Much of the historical perspective on the era holds that the Japanese were prepared to fight to their very last man, and that until the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been visited upon their homeland Japanese leaders had no intention of surrendering. But in fact the Japanese had sent peace feelers to the West as early as 1942, only six months after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. More would come in a flood long before the fateful use of the atomic bombs. In her 1956 book, The Enemy at His Back, journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown supplied overwhelming...