Bloody Pacific (PDF)

PETER SCHRIJVERS  teaches American and International History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the author of The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II, The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge and Liberators: The Allies and Belgian Society, 1944-1945. His work on World War II has received international acclaim and been made a selection of the History Book Club in the US.

'This terrifying, remarkable work examines the attitudes, perceptions, and behavior of U.S. fighting men in the Pacific theater during World War II. Imaginatively drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs, military reports, and contemporary psychological assessments, Schrijvers reveals the social, historical, and emotional roots of the peculiarly frenzied and merciless war that Americans fought in what they regarded as an exotic and impenetrable paradise a conflict that escalated into a campaign of extermination, and a war against the land and nature itself. Schrijvers's sober account of Americans' wartime rage, which manifested itself in wholesale rape and the indiscriminate killing of civilians, is far from a work of crude revisionism he reminds us of the abysmal conduct of the Japanese, and he refreshingly and correctly views the dropping of the atomic bomb as a continuation of the methods used by all the combatants. Nevertheless, this temperate study of murderous fury is among the most unsettling books I've read in years.

- The Atlantic Monthly

"A rich and compelling cultural and social history of American servicemen and -women serving in Asia and the Pacific during World War II."

- The Journal of American History

"Just when it appeared that little remained to be said about the Pacific War, Schrijvers produces the best social history of the conflict to date...This is an important book, not only about WWII but also about the nature of war itself...Highly recommended."

- Choice

"Peter Schrijvers has pulled a double' by writing a worthy companion to The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II. His study of the soldiers' war against Japan transcends simplistic race-hate explanations and reconstructs the psycho-social context of war in which only the enemy remained the same."

- Allan R. Millett, Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New