James M. Scott Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

James M. Scott is a literary fiction novelist that is best known for his work “Rampage” which he published in 2018.
The novel was named one of 2018’s best books by the editors at Military Times, Kirkus, and Amazon. It also made the final shortlist for the Military History Gilder Lehrman Prize, which was an award by the New York Historical Society.
He is also the author of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist “Target Tokyo” and the winner of the Samuel Elito Morison Rear Admiral Award for his novel “The Attack on the Liberty” and “The War Below.”
He has now become a renowned author who makes his home in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina alongside his wife and two children.

Scott’s first job upon getting out of college was in Japan where he taught English at a public school. He was employed in middle school in a small town of about twenty thousand people on Honshu, which he particularly loved.
During his time as a teacher in Japan, James M. Scott also worked as a volunteer and also went to the community center regularly where he taught a night curse.

It was in that class that he met students many of who were small kids during the Second World War. These students talked to him about the B-29 bombing campaign and how they had to escape the cities of Japan that were engulfed by war.
It was the first time that James Scott ever heard from people that had been in the war and he was very fascinated. It was during this time that he also traveled to Hiroshima for a school visit.
A few weeks later, he traveled to Hawaii to meet his parents that were vacationing there. Since his father had been in the Navy the first place they went to was Pearl Harbor.
As such, in about a fortnight, he experienced what was the end and beginning of the Second World War and was hooked.

After James M. Scott came back from Japan, he was assigned to the military beat at the Post and Courier. This was just a few weeks after September 11 and hence there were a lot of things going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scott would become a reporter in both countries and he found it very interesting. He would later on be seconded to “The Buenos Aires Herald” in Argentina which at that time was in the same stable as “The Post and Courier.”
Working in Argentina, he began learning and soon penned a lot of writing on the “Dirty War” of the 1970s. He continued writing and by 2006, he had garnered a lot of experience that he earned the Nieman Fellowship.
He would continue along that path and only switch over to long from writing when he began becoming interested in novel writing.

Scott published “Target Tokyo,” his debut novel in 2015, and this would mark the beginning of his long journey toward becoming an acclaimed literary fiction author of the military genre.
He now makes his home in a Victorian house in South Carolina that was built at the end of the 19th century.

When they were renovating, they turned the cupola into her office and she usually does a lot of writing in the morning and revises and does most of her research during the afternoons.

“Rampage” by James Scott is a scary history of some of the most terrible moments during the Pacific War during the Second World War.

In 1945, General Douglas MacArthur went back to the Philippines to fulfill his promise of having a military parade through the capital.

Tomoyuki Yamashita is the Japanese commander who was ready to withdraw his soldiers from Manilla but Sanji Iwabuchi a prominent admiral had other ideas.
The latter defied orders and commanded marines and sailors to dig in for a house-to-house defense to the death.

Iwabuchi orchestrated a campaign of atrocities in which more than 100,000 foreign nationals and Filipinos were killed. They were often herded together and burnt inside buildings to save ammunition.
According to Scott, Manila has never truly recovered from the atrocities, even though it has now become a modern gleaming city. In some places, it is still unreconstructed and its heart remains scarred.
Moreover, the orgy of violence was not an isolated happenstance of the last aggression by soldiers who had lost all hope of winning. Rather it was a pattern of brutality by the Japanese that was common across Asia.

James Scott’s novel “Target Tokyo” is a work that fills many of the gaps in the story of the Doolittle raids over Tokyo.

In this work, the author explores the ultimate horrendous cost of the raids on human lives, including the innovation and bravery of the raiders.

Following a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Franklin Roosevelt, and his commanders are determined to retaliate to boost national morale.
Conducting a bombing mission over Tokyo needed the best people in the Air Force and Navy of the United States.

One of the most important of these was Kimmy Doolittle, a Lieutenant Colonel and legendary racing pilot who is also a troubleshooter on Gen Henrey Arold’s staff.

When he is assigned the job, he immediately demands that he be given the B-25 aerial workhorse. It was an aircraft so big that its wingspan could clear the superstructure of an aircraft carrier.
However, flying to Tokyo from a Pacific carrier to China was difficult as the allies did not have in their control critical airfields.

Despite the odds, Doolittle manages to cross the thousands of miles to reach Tokyo and wreak all manner of havoc that marked a turning point in the war.

“Black Snow” by James Scott is a study of the Second World War raids by the B-29 bombers. The work is all about the debates over firebombing over precision bombing at the end of the war.

The author looks into the controversy over the firebombing of cities in Japan and provides a sympathetic rendering of the horrendous consequences of the bombings on civilians.

At the center of the narrative is the development of the massive Superfortress B-29 that was championed by General Henry Arnold who advocated for the independence of the Air Force.

By the latter years of the war, the new planes were assigned to the Pacific under the command of Gen Haywood Hansell one of the few leaders who was still a believer in daylight and humane precision bombing.

As the American public fought hard to end the war, top-level military people decided that to break civilian population morale, avoid a costly invasion and force a surrender, they had to increase the use of incendiary bombs.
This saw a tremendous shift in morality in the United States that ultimately led to the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.