. As U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary Mulcahy recalled how ‘‘Cuba didn’t even enter into our calculations.” By successfully implementing its own revolutionary project and bypassing the world’s preeminent superpower in the process, Cuba proved itself to be a formidable communist actor on a stage where Russia’s diplomatic presence had already begun to wane.

The most enjoyable interludes in the book describe Cuban philanthropy in post-colonial African villages. Stories of Cuban medical workers aiding undeveloped, rural communities bring to the forefront the humanitarian side of Cuba’s brand of communism; frequently neglected in histories of the Cold War. With Cuban doctors around, villagers ‘‘knew that their wounds need not be fatal and that their injuries could be healed.” Comments such as these color a Cold War narrative all too often painted in broad, black and white strokes. That Conflicting Missions achieves this feat in an exceptionally readable, wanderlust-inducing form makes it a welcome addition to the widening circle of global Cold War scholarship.

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