Author and historian Sir Max Hastings presents a talk based on his book Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45.

Hastings chronicles the final year of the Second World War in the Pacific and offers a detailed discussion of the events leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—including Japan’s war against China, the Marines at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. He also explains the Japanese wartime mind-set, which caused an otherwise civilized society to carry out atrocities that haunt the nation to this day.

Hastings is the recipient of the 2011 Crosby Kemper Lectureship at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.