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 away. Rabaul,…
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…
Manila, Philippines · February 3, 1945 On this date in 1945, 35,000 soldiers of the U.S. Sixth Army under Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, supported by 3,000 Filipino guerrillas, began entering Manila, capital of the Philippines, and soon liberated nearly 6,000 Allied and Filipino prisoners. Some of them, like the 64 U.S. Army nurses, were taken captive in 1942…
Washington, D.C. · January 9, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, D.C., the U.S. State Department advised American citizens to leave Japan. Two summers earlier the State Department had informed Japan that it would not renew the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the two countries, leaving the U.S. free in January…
Saipan Island, Northern Marianas · January 7, 1945 In early October 1944 the U.S. high command decided that, after securing the Philippine island of Leyte (done before the end of December), Gen. Douglas MacArthur was to liberate neighboring Luzon Island, while Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, from his station in the Central Pacific, would attack the…
Manila, Philippines · January 2, 1942 Japan intended to occupy the Philippine Islands as part of its plan for a “Greater East Asia War.” The nation’s Southern Expeditionary Army Group was tasked with seizing the islands, British Malaya (today’s Malaysia), and the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) simultaneously with the Japanese Navy’s assault on the…
Hirohito is better known outside Japan by his personal name, Hirohito, which means “abundant benevolence.” Among the Japanese he is now primarily known by his posthumous name, Emperor Shōwa or Shōwa Emperor, the name of the era (“Enlightened Peace”) that corresponded with his reign. He reigned as the 124th Emperor of Japan, from December 25, 1926,…
Born into a military family, Tōjō was a career army officer with political ambitions. He was an arch nationalist and a leader of the Toseiha, political faction in the Japanese Imperial Army, active in the 1920s and 1930s, that wanted the army to have a more prominent role in Japan’s political life. He fully supported…
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1915, Eisenhower served in various capacities during World War I and the interwar years: in Texas, where he commanded a tank training center (1915–18); in Panama (1922–24); the Philippines (1935–39), where served under Gen. Douglas MacArthur; and in the States, where he severed as chief-of-staff…