Osprey's 200th volume in their "Campaign" series is Clayton Chun's, "Japan 1945: From Operation Downfall to Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Unfortunately "Downfall" the code name for the planned invasion of Japan is all too appropriate a title for this work. Limited by Osprey's 90 page count this attempts a far too ambitious scope for such limited page count.

Beyond the purely military actions there are social and political elements on both side of the conflict that the book barely touches upon. For example Chun comments that Hiroshima authorities were able to provide some services almost immediately after the nuclear blast, but he doesn't say what those were.

The editing and fact checking in the book seems suspect at best. For example when discussing the "Potsdam Conference" where the allies set down their strategy for dealing with Japan, he says Churchill had advocated a degree of leniency. But at Potsdam Churchill was replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Atlee, and his views on the Japan, or even his existence are not mentioned by the book.

Some stuff is just odd. On page 55 a picture of the Little Boy weapon has the caption that "Its detonation would be the second man made nuclear explosion." This could imply there were other, non-man made, nuclear explosions.

The secondary title, From Operation Downfall to...Nagasaki" is not even correct as the book goes on to detail the Japanese surrender which came about after Nagasaki. The volume's cover should be a clue as it is the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor.

The book pretty much limits itself to a straight on recounting of the military facts that led to the use of nuclear weapons and the events when `The bomb' was dropped. For a quick walk through of those facts this is a good, quick source book, but considering the fact there are volumes written about this event with its different aspects and Chun himself gives a brief recounting of how "The Bomb" changed the world if leave much dangling. The book mentions that some were opposed to the use of nuclear weapons without really going into detail of why and the climatic struggles within the Japanese government are barely touched on.

In part this is the limitations of Osprey's size requirements but it does seem to be an overly ambitious theme for such a thin work. While ok for the military elements of the nuclear attacks on Japan, for the rest, this seems to be inadequate to the struggle of detailing what was not just an air raid but the painful birth of the modern world.

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