“Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army”, by Meirion and Susie Harries

569 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0394569352

In Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army, the husband-and-wife team of Meirion and Susie Harries ask the question: “How was it possible for an organization displaying the highest of soldierly qualities to possess such a capacity for barbarism?” In this well-written and comprehensively researched survey of the Imperial Japanese Army – from its inception during the Meiji Restoration to its dissolution in 1945 – they describe an ethos based on service to the “Japanese Way” embodied in the devotion to service to the Emperor as expressed in the code of bushido, or “the way of the warrior”, a codified samurai way of life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry in Europe. According to the Harries’, bushido was perverted by modernizers of the Japanese military into a philosophy that exalted death and violence and taught contempt for the vanquished; alterations, that did indeed contribute to war crimes. But the Imperial Japanese Army was also influenced by the military institutions of Europe (particularly Prussia) and, in emulating the armies of Europe, the Japanese distilled much of the best of both the samurai and the European traditions while developing a fighting force that could compete successfully with those of the Great Powers.

Once it emerged from international isolation, Japan began to imitate Europe's imperialism as well as its militarism, with the soldiers increasingly advocating transforming Japan into a self-sufficient garrison state through total physical and psychological mobilization. This ideology, however, was not translated into operable strategy. Detailing Japan’s intrigues against China and Russia and its successes in the first Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, as well as its successful though peripheral involvement in WW I, the Harries’ show how the island nation's warlords developed a hubris that led inexorably to Japan's imperialist adventures on the Asian mainland. Unable to conquer China, the army embarked on war with the West, as well. This reckless advance into the unknown involved missed opportunities and repeated mistakes from Bataan to Imphal. Spirit and willpower were expected to compensate for material weaknesses. Unreflected decisions were made at all levels of planning and command. Eventually the gap between the samurai way and modern high-tech warfare became obvious even to true believers. But by the time of Japan's WW II surrender its army had unrepentantly inflicted death and destruction throughout the Pacific on a scale that continues to assert Japan's status as an outsider among Western-style democracies. This first-rate analysis will appeal to general readers and specialists alike.

The Harries’ show sympathy for the Japanese, acknowledging, for example, that the extraordinary commitment of resources and energy to the army was a virtual necessity, from the inception of the Imperial Army in the 1870s and 1880s well into the 20^th Century, if Japan was to fend off Western imperialism. Nevertheless, while they are hardly Japan bashers, much of the history they narrate is so ugly that the reluctance of the Japanese to confront this part of their past becomes thoroughly understandable. As part of their repudiation of their warlike past, the Japanese rarely study the history of the Imperial Japanese Army. Among historians in Japan, the few who specialize in military history are even more isolated from other academic historians than are their Western counterparts. The Harries’ plead for a reversal of such attitudes in both Japan and the United States – an appeal that is a quarter of a century old, this book having been published in 1991. It argues that war and armed forces in general cannot be controlled unless they are studied and thus better understood. It also contends that the Imperial Army in particular was so closely bound to the Japanese people that it must be studied to understand Japan's future as well as its past. Soldiers of the Sun offers the most readable introduction to the special qualities of the Imperial Japanese Army and to the sources of its especially appalling history.

“Napoleon & Marie Louise: The Second Empress”, by Alan Palmer

288 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-0312280086

Having first met at a dinner party in Paris in October 1795, Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais went on to become one of the most famous couples in history…but few are aware that, in December 1809, having had enough of Josephine’s inveterate adultery and profligacy (and in desperate need of an heir for his fragile Imperial throne), Napoleon dispensed with his first wife in order to marry an Austrian Archduchess and secure his line – or so he hoped. In Napoleon & Marie Louise: The Second Empress, historian Alan Palmer tells the tale of Napoleon’s often-overlooked second empress. There could have been no more desirable marriage candidate for Josephine’s replacement than the 18-year-old Marie-Louise. As a Habsburg archduchess, her credentials were impeccable: the great-grand-daughter of formidable empress Maria Theresa and daughter of Emperor Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire (aka Francis I of Austria), she was related to practically every ruling dynasty in Europe. Much beloved, Marie-Louise’s father stood at the helm of a vast empire. Reared since birth to be the most eligible bride in Europe, Marie-Louise had been kept largely cloistered in Habsburg palaces, receiving a thorough education, taught the piano, guitar and harp, and made to understand the importance of management of diplomatic relations. When relaxed and in familiar company, she was witty and playful, and though personifying modesty and virtue, she was in awe of no one – which would be a great tonic to the Emperor Napoleon, a man over whom the world fawned.

Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich had the vision to see that marriage to Marie-Louise would be a powerful tool in the felling of the “Corsican usurper” and he carefully dangled the prospect of Marie-Louise before Napoleon while intriguers at the French court encouraged the imperial divorce project.  Her common sense and intellect would subdue the great military genius and, it was hoped, would put a brake on his destructive step. Few could have been less favorably disposed towards the match than Marie-Louise. Ever since her birth in December 1791, France had been making life miserable for Austria. The abolition of monarchy and the guillotine in 1793 of the French king and queen (Marie-Louise’s great-aunt and uncle) placed the French administration beyond redemption. Marie-Louise’s grandmother, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and Sicily, was the most vociferous member of the family in her expression of hatred of the French, constantly ranting that they should all be pulverized. War between France and Austria, which had already started in April 1792, was now set to continue with only brief respites for more than two decades, only finally coming to an end in 1815. By 1809, Napoleon had defeated Austria across her empire, reduced it to a quarter of the size that it had been in 1792, and occupied Vienna for a second time. Drastic measures were needed to prevent the Habsburg monarchy from collapse, and its territories from being subsumed into the French empire.

However unappetizing the prospect of marrying Bonaparte might be, Marie-Louise knew to perform her duty for the good of the country (“if only predictions of his premature death had come true!” she lamented in a letter to a friend). On March 11^th, 1810, Marie-Louise was married by proxy, Napoleon having appointed her uncle and his formidable Austrian opponent, Archduke Charles, to stand in for him at the altar of the Augustinian Church adjacent to Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, the principal Habsburg family seat. A few days later, Marie-Louise set out for Paris, following in the footsteps taken by Queen Marie-Antoinette 40 years earlier. On March 20^th, 1811, Marie-Louise produced the king of Rome, the male heir whom all parties had expected of her. While Napoleon rejoiced, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England planned his demise. England had been particularly furious that Austria had created an alliance with France by marrying Marie-Louise to Napoleon. But by the end of 1813, they would realize the wisdom of Metternich’s strategy. With Marie-Louise and the baby, the French emperor began to neglect his affairs. Time was not to be on his side, especially when he made the gross mistake of invading Russia in June 1812, having discovered that tsar Alexander was breaching the continental blockade by allowing English ships and goods into the Baltic. Within six months, Napoleon and Russia’s snows had reduced la Grande Armée from almost a million men to barely 120,000. Equally catastrophic to Napoleon’s reign was the shattering of the Austrian-French alliance.

Unaware of her husband’s deceits, Marie-Louise was horrified when she learned that her father had joined Russia in war against her husband. Believing in Napoleon and his seeming invincibility, she declared herself loyal to Napoleon and France. She begged her father not to tempt defeat by Napoleon again. By March 1814, Marie-Louise stood alone as regent of France, forced to decide whether she should confront her father and his allies – who were poised to march on Paris – or flee to Loire Valley, Centre-Val de Loire, as urged by her husband’s cowardly ministers. Her courage and heroism would not help her. Separated from Napoleon, she and her son were forced to return to Vienna as refugees. After a hard campaign, Marie-Louise was finally granted the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla promised her by the allies to secure her husband’s first abdication. In 1816, she set out for Parma, forced to leave her son in Vienna as hostage for Napoleon’s good behavior on St Helena.

Her enlightened permissive government, which assured her subjects a fair trial and placed women and children’s rights far ahead of their time, earned her the loyalty of her subjects – and their complicity in her secrets. This notwithstanding, though her subjects might have sympathized with her on a personal level, the tide of nationalist fervor which Napoleon had unleashed on the Italian peninsula disturbed any sense of security she might have deserved. Well aware that her days were numbered as a foreign sovereign, Marie-Louise fought to hold on to her ducal seat. The revelation of the double life that she had been forced to lead by the allies’ treatment of her and by prevailing morality scandalized Europe. Humiliation was compounded by tragedy, the death of her son by Napoleon sparking controversy. Trying desperately to ride the surge of patriotism fueled by the operas of her subject, Giuseppe Verdi, Marie-Louise refused to implement the reactionary oppressive measures adopted beyond her borders and did her best to spare her subjects the political trials and the brutal sentences exacted elsewhere. The patriots would not give up, and chased her out of Parma. Austrian bayonets restored her, but thereafter her life was precarious. Within a fortnight of her death, revolution spread across the Italian peninsula, her children pitched against one another in the struggle for Italian unification.

Alan Palmer tells the tale of Marie-Louise – sometime Empress of the French, foolish though kind Duchess of Parma – with sympathy (perhaps too much) and understanding. A well-written and much-needed addition to the corpus of Napoleonic studies, Napoleon & Marie Louise: The Second Empress would make a fine addition to anyone’s library.

“Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story”, by David Maraniss

464 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1476748399

In Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story David Maraniss does what no other author can: puts the Detroit story into a global perspective that is educational, informative and fun to any reader anywhere. The book covers the time period roughly from late 1962 to late 1964 (with the emphasis being on 1963), a time when America (and Detroit) was truly on top of the world…although cracks were just beginning to show. Detroit was at its height; the country as a whole was prosperous, the car industry was booming, and no one, I’m sure, could possibly have imagined a time when Japanese cars would be a serious threat to the Ford, Chrysler, and GM. Detroit was a vibrant, dynamic city which, in fact, even bid on the 1968 Summer Olympics, a fact which astonished me; indeed, Detroit was selected over Los Angeles as the American bidder for the games (the Olympics eventually went to Mexico City). It’s simply incredibly today to think about Detroit as being a serious competitor for the Olympics, but that’s what Detroit was in 1963.

The auto industry, besides being the arbiter of the world, helped to create a solid middle class across the country but especially in Detroit and amongst African-Americans which, ultimately, fueled the growth of Motown, probably one of, if not the, first large-scale African-American enterprises. The auto industry, despite the racism of many union members (and, yes, they were racists), enabled many black families to purchase pianos, which created a pool of musical talent that fueled the Motown sound, which remains one of the aspects of American culture that is most embraced by the rest of the world (with each song described in the book I found myself subconsciously humming along).

Yet even in 1963 there were portents of what was to come. Already the city was beginning to lose residents, up to 200,000 between 1960 and 1964. Maraniss suggests that much of this was caused by urban renewal projects which built freeways through a once-vibrant downtown and destroying a slew of solid African-American neighborhoods while simultaneously enabling whites to move to the suburbs and still easily commute into the city for work. Maraniss argues that the movement of whites into the ‘burbs created a pool of vacant housing in those neighborhoods; the destruction of the thriving black communities forced African-Americans into those previously white neighborhoods which, in turn, led to more outmigration by whites, fueled in large part by unscrupulous “blockbusting” realtors.

There were many other factors besides racism that led to the Detroit we know today, and racism has to be included amongst the culprits. In 1963, Detroit had a Democrat Mayor (Jerome Cavanagh) and Michigan had a Republican Governor (George Romney; Mitt’s father) who were both more liberal than large proportions of their respective constituents. At this time many neighborhoods in Detroit had covenants, either official or informal, that either prohibited or restricted selling houses to minorities; this was especially applied to African-Americans. In 1963, the Detroit City Council considered a bill to outlaw restrictive covenants (which were later outlawed by the US Supreme Court) but because of pressure from whites the Council rejected the bill.

Still, it’s a largely upbeat picture of Detroit in 1963, shadowed, of course, by the foreknowledge of what is to come. I found the discussion of the car industry and the completely different cultural context most interesting (Maraniss focuses primarily on Ford and, especially, on Henry Ford II, the original Henry Ford’s grandson; he was quite a character – or cad – depending on your point of view). It’s actually pretty interesting to read about how the auto executives lived and how the various neighborhoods were segregated according to how high up people were: executives and CEOs of the companies lived in one neighborhood, while the even tonier neighborhoods were reserved for people like the Fords. It was a very stratified society; they certainly would not live with the Hoi Polloi. Young women in this set still had elaborate “coming out” parties, which in 1963 had a much different meaning than it does now. It seems quaint and sort of innocent reading about it today.

The one mistake I think Maraniss makes is in venturing off into stories that were only tangentially related to Detroit. For example, he spends a lot of time discussing how the team trying to land the Olympics for Detroit went to Switzerland to present to the International Olympic Committee. Fine, but he spends too much time talking about details of the trip that really had nothing to do with Detroit. Ultimately, this is a tragedy because, as noted above, there is always a foreshadowing of what is to come. The arrogance of the Big Three and their refusal to accept that the public was starting to want smaller cars eventually decimated the American car industry and Detroit itself. Detroit still has a significant car industry (and the concomitant suppliers and contractors to the industry) but much of it is outside of Detroit and, indeed, the US. The city is slowly recovering, I suppose, but whatever it becomes it will not be like the Detroit of 1963.