NEMESIS: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, by Max Hastings. HarperPress, 2007, £25, 699 pp., (cloth). (U.S. release is titled RETRIBUTION: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. Knopf, 2008, $35)

At Frankfurt airport, the insecurity police screening hand baggage discovered something in my bag that alarmed them. Gingerly they opened the bag, swabbed the object with bomb-sensitive tape and took the tape to a detector machine. The machine gave the all-clear. It was not a bomb. It was only a book.

It is not easy to have much confidence in airport security when its officials find themselves nervous over a book, but the suspicious item (bought in the sterile area at London's City Airport) is, in fact, something of a bombshell.

Max Hastings' "Nemesis," the book in question, is massive — in scope and in imagination as well as in pages. It covers the big battles, with maps illustrating the lines of attack at key stages, across the huge arena from Imphal in the west to the vast Pacific Ocean in the east and south.