On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese dive bombers launched from aircraft carriers west of Hawaii struck the U.S. Naval Base on the island of Oahu. The bold attack immediately brought the United States into the war. The Japanese opened a brilliant campaign in Asia. In rapid succession they seized the chain of strategic US possessions in the Pacific as well as Thailand, Hongkong, the Philippines, Singapore, the Solomon Islands and the Dutch East Indies.
In February, an Allied fleet of five cruisers and 11 destroyers try to intercept an Imperial force bound for Java but was almost totally eliminated. In March, the Japanese took the Dutch colonial capital, pushed the British out of Rangoon and invaded New Guinea. In the air-sea Battle of the Coral Sea, the U.S. foiled Japanese efforts to cut supply lines to Australia but in June, Japan’s war time expansion reached its peak. Implementing a diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands, Admiral Yamamoto masterminded an attack on Midway Island but the U.S. had decoded the plan. At midway, Japan lost their superiority over the Pacific.
In August, U.S. Marines established the beach head in the eastern most part of the Indonesian Archipelago. The tropical island of Guadalcanal became a scene of six months of savage jungle fighting. Naval forces under Admiral Chester Nimitz along with Allied ground forces under General Douglas MacArthur started the process of ‘leapfrogging’. The capture of key islands in a two-pronged assault on Japan, the Allies secured the Marshall Islands then moved on to the Marianas. They overwhelmed the Japanese at Saipan and recaptured Guam.
Meanwhile, General MacArthur returned to the Philippines with an invasion force. In October, the U.S. annihilated the Imperial fleet at the battle of Leyte Gulf then overran all resistance in the Philippines.
By late 1944, B-29 bombers had begun incinerating whole cities of the Japanese mainland. Iwo Jima’s capture secured the flight path from Saipan to Tokyo. In June, Americans suffered nearly 50,000 casualties in the nightmarish battle for Okinawa. The Japanese lost 100,000 dead. If the capture of tiny islands had been so deadly, what would the invasion of mainland Japan cost?
To end the war immediately, President Harry Truman ordered the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. The blast destroyed the city in a single explosion. The U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki forcing Japan to surrender. Cole statistics failed to convey the tragedy of the Second World War in Asia.
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