To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945

John C. McManus

may 2023 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrado por Walter Dixon

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From the liberation of the Philippines to the Japanese surrender, the final volume of John C. McManus's trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War

The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus’s magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” returns with this brilliant final volume. On the island of Luzon, a months-long stand-off between US and Japanese troops finally breaks open, as American soldiers push into Manila, while paratroopers and amphibious invaders capture nearby Corregidor. The Philippines are soon liberated, and Allied strategists turn their eyes to China, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands themselves. Readers will walk in the boots of American soldiers and officers, braving intense heat, rampant disease, and a by-now suicidal enemy, determined to kill as many opponents as possible before defeat, and they will encounter Japanese soldiers faced with the terrible choice between capitulation or doom. At the same time, this outstanding narrative lays bare the titanic ego and ambition of the Pacific War’s most prominent general, Douglas MacArthur, and the complex challenges he faced in Japan’s unconditional surrender and America’s lengthy occupation.


Photo courtesy of the National World War II Museum, accession number 2013.495.1300.

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John C. McManus, PhD, is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of US military history at Missouri University of Science and Technology and a leading historian of World War II. His critically acclaimed books include September Hope, The Dead and Those About to Die, Island Infernos, and Fire and Fortitude, recipient of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History.