Hashirajima Anchoring Area, Hiroshima Bay, Japan • May 27, 1942 A little over 4 months after Japan devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet riding at peaceful anchor at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japanese Shōwa Emperor Hirohito and his Army and Navy staff officers received a rude calling card from Lt. Col. James “Jimmy” Doolittle and 79 other airmen of…
Operation Olympic was the U.S. high-casualty plan to invade Japan’s southernmost Home Island, Kyushu. It was never put into operation due to Japan’s capitulation and unconditional surrender in August and September 1945
Rabaul, New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea • April 13, 1943 On this date in 1943 the headquarters of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto on Rabaul, the important Japanese garrison on New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, sent a coded military radio signal to various Japanese commands in the Western South Pacific. The message listed the dates…
East China Sea • April 7, 1945 On this date the Japanese super-battleship Yamato steamed toward Okinawa and to a martyr’s death dispensed by pilots from Rear Adm. Mark A. “Pete” Mitscher’s U.S. Fast Carrier Task Force 58 (TF58). Early in World War II, Mitscher commanded the Hornet, which from her deck famously launched Col. Jimmy…
Off the Coast of Okinawa, Japan • April 6–7, 1945 For centuries the concept of individual suicide was accepted within Japanese society. Among the warrior, or Samurai, class especially, suicide was seen as the way to, among other things, atone for one’s failure, attenuate shame, and restore honor for oneself or for one’s family or…
Potsdam, Germany • July 21, 1945 The “Big Three” Allies opened their victors’ conference on July 17, 1945, in an undamaged suburb 15 miles/24 kilometers from Berlin, the German capital. Two dramatic unconditional surrenders by the heads of Germany’s armed forces a week after the April 30 suicide of German dictator Adolf Hitler had encouraged the government heads of the…
Aboard the U.S. Carrier Shangri-La • July 14, 1945 On this date and the next in 1945, less than four months after the start of the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits, aptly named Operation Starvation, Navy air groups destroyed over…
Tokyo, Japan · June 22, 1945 Beginning in the summer of 1944 Japanese military prowess fast approached terminal collapse in the Pacific. Between mid-June and early August, Saipan and Guam in the Marianas fell to superior American forces. Peleliu and Angaur in the Palau Islands were in American hands by the end of November 1944….
Chengtu, China · June 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 67 B-29 Superfortresses took off from their base in Chengtu, mainland China, to release 221 tons of bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyūshū. This was the first attack on the Japanese homeland since…
Tokyo, Japan • November 12, 1948 On this date in 1948 some 28 verdicts for Class A war criminals were read out at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), better known as the Tokyo Trials or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Convened in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, on April 29, 1946, to try Japan’s highest-ranking…