Readers of this review will likely know of this book as a result of the howls of outrage reported in the media at the beginning of December concerning Max Hastings’s claims about Australian performance in the fighting in 1945. It is not fair to judge a long and complex book on the basis of a single, ten-page chapter, but since that is the section of the book that has attracted attention in this part of the world, it seems best to deal with it first before moving on to the rest of Hastings’s lengthy and detailed account of the final year of the war against Japan.