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…
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…
Pentagon, Washington, D.C. · May 31, 1945 On this date in 1945 a special group met in the Pentagon to search for an alternative to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The group had been called into existence by the new American president, Harry S. Truman. Neither Truman nor anyone else in the room knew…
Hashirajima Anchoring Area, Hiroshima Bay, Japan · May 27, 1942 A little over four 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…
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…
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea · May 4, 1942 On this date in 1942 the five-day Battle of the Coral Sea began. A Japanese invasion fleet was steaming toward the capital of Australian Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, which had the potential of becoming, after Rabaul’s capture earlier in January, another major Japanese staging point…
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…
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…
