The Pacific War WW2

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The Pacific War WW2
The Pacific war had LandSeaAir however I have placed it in land for ease of tracking.

Prior to 1939, the United States was Japan’s largest supplier of Petroleum and Mineral ores. Due to their invasion of China this led President Roosevelt and Secretary of state Hull to place an embargo on shipments to Japan
Only the United States stood in Japan's path. The U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was the only force capable of challenging Japan's Navy, and American bases in the Philippines could threaten lines of communications between the Japanese home islands and the East Indies. Every oil tanker heading for Japan would have to pass by American-held Luzon. From these needs and constraints, Japan's war plans emerged.


Even before Pearl Harbor American military chiefs had agreed on a common strategy with Great Britain. The most powerful foe would need to be defeated first and only enough military resources would be devoted to the Pacific to hold the Japanese west of the Alaska-Hawaii-Panama defensive line.

Competition for limited resources between the Allied commanders of the Europeans and Pacific theatres was actually less intense than might have been expected. Thus, American offensive naval power -- especially the fast carrier task forces -- could be committed to the Pacific war.

The Pacific theatre differed fundamentally in strategy and command and in the character of the fighting. Operational planning was conducted, at least at the higher levels, by combined Anglo-American staffs. In the Pacific the United States also had Allies - Australian and New Zealand. Yet the ratio of U.S. to Allied forces was much higher there than in Europe, and in consequence strategy and planning were almost wholly in American hands.

From the beginning of the war, rivalry between the Army and the Navy marked the conflict in the Pacific. The two most important were MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area and Admiral Chester Nimitz's Pacific Ocean Areas. In turn, it was subdivided into North Pacific, Central Pacific, and South Pacific commands. Nimitz personally retained command of the Central Pacific.
Fighting in the Pacific was unlike fighting in Europe.. The Pacific war was a seemingly endless series of amphibious landings and island-hopping campaigns where naval power, air power, and shipping, rather than large and heavy ground forces, were of paramount importance.

Yet for the soldiers and marines who assaulted the countless beaches, the Pacific war was even more brutal and deadly than the war in Europe. Japanese defenders always dug in, reinforced their bunkers with coconut logs, and fought until they were killed. They almost never surrendered. On Betio in the Tarawa Atoll (The Gilberts) in November 1943 the marines suffered 3,301 casualties, including 900 killed in action, for a bit of coral 3 miles long and 800 yards wide. At Iwo Jima in February and March 1945 the marines lost almost 6,000 dead and over 17,000 wounded and fought for five weeks to take an island less than five miles long. At Iwo Jima, no battalion suffered fewer than 50 percent casualties, and many sustained even higher losses.

The history of the war in the Pacific falls neatly into three periods. The first six months of the war, from December 1941to May 1942, were a time of unbroken Japanese military victory. At the-height of Japanese expansion in mid-1942, the tide turned. The period from mid-1942 to mid-1943 saw Japanese strategic thrusts into the south and central Pacific blunted by the carrier battles of the Coral Sea.


(May 1942) and Midway (June 1942). Limited U.S. offensives in the Solomons and in the Papuan area of eastern New Guinea were launched in the last months of 1942. Both offensives were begun on a shoestring, and both came close to failure. Yet they represented the end of defeat in the Pacific and the first tentative steps toward victory. Those steps became great leaps in 1944 and 1945. Two amphibious offensives developed, as MacArthur advanced across the northern coast of New Guinea into the Philippines and Nimitz island-hopped 2,000 miles across the central Pacific from the Gilbert Islands to Okinawa.