The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable

About the Allies’ victory in the Pacific in WWII, it goes almost without question that Japan’s defeat was inevitable in the face of overwhelming American military might and economic power. But the outcome, Michael W. Myers contends, was actually anything but inevitable. This book is Myers’s thorough and deeply informed explanation of how contingent the “foregone conclusion” of the war in the Pacific really was.

However disproportionate their respective resources, both Japan and the Allied fo...