Washington, D.C. · August 14, 1982 Some 44,000 Native Americans served in the U.S. military during World War II. There were one-and-a-half times more Native American volunteers than draftees; 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 of…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 9, 1945 Despite the shockwaves that Hiroshima’s destruction on August 6, 1945, sent through Imperial circles, Japan’s government refused to agree to an unconditional surrender, their leaders insisting on preconditions that protected the status of Hirohito as emperor. (Without Japanese foot-dragging, would the war have been over…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 8, 1945 On this date in 1945 in Japan, two days after 40,000 Hiroshima men, women, and children had died in an instant (90,000–166,000 would die within days of burns and radiation), U.S. airplanes carpet-bombed the country with over five million leaflets. The leaflets described Hiroshima’s…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 6, 1945 For several months the U.S. had dropped more than 63 million leaflets across Japan, warning civilians of devastating aerial bombings. Many Japanese cities suffered terrible damage from napalm bombs that set their wood-frame buildings on fire. On August 1, some 80 percent of Hachioji, a rail choke point near…
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 later engagements is estimated at 116,000 Japanese merchant seamen, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions….
Saigon, 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 reaction to Japanese aggression…
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 cargo…
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 Operation Starvation—the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits—Navy air groups destroyed over half the train ferries…
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…
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…