“Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternative History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War”, edited by Peter G. Tsouras

256 pages, Greenhill Books, ISBN-13: 978-185367446

The game of “What If?” must be every historian’s favorite pastime and a great way to show off one’s knowledge and erudition to those ants one must associate with, and Greenhill Books’, with their “Alternate Decisions” series, allows them – professional and armchair alike – to indulge in this guilty pleasure to their heart’s content. Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternative History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War is just one in this series. The overriding theme of the book (and the series, for that matter) is that, with very few exceptions, while an Allied victory was inevitable once the American manufacturing juggernaut was fully mobilized, there were several points, even late in the war, where a key victory for the Japanese could have made it so difficult to stop them that the Allies might have accepted less than total surrender and the Japanese might have been able to force a peace treaty that would have consolidated their gains. Ten leading military historians ask these and other questions in this fascinating book, and the war with Japan was rife with difficult choices and battles that could have gone either way. These fact-based alternate scenarios offer intriguing insights into what might have happened in the Pacific during World War II, and what the consequences would have been for America:

• Hokushin: The Second Russo-Japanese War by Peter G. Tsouras 
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The Plan Orange Disaster by Wade G. Dudley 
• Pearl Harbor: Irredeemable Defeat by Frank Shirer 
• Coral and Purple: The Lost Advantage by James Arnold 
• Nagumo’s Luck: The Battles of Midway and California by Forrest R. Lindsey 
• Samurai Down Under: The Japanese Invasion of Australia by John H. Gill 
• The Japanese Raj: The Conquest of India by David C. Isby 
• Guadalcanal: The Broken Shoestring by John Burtt 
• There Are Such Things as Miracles: Halsey and Kurita at Leyte Gulf by Christopher J. Anderson 
• Victory Rides the Wind: The Kamikaze Prevents Defeat at Kyūshū by Dennis Giangreco

Although most or all of the chapters end with a short overview/explanation of where the actual events and the stories diverge, it would have been nice to know that while reading. This became more of an issue because of the numerous “citations” used by the author, which appear to have been used to make the book feel like an historically cited essay. However, as a casual reader with a good knowledge of WWII in the Pacific (but certainly not at historian level), they simply confused me even more as some, or even most, of them appeared to be either attempts at humor or fake citations to imagined books written about the parallel chain of events (I managed to catch the Jack Ryan/Tom Clancy reference in one, as an example, but I’m sure several others went right over my head). For all that, I still liked it, and it just goes to show how alternative histories like this and others can show how, in war, victory can be held hostage to seemingly insignificant incidents – chance events, opportunities seized or cast aside – that can derail the most brilliant military strategies and change the course of history.