Jagdgeschwader 301 and 302 were established in 1943. Their mission was to intercept enemy bombers at night flying fast single-engined fighters. But they also had to engage Allied bombers by day. The pilots of these new fighter wings were a mix of former bomber pilots and trained fighter pilots a unique composition for the Luftwaffe. Night missions required good instrument training, like that given to bomber pilots. The fighter pilots were more familiar with the available aircraft and combat tactics. A former fighter pilot himself, Willi Reschke describes the difficulties of crossing over from day to night fighting and vice-versa. He describes the difficult missions flown by JG 301/ JG 302 and the fates of their pilots, providing the first chronicle of the Wilde Sau Geschwader.

This groundbreaking work of oral history captures for the first time ever the remarkable story of ordinary Japanese people during World War II. In a sweeping panorama, Haruko Taya and Theodore Cook take us from the Japanese attacks on China in the 1930s to the Japanese homefront during the inhuman raids on Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, offering the first glimpses of how this century's most violent conflict affected the lives of the Japanese population. Japan At War is a monumental work of history--one to which Americans and Japanese will turn for decades to come.

The Japanese conquest of the Pacific comprised of a complex series of widely scattered operations; their intent was to neutralize American, Commonwealth, and Dutch forces, seize regions rich in economic resources, and secure an outer defense line for their empire. Although their conquest was successful, the forces deployed from Japan and China were not always ideally trained, equipped and armed. The South Seas and tropics proved challenging to these soldiers who were used to milder climates, and they were a less lethal enemy on the Chinese mainland. This book examines the overall structure of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), the forces in existence at the beginning of World War II and the organization of the forces committed to the conquest of the Pacific.

The author's research shows the Japanese came far closer to cracking the atomic riddle than they have ever let on. After a half-century of stonewalling by the Japanese and loss of records by the United State government, Robert Wilcox couldn't find the definite answers. Much of his research is unfortunately larded with such phrases as "perhaps" or "possibly." Some of the oral accounts of a Japanese bomb experiment are secondhand or possibly repeated versions of a similar rumor. But the records he dug out of the National Archives (cited box by box) show a pattern of frantic wartime expenditures on fission materials by Japan, attempts to build uranium separators, and plans by the Japanese navy and army to use atomic weapons if the scientists could only finish them in time. The Japanese have never admitted to massive wartime atrocities, let alone their own attempt at building a bomb. The biggest riddle of the book is whether the Japanese, as some reports say, test-detonated their own bomb at a site in present-day North Korea just before the Soviet army closed in. The definite answer may be lost forever.

I can recommend this book to anyone wanting a basic knowledge of the Nuremberg trial and the atrocities that it exposed. My only complaint is that the book often drifts from the subject of the trial itself to general Nazi and Holocaust history, which is fine unless you've already read a good deal about these subjects in other books. One more issue is that Conot's mini-biography of Hitler, found at the end of the book, relies too much on speculation about the cause of Hitler's madness. (Can the root of Hitler's madness really be reduced to the view that he might have had syphilis?) Still, Conot manages to find some nuggets of information that I have not seen elsewhere, and when he does stay close to the trial it makes for highly intriguing reading.