战争是可怕的，战争使人家破人亡。

第二次世界大战爆发于1939年，历时6年之久，先后有60多个国家和地区参战，波及20多亿人口。战争双方共动员军队1亿多人，战争死亡人数达5000万，直接战争费用13520亿美元，财产损失高达4万亿美元。

如果想了解二战在亚太地区的情况，读这本书是非常合适的，亲历这场战争的人，才有资格发言，而这本书，都是经历战争的人的日记。

The war that took place across Asia and the Pacific between 1941 and 1945 both united and divided nations across the globe.Yet beyond the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, the personal experience of war in this theatre has received relatively little attention - the primary focus having been on the action against Hitler in Europe. On the opposite side of the world the main combatants were all fighting each other upon unfamiliar terrain far away from their homelands: as one Japanese soldier wrote in his diary, 'At this moment in the southern hemisphere, everybody's mind was just preoccupied with the memory of home.'

Richard J. Aldrich brings the war to life through the diaries of people on all sides, with events recorded as they happened. A kamikaze pilot in the last days before his suicide mission; an injured Australian prisoner of war humbled by the heroic attempts of his fellow inmates to save his life by endangering their own; a young Japanese boy terrified by the rumours of impending atomic warfare; a British nurse in Malaya forced to abandon her patients following strict evacuation orders. Stories such as these are drawn into a chronological account of the war by Aldrich's expert month-by-month commentary.

The Faraway War offers a stunning and diverse range of diaries, focusing both on ordinary people,some of whose diaries are published here for the first time, and on more celebrated figures such as Evelyn Waugh, Charles Lindbergh, Harry Truman and Joyce Grenfell.With this second volume Richard Aldrich now completes the picture that he began with the European and Middle Eastern action in Witness to War, by creating an intimate and illuminating portrait of a whole world ravaged by war.

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Race, Barbarity and Experience in Asia and the Pacific

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

Source Notes

References

Acknowledgement of Permissions

Illustration Credits

Index

Saving Your Diaries from the Dustbin of History