Max Hastings in The Great Hall

In the impressive surroundings of Christ Church’s Great Hall, bestselling historian Max Hastings admits to feeling a great sense of privilege that he’s able to “spend hours on end in the four corners of the Earth” listening to the personal testimonies of history’s survivors.

While there’s clearly enormous amounts of library work compacted into his comprehensive histories, vivid eyewitness accounts have always been central to Hasting’s books – and latest title Nemesis is no different, attempting to recreate the experiences of civilians and soldiers of all the sides entwined in World War II’s pacific battlefields.

Setting out to challenge some of the myths around Japan’s notoriously brutal campaigns, Hastings explained that his research only confirmed for him that the Japanese conducted themsleves ‘even more hideously than the world knows today’. By way of illustration, he details the fate of one captured British troop. From 1000 men, 35 died in combat – but only 278 survived internment in Japanese camps.

Not surprisingly then, Nemesis also contains a spirited defence of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fired up with what he calls “the ferocity of despair”, Hastings confidently states that the Japanese troops would have fought on till the last man – and that even as little as a few more weeks of fighting would have led to much greater loss of life.

His book also takes a specific interest in the role of women in the Pacific War, (“Another side of the story that’s just as interesting as life on the front lines,”); emphasises the frustration felt by Allied troops suffering immense losses while the war in the West looked all but finished; and underlines how unharmoniously the American, British and even the Australian forces cooperated.

But it’s the Japanese who bear the brunt of Hasting’s lecture: “Japan is a glittering example of economic success and democracy,” he concludes, “but it’s hard to think of it as entirely part of our normal world as long as it continues to deny it’s own history.”