U.S. Seventh Fleet HQ · July 30, 1943 During the Pacific War U.S. submarines fired some 11,000 torpedoes, sinking hundreds of Japanese warships and well over one thousand merchant ships. The number of lives lost in the latter engagements is estimated at 116,000 Japanese merchant seamen, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions. In mid-March 1942…
Aboard the USS Shangri-La · July 28, 1945 The Imperial Japanese Navy had the second most powerful navy in the Pacific Theater in World War II and the third largest navy in the world after the U.S. and Royal navies. During the first years of the war the Japanese Combined Fleet, the IJN’s main ocean-going component,…
Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), French Indochina · July 25, 1941 On September 21, 1937, Japanese planes bombed the capital of China, Nanking, shortly after igniting the Second Sino-Japanese War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed the shock of “every civilized man and woman” over “the ruthless bombing” of Chinese civilians. Generally, however, U.S. and European…
San Francisco, California · July 15, 1945 On this date in 1945 the USS Indianapolis, a Portland-class cruiser in California for repairs, received orders to pick up a piece of special cargo at Hunters Point (predecessor name for the now-closed San Francisco Naval Yard). Eleven days later, on July 26, the Indianapolis delivered her mysterious…
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…
Saipan, Marianas, Central Pacific · July 6, 1944 The Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944) was a pivotal U.S. naval victory, effectively eliminating Japan’s ability to both conduct large-scale carrier actions and reinforce its garrisons to the east in the Marianas. The most important islands in the Mariana chain were Guam (an American…
Chicago, Illinois · July 3, 1945 On this date in 1945 Hungarian-born physicist and inventor Leó Szilárd drafted the first of two versions of a petition to President Harry S. Truman, urging him not to use the atomic bomb on Japan before that nation had been given a chance to surrender. It was Szilárd who,…
Washington, D.C. · July 2, 1940 America responded to Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and to the many news reports of indiscriminate bombing of Chinese civilian targets by imposing trade restrictions on exports to Japan. Initially a proclamation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 26, 1940, it morphed into an expression of national moral…
Tokyo, Japan · June 30, 1941 On September 19, 1931, soldiers of the Kwantung Army (eventually the largest, most prestigious branch of the Imperial Japanese Army) invaded Manchuria in Northeast China from their base at Port Arthur (present-day Dalian or Lüshun Port) and established a puppet state they called Manchukuo. This event was a massive…
Mariana Islands, Central Pacific · June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 a huge gale hit the two gigantic artificial harbors known as Mulberry harbors that the British had built in England, floated across the English Channel, and deposited on Normandy’s beaches several days after the Allies’ June 6 invasion of German-occupied France. The…
