“What are the best books about The Pacific Theater and Japan In WWII?” We looked at 268 of the top books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 18 titles, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Pacific Theater” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 200+ titles, as well as the lists we used are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 18 Japan & World War 2 Books

18 .) At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor by Gordon W. Prange

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• The Christian Science Monitor

This authentic record of the planning and execution of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and its impact on American culture tells about Americans as a people and American leadership, thoughts and actions

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17 .) Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

“On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. A recent prison massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation.

In Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp. Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture. Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.”

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16 .) Kokoda by Paul Ham

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Goodreads 2

“In a unique and balanced portrayal, renowned journalist Paul Ham recounts both the Australian and Japanese perspectives of the events on the hellish Papuan jungle trail where thousands fought and died during World War II.

It was a war without mercy, fought back and forth along 90 miles of river crossings, steep inclines and precipitous descents, with both sides wracked by hunger and disease, and terrified of falling into enemy hands. Defeat was unthinkable: the Australian soldier was fighting for his homeland against an unyielding aggressor; the Japanese ordered to fight to the death in a bid to conquer “”Greater East Asia.”””

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15 .) Pacific War Ghosts by Tony Maxwell

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• Goodreads 2
• History Of War

“A personal account of author Tony Maxwell’s travels to the South Pacific in search of the fast disappearing relics left behind in the jungles and on the islands by that titanic struggle against the invading forces of the Empire of Japan.

Maxwell’s book is profusely illustrated with over 100 B&W photographs of the wrecked aircraft, tanks and guns left behind on the battlefields of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Bougainville and Tarawa.”

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14 .) Samurai! by Saburo Sakai

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• War bird Forum

Written by Martin Caidin from Saburo Sakai’s own memoirs and journalist Fred Saito’s extensive interviews with the World War II fighter pilot, Samurai! vividly documents the chivalry and valor of the combat aviator who time after time fought American fighter pilots and, with 64 kills, would survive the war as Japan’s greatest living ace. Here are the harrowing experiences of one of Japan’s greatest aces: from fighter pilot school — where the harsh training expelled over half of his class — to the thrilling early Japanese victories; from his incredible six hundred mile fight for life from Guadalcanal to his base in Rabaul, to the poignant story of the now-handicapped veteran’s return to the air during the final desperate months of World War II.

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13 .) Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Reddit

Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange’s bestselling Miracle at Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Unlike previous accounts, Shattered Sword makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida’s Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, an uncritical reliance upon which has tainted every previous Western account. It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle.

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12 .) The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour by James D. Hornfischer

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

With these words, Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland addressed the crew of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts on the morning of October 25, 1944, off the Philippine Island of Samar. On the horizon loomed the mightiest ships of the Japanese navy, a massive fleet that represented the last hope of a staggering empire. All that stood between it and Douglas MacArthur’ s vulnerable invasion force were the Roberts and the other small ships of a tiny American flotilla poised to charge into history.

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11 .) The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• The Christian Science Monitor
• War bird Forum

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this horrifying episode. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Among these was the Nazi John Rabe, an unlikely hero whom Chang calls the “Oskar Schindler of China” and who worked tirelessly to protect the innocent and publicize the horror. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, The Rape of Nanking analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. Finally, it tells the appalling story: about how the advent of the Cold War led to a concerted effort on the part of the West and even the Chinese to stifle open discussion of this atrocity. Indeed, Chang characterizes this conspiracy of silence, that persists to this day, as “a second rape.”

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10 .) The Rising Sun: The Decline & Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 by John Toland

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.”

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9 .) Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Reddit

“On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.”

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8 .) With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene B. Sledge

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Reddit

“In his own book, Wartime, Paul Fussell called With the Old Breed “”one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war.”” John Keegan referred to it in The Second World War as “”one of the most arresting documents in war literature.”” And Studs Terkel was so fascinated with the story he interviewed its author for his book, “”The Good War.”” What has made E.B. Sledge’s memoir of his experience fighting in the South Pacific during World War II so devastatingly powerful is its sheer honest simplicity and compassion.
Now including a new introduction by Paul Fussell, With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the vitality and bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923 and raised on riding, hunting, fishing, and a respect for history and legendary heroes such as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene Bondurant Sledge (later called “”Sledgehammer”” by his Marine Corps buddies) joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. In those years, he passed, often painfully, from innocence to experience.”

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7 .) Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald H. Spector

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• History Of War
• Library Thing

A stunning history of the war in the Pacific written by award-winning military historian Ronald Spector. Drawing on declassified intelligence files, an abundance of British and American archival material, Japanese scholarship and documents, and research and memoirs of scholarly and military men, Spector focuses on the major battles in the Pacific theater as well as the smaller details, from the various rivalries between branches of the U.S. armed services to the problems of command and allocating resources.

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6 .) Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Goodreads 2
• Reddit

Robert Leckie, one of America’s greatest military historians, was both an eyewitness and participant to some of the greatest battles in the Pacific. This is Leckie’s vivid account of combat and survival in World War II. In January 1942, in the aftermath of the infamous Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the United States Marines Corps. From boot camp in Parris Island to the bloody war in the Pacific, Robert Leckie experienced it all. The booze, the brawling, the loving on sixty-two-hour leave; the courageous fighting and dying in combat as the US Marines slugged it out, inch by inch, island by island across the Pacific to the shores of Japan.

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5 .) Miracle at Midway by Gordon W. Prange

Lists It Appears On:

• Early Bird Books
• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• The Christian Science Monitor

Here is the definitive history of the battle of Midway, an American victory that marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific during World War II. Told with the same stylistic flair and attention to detail as the bestselling At Dawn We Slept, Miracle at Midway brings together eyewitness accounts from the men who commanded and fought on both sides. The sweeping narrative takes readers into the thick of the action and shows exactly how American strategies and decisions led to the triumphant victory that paved the way for the defeat of Japan.

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4 .) The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians by Brian Garfield

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing
• Reddit

The 1942 Japanese invasion of two of the Aleutian Islands, the thousand-mile archipelago west of Alaska, represents the only time in modern history that American territory has been occupied by a foreign power. The ensuing fifteen-month campaign, memorialised in John Huston’s extraordinary documentary film, was ‘the weirdest war ever waged’: a terrible, elemental and always three-sided battle, between the Americans, the Japanese and the weather. Frozen puddies of oil could be lifted like boards. Servicement burned summer clothing for fuel. Aircrews flew amidst icy rain, driven upside-down by gales. The eventual liberation of the island of Attu was second only to Iwo Jima in the percentage of American casualties. Brian Garfield’s book, never before published in the UK, is the definitive history of this ‘Forgotten War’.

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3 .) Flags Of Our Fathers by James D. Bradley

Lists It Appears On:

• Early Bird Books
• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Reddit
• The Christian Science Monitor

“In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island’s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.

Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever.

To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men’s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific’s most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.”

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2 .) Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 by Max Hastings

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing
• Reddit
• The Christian Science Monitor

By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory would be achieved remained to be seen. The ensuing drama—that ended in Japan’s utter devastation—was acted out across the vast stage of Asia, with massive clashes of naval and air forces, fighting through jungles, and barbarities by an apparently incomprehensible foe. In recounting the saga of this time and place, Max Hastings gives us incisive portraits of the theater’s key figures—MacArthur, Nimitz, Mountbatten, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. But he is equally adept in his portrayals of the ordinary soldiers and sailors—American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese—caught in some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns.

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1 .) The Pacific War: 1941-1945 by John Edmond Costello

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 1
• History Of War
• Reddit
• The Christian Science Monitor
• War bird Forum

The definitive one-volume history of World War II in the Pacific theater, The Pacific War was the first book to weave together the separate stories of the fighting in China, Malaya, Burma, the East Indies, the Philippines, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Aleutians. Now available with a new cover, John Costello’s classic work provides a brilliantly clear account of one of the most massive movements of men and arms in military history.

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The 200+ Additional Best WWII Books About Japan & The Pacific Theater

11 Best Japan In World War 2 Book Sources/Lists