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Rain of Ruin

Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan

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Rain of Ruin

By: Richard Overy
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A remarkable account of the terrible climax of the Second World War in Asia, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of violence from the air. American planes were beginning to run low on plausible targets when it was decided to use two atomic weapons in a final, terrible flourish to try to end the war.

Richard Overy’s remarkable new book rethinks how we should regard this last stage of the war and the role of the bombing. This book explores the way in which the willingness to kill civilians and destroy cities became normalized in the course of a horrific war as moral concerns were blunted and scientists, airmen, and politicians followed a strategy of mass destruction they would never have endorsed before the war began. But it also engages with the new scholarship that shows how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where ‘surrender’ was entirely foreign to Japanese culture.

© Richard Overy 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Air Forces Americas Armed Forces Asia Japan Military United States Weapons & Warfare War Imperial Japan China

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Critic reviews

A short but quietly devastating book, in which Overy adds new perspectives to a subject that has often been approached from a narrowly American angle... Overy's book is a sombre reminder that the border between civilisation and savagery is wafer-thin. (Philip Snow)
Rain of Ruin, a new study by war expert Richard Overy, decisively shows that the atomic bombs didn’t force the Japanese emperor’s hand... His brief yet nuanced account draws on a wealth of historical scholarship down the decades, on Allied and Japanese political and strategic thinking... a compelling reconstruction of how morality fares amid total war (Christopher Harding)
An excellent short book.... What Rain of Ruin makes clear is that the strategy of mass murder by bombs – atomic, hydrogen, napalm or incendiary – is not just immoral but hardly ever effective. That it is still employed in war is a terrible stain on humanity. (Ian Buruma)
A chaff-clearing book about the last days of the war in the Pacific... Among the topics Overy discusses with exemplary clarity are the moves already afoot within Japan to bring the war to an end and whether the decision to drop the atomic bombs was really meant as a signal to the Soviet Union. (Michael Prodger)
Rain of Ruin is a compact, first-rate history of one of World War II’s great tragedies (Jonathan W. Jordan)
The Second World War was brought to an end by the atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender – or was it? Overy, one of the world’s leading war historians, delves deeper into what happened in the summer of 1945, and shows that far more was at play behind Hirohito’s fateful decisions than anything America’s superweapon represented or did
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