West New Britain, Papua New Guinea • December 26, 1943 Following the successful conclusion of the U.S. and Australian Buna-Gona Campaign on New Guinea’s southeastern peninsula in late-January 1943, the Allies moved west along the island’s north shore. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area, used Buna (see map, lower…
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…
Manila, Philippines · December 10, 1941 On this date in 1941, 3 days after the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been severely crippled at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japanese troops landed on the U.S.-held island of Guam in the Western Pacific Ocean and occupied it within hours. On the same day elements of the Japanese 14th Area…
Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands · November 12, 1942 On this date in 1942 in the South Pacific, U.S. and Japanese fleets began the four-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, often at point-blank range and under the cover of darkness. Variously referred to as the Third and Fourth Battles of Savo Island, the Battle of the…
Leyte, Philippines · October 20, 1944 In October 1944 Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita commanded 225,000 Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. On this date in 1944, on a 25‑mile stretch of Leyte Island in the Philippines, an Allied fleet of more than 730 transport and escort vessels, supported by aircraft carriers and 100 warships, put 160,000 U.S. troops…
Tokyo, Japan · October 9, 1945 On this date in 1945 in Tokyo, Baron Kijūrō Shidehara became Prime Minister of Japan at the head of a constitutional government committed to pursuing a peaceful future. Before the war Shidehara had been a prominent Japanese diplomat and a leading proponent of pacifism in Japan. On the same…
Kyūshū Island, Japan · August 25, 1945 On this date in 1945, ten days after Japan had agreed to unconditional surrender, two U.S. Army pilots flying P‑38 Lightnings on armed reconnaissance landed on Kyūshū Island, the southernmost Japanese Home Island, after one of the P‑38s ran low on fuel. The two pilots became the first…
Manila, Occupied Philippines · May 6, 1942 On December 8, 1941, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines, a largely self-governing U.S. possession. (December 8, Manila and Japanese time, was the same date Japanese carrier-based planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a set of interlocked assaults on U.S. military assets in the Pacific region.) The combined U.S.-Filipino…
SWPA HQ, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia · April 26, 1943 By January 1943, as the six-month campaign for Guadalcanal in the Southwest Pacific Solomon Islands was winding down (the Japanese abandoned the island on February 7), it became clear that the Allies lacked sufficient resources to swiftly dislodge the Japanese from heavily fortified Rabaul, 650 miles to…
Washington, D.C. · April 3, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Roosevelt administration appointed Gen. Douglas MacArthur Commander-in-Chief U.S. Army Forces Pacific (AFPAC), responsible for all Army and Army Air Forces units in the Pacific Theater excepting Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force based in the Marianas. At the same time Adm. Chester…