Abstract

CONTEMPORARY JAPAN 2021, VOL. 33, NO. 2, 225–242 https://doi.org/10.1080/18692729.2020.1842969 Was Fidel Castro’s Cuba rescued by the Yankees from Japanese aggression? A very special view of the Pacific War Gerhard Krebs Berlin Free University ARTICLE HISTORY Received 24 October 2020; Accepted 24 October 2020 Doubts Usually, historiography on World War II handles the war theatres in Europe including North Africa and in the Asia-Pacific area separately. Gerhard L(udwig) Weinberg, an American scholar of German-Jewish origin (Eckert, 2012), attempted to provide a global overview in a voluminous work comprising 1178 pages entitled A World at Arms in 1994 (Weinberg, 1994). He originally was a leading specialist on Nazi Germany’s history and one of the most famous authorities in that field. Since he was intensively dealing with the European part of World War II, he occasionally gave a glance to the Asia-Pacific theatre as well. While most European historians do not pay much attention to the Asia-Pacific war theatre, their American colleagues – and to a certain degree the British also – have produced a tremendous amount of specialized studies on that part of World War II. One reason is, of course, that their countries had been deeply involved in those battles,