Wake Island, Western Pacific Ocean • December 23, 1941 On this date in 1941 Wake Island defenders surrendered after 2 attack waves of 1,000 Japanese marines each stormed the beaches. Two days earlier, in their largest attack yet on Wake Island, the Japanese had sent 49 aircraft, dive bombers and fighters both, to knock out the last of…
Wake Island, North Pacific Ocean · December 23, 1941 On this date in 1941 Wake Island defenders surrendered after two attack waves of 1,000 Japanese each stormed the beaches. Two days earlier, in their largest attack yet on Wake Island, the Japanese had sent 49 aircraft, dive bombers and fighters both, to knock out the last of…
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii · December 7, 1941 On this date in 1941, a quiet Sunday morning on the Hawaiian island of Oahu just before 8 o’clock, Japan staged a devious, vicious, unprovoked air and naval attack on America’s doorstep, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine airfields that…
Washington, D.C. · September 8, 1939 On this date in 1939, eight days after Nazi Germany invaded neighboring Poland and triggered World War II in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a state of “limited national emergency.” The underfunded and undermanned U.S. military forces were strengthened, and the next year Congress provided major military budget increases, which…
Washington, D.C. · August 14, 1982 Some 44,000 Native Americans served in the U.S. military during World War II. One-and-a-half times more Native Americans volunteered for service than were drafted; indeed, Native American participation in the war per capita exceeded any other group. Native Americans served in all theaters, but predominately in the Pacific. No group…
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…
Off the Mariana Islands, Central Pacific · June 12, 1944 On this date in 1944 in the Marianas, U.S. carrier aircraft began attacking Japanese defenses on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in preparation for the 3‑week battle for the archipelago’s administrative center, Saipan. Eight hundred U.S. warships carrying 162,000 fighting men were set to smash into…
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…
Aboard Admiral Spruance’s Flagship USS Indianapolis · April 1, 1945 For weeks the largest Allied fleet since D‑Day—nearly 1,500 U.S. and British vessels—fired 2.3 million shells onto Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago and a little more than 300 miles/483 km from Kyūshū and Shikoku, the southernmost Japanese Home Islands. Kyūshū and Shikoku were home to many…
U.S. Navy Offshore Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands · March 26, 1945 Late in 1944 Rear Admiral Takajiro Ohnishi, commander of the First Air Fleet in Japanese-held Manila, the Philippine’s capital, championed a special attack force (tokubetsu kogeki tai, abbreviated as tokkotai) that would inflict maximum damage on Allied naval vessels squeezing the island empire: Japan’s food…