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History > 20th century > WW2 (1939-1945) > USA, World > Timeline in pictures
India, Asia, Pacific > Timeline in pictures
The Last Kamikaze | Guardian Features Video The Guardian 11 August 2015
The last kamikaze: 'I felt the blood was draining from my face'
‘It sounds strange, but we were congratulating each other for being selected’ for the special suicide attack unit.
‘When I knew we had lost the war ... the thought going through my mind was I had missed my chance to die ... and be remembered in infinite glory.’
Two Japanese veterans share memories of the second world war and the aftermath of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3qoNE4XwhM
War And Conflict-Wwii
Pfc. Faris M. (Bob) Tuohy, 19 holding coffee cup &, along w. his fellow Marines, looking grimy & weary from 2 days & 2 nights of fighting on Eniwetok Atoll during WWII.
Location: Marshall Islands Date taken: 1944
Photograph: Ray R. Platnick
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=09888f22a734f933
Louis Silvie Zamperini 1917-2014
Capt. Louis Zamperini, right, and Capt. Fred Garrett at Hamilton Field, Calif., after their release from a Japanese prisoner of war camp in 1945.
Photograph: PCS/Associated Press
Louis Zamperini, Olympian and ‘Unbroken’ War Survivor, Dies at 97 By IRA BERKOW NYT JULY 3, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/
Olympic runner whose remarkable story of survival as a prisoner of war in World War II gained new attention in 2010 with the publication of a best-selling biography by Laura Hillenbrand
(...)
Ms. Hillenbrand’s book, “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” recounted in vivid detail how Mr. Zamperini — a track star at the University of Southern California and an airman during the war — crashed into the Pacific, was listed as dead and spent 47 days adrift in a life raft before his capture by the Japanese.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/
Eric Sutherland Lomax 1919-2012
The experience of three and a half years of slave labour and torture as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, on the notorious Burma-Siam railway, dominated the rest of the life of Eric Lomax.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/09/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/09/
165th infantry attacking Butaritari, Yellow Beach Two find it difficult to wade through coral-bottomed waters while dodging Japanese gunfire.
Location: Makin Atoll, Gilbert Islands Date taken: November 20, 1943
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=7342004b71c86934
USA
General Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964
second world war supreme allied commander
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/timeline/index.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX96.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX98.html
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0126.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/29/macarthur-reel-history
International Military Tribunal for the Far East IMTFE
Tokyo Trials / Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal 1946-1948
Jap War Criminals Arraigned, Tokyo
Date taken: 1946
Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=f1bfe4a6feb8274e
Jap War Criminals Arraigned, Tokyo
Date taken: 1946
Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=5150bc4a0b3cabd0
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX101.html http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/tokyo.htm
2 September 1945
Japanese surrender ceremony on board the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay
日本の降伏
Japanese Sign Final Surrender 日本の降伏
News reel of the surrender ceremony on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Background music is "With Honour Crowned".
YouTube > sget88 Aug 6, 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcnH_kF1zXc
Mr. Desfor photographed the official Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
Max Desfor, 104, War Photographer at Midcentury, Is Dead Mr. Desfor’s photo of hundreds of Korean War refugees crawling across a damaged bridge in 1950 helped win him a Pulitzer Prize. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NYT FEB. 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5MMVd5XOK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcnH_kF1zXc
Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 1945
Time Covers - The 40S TIME cover 08-20-1945 The Fall of Japan, re Japan's acceptance of unconditional surrender on August 14, 1945, ending WWII. (from TAC 1233-1)
Date taken: August 20, 1945
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=f87800b8af46bd44
July 30, 1945
USS Indianapolis bombed
The USS Indianapolis is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sinks within minutes in shark-infested waters.
Only 317 of the 1,196 men on board survived.
However, the Indianapolis had already completed its major mission: the delivery of key components of the atomic bomb that would be dropped a week later at Hiroshima to Tinian Island in the South Pacific. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uss-indianapolis-bombed
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uss-indianapolis-bombed
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/asia/
http://www.npr.org/2015/07/26/
April 6, 1945
The Yamato battleship is sunk by American bomber and fighter planes
In early April 1945, the Pacific war was in its final, violent days.
American soldiers had slowly and bloodily fought their way, island by island, across the Pacific, while the Japanese were running out of kamikaze pilots and planes, and their navy had been half destroyed.
This is the setting for both a battle and a clash between two styles of warfare.
On one side, America is ready to attack Okinawa with 1,500 ships and 250,000 men.
On the other, Japan is led by an emperor who traces his line of succession back to the sun goddess and the Japanese military is possessed, Morris explains, by “the conviction that battles can be won by single, deadly blows, samurai style.”
Now the Yamato is sent on a suicide mission.
At 3 o’clock on the afternoon of April 6 it sets sail for Okinawa, where there is no plan but for the great ship to fire away at its enemies.
At 12:30 the following day, 386 American bomber and fighter planes begin their attack, joined by submarines, and three hours later the Yamato slowly capsizes.
This was the end of the era of battleships and great sea battles.
It was, Morris claims, “perhaps even the end of the imperial idea itself.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/
Japan B-29 missions against Toyama, Honshu night of August 1-2, 1945
Aerial photo taken from American B-29 shows massive fire damage caused by night time incendiary bombing raid over city.
Location: Toyama, Honshu, Japan Date taken: 1945
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=e939926964f767ac
Despite a sophisticated alert system and a decade of air defense drills, the arrival just after midnight of a wave of B-29 bombers plunged Toyama into chaos.
Superfortresses — 173 of them — encountered only sparse antiaircraft fire as they released around 1,500 tons of incendiaries onto the city's center.
In a few short hours, Toyama was enveloped by a "sea of fire,"
(...)
Over 95% of the city was incinerated, leaving around 2,600 people dead.
(...)
Rather than a sideshow to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, the incendiary destruction of cities was a fundamental facet of the war against Japan.
The atomic bombings evolved out of a fierce U.S. campaign to target and destroy entire cities, in hopes of forcing a Japanese surrender.
This was not how air power strategists had initially imagined the war against Japan.
The commitment at first was to the precision bombing of "war-making targets," such as airplane factories.
Planes, however, struggled to hit their targets, due in no small part to the jet streams they encountered while flying at high altitudes over Japan.
Eager to both justify the immense costs of the newly developed B-29 and play a central role in the defeat of Japan, U.S. Army Air Forces officials in Washington, D.C., were hungry for results.
Enter Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the commander of the 21st Bomber Command based on the Mariana Islands, who, in early 1945, ushered in a shift to nighttime incendiary area bombing — a doctrine that quickly moved to the center of the American air assault against Japan.
(...)
The scale of destruction wrought by this scorched-earth campaign remains underappreciated.
By the time of the assault on Toyama, incendiary raids had already destroyed significant portions of dozens of cities and wiped out over a quarter of Japan's housing.
Some Americans may be familiar with the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, the most destructive incendiary air raid in history.
Overnight, B-29s burned down 16 square miles of the capital's main working-class neighborhood, claiming an estimated 100,000 lives.
Elated with the results, LeMay thereafter sent squadrons to burn down Osaka, Nagoya and other large cities in quick succession.
In just 10 days, the U.S. Army Air Forces reduced 32 square miles of urban fabric to ashes.
Further bombing of these major metropolises in April and May resulted in destruction that one staff officer described as "beyond our wildest hopes."
In what remains one of the most striking gaps in American public memory regarding the war with Japan, the AAF thereafter turned its sights on cities such as Toyama that were of minor or negligible importance to Japan's war machine.
Between June 17 and Aug. 14, one after another of Japan's smaller cities joined their larger cousins in fire and ruin.
In total, 8,000 sorties dropped roughly 54,000 tons of incendiary bombs on 66 cities, killing (by conservative estimates) about 180,000 people.
The attacks burned 76 square miles of urban Japan to the ground.
To bring home the extent of the destruction, one postwar report by a government magazine included a U.S. map showing dozens of American cities with comparable populations, asking the reader to imagine (as in the case of Toyama) the incineration of 96.5% of Chattanooga, Tenn.
Still, there were sensitivities to potential criticism from the American public, so AAF officials commonly used sanitizing language to mask the fact that they were targeting entire cities for destruction.
Press releases described attacks not on cities, but on "industrial urban areas."
Tactical reports set their sights not on densely populated neighborhoods, but on "worker housing."
In the privacy of briefing rooms, AAF officials made no bones about the fact that they were targeting residential areas and civilian populations.
Publicly, however, they went to great pains to cast Japanese cities as singularly military or industrial in composition.
Toyama is a case in point.
Although planners highlighted the city's industrial sites, maps distributed to flight crews led directly to the residential city center.
By dawn, Toyama's schools, shrines, hospitals, and neighborhoods lay in ruins.
Left unscathed were the war-related factories just outside the city.
Carl Spaatz, the commanding general of the newly christened U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, handwrote an amendment to a press communique on the bombings of Toyama and three other small cities to emphasize that bombers struck "industrial areas" rather than the entirety of each city.
While the scale of Toyama's destruction was extraordinary, the planning and prosecution of this raid was business as usual.
In the parlance of American flight crews, the firebombing of this city was just another "milk run" — an act by then so commonplace it was akin to a local neighborhood delivery.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/01/
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/01/
Japan B-29 missions against Tokyo March 10, 1945
Tokyo burns under B-29 firebomb assault, May 26, 1945 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firebombing_of_Tokyo.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo Primary source > Library of Congress DIGITAL ID: (b&w film copy neg.) cph 3c11427
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c11427
At Yalta, the Soviet Union also agreed to join the war against Japan as soon as Germany was defeated.
The United States and Britain, shaken by the suicidal defence of Pacific islands, feared that storming Japan would cost up to half a million allied casualties.
At that stage, nobody knew whether the new atomic bomb would work.
In the meantime, General Curtis LeMay stepped up his bombing attacks.
On the night of 9 March, he sent his Superfortress squadrons on a fire-bombing raid against Tokyo.
The mainly wooden houses blazed into an inferno.
It is estimated that 97,000 people died, 125,000 were injured and 1 million left homeless.
On 6 April, US forces landed on Okinawa to seize it as a springboard for the invasion of Japan itself.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/
On March 10, 1945, flying in darkness at low altitudes, more than 300 B-29s dropped close to a quarter of a million incendiary bombs over Tokyo. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-b-29s/ - broken URL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/
April - June 1945 Pacific Battle of Okinawa
Ernie Pyle listening to a news report on war activities over the loudspeaker of a Navy transport carrying Marines to the invasion of Okinawa in 1945.
Credit Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The Man Who Told America the Truth About D-Day June 5, 2019 NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/
On 6 April, US forces landed on Okinawa to seize it as a springboard for the invasion of Japan itself.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/
The Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest and costliest of World War II in the Pacific.
The United States needed a base to stage an invasion of mainland Japan.
The island of Okinawa was the crucial final stepping stone for the Americans.
For the Japanese, it would be the first time they met the enemy on home soil.
The battle lasted 82 days.
More than 12,000 Americans were killed or missing in action -- the highest number lost in a single battle in the Pacific war.
More than 70,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawan conscripts were killed defending the island.
Civilians, caught in the crossfire, bore the highest toll -- perhaps as many as 100,000 to 150,000 Okinawan men, woman, and children lost their lives during the nearly three months of fighting. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-civilians-okinawa/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-civilians-okinawa/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-major-battles/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/11/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/
near the Japanese island of Kyushu
Lt. Cmdr. Joseph R. Carmichael Jr.
May 11, 1945
The Bunker Hill, an aircraft carrier with dozens of planes and vast stores of fuel and ammunition on its flight deck, was struck by two kamikaze planes in suicide attacks within minutes of each other. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/us/joseph-r-carmichael-jr-hero-of-uss-bunker-hill-dies-at-96.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/us/
Philippines The Battle for Manila February-March 1945
San Thomas Prison Liberation
Two emaciated American civilians, Lee Rogers (L) & John C. Todd, sit outside gym which had been used as a Japanese prison camp following their release by Allied forces liberating the city.
Location: Manila, Luzon, Philippines Date taken: February 05, 1945
Photographer: Carl Mydans Life Images
MacArthur's forces take back the city
San Thomas Prison Liberation
Manila was only one of the great cities of Southeast Asia overrun by the Japanese war machine between July, 1941 and April, 1942.
But unlike Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore, Djakarta and Rangoon -- which late in the war the Japanese surrendered to British forces without a fight -- Manila was the only city in which Japanese and Allied forces collided.
The results were unspeakable: an estimated 100,000 of its citizens died.
In the entire war, only the battles of Berlin and Stalingrad resulted in more casualties. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX98.html - broken URL
16-26 February 1945
Pacific ocean
Battle for the Recapture of Corregidor
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/macarthur-war-pacific/
1945
Pacific Ocean
Mogmog Island in the Ulithi Atoll, part of the Caroline Islands
Vast array of American warships just offshore of naval base on Mogmog Island in the Ulithi Atoll, part of the Caroline Islands.
Location: Caroline Islands Date taken: 1945
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=231a781adb859430
Ulithi was a major base for the U.S. Navy in World War II.
The Japanese had established a radio and weather station early in the war, and had used the lagoon as an anchorage occasionally, which resulted in strikes from US aircraft carriers early in 1944.
However, Ulithi was perfectly positioned to act as a staging area, being nearly equidistant from the Philippines, Formosa, and Okinawa.
On September 23, 1944, an army regiment landed unopposed (the Japanese having evacuated the atoll some months earlier), followed a few days later by a battalion of Seabees.
The survey ship USS Sumner (AGS-5) surveyed the lagoon and reported it capable of holding 700 vessels, and indeed just a few months later, 617 ships had gathered there for the Okinawa operation.
The huge anchorage capacity was greater than either Majuro or Pearl Harbor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulithi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulithi
Pacific ocean US flag raised over Iwo Jima 23 February 1945
Joe Rosenthal’s original, uncropped image from Iwo Jima.
Photograph: Joe Rosenthal/AP
Marines investigate claim of mistaken identity in Iwo Jima photograph Associated Press in Des Moines G Tuesday 3 May 2016 16.32 BST
Related
Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division raise the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945.
After more than seven decades, Navy Corpsman John Bradley's name will be replaced in captions with the name of Pvt. 1st Class Harold Schultz.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/23/
Related
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/16/ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/28/alan-wood-iwo-jima-flag-photo
Flag raising on Iwo Jima. Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press. February 23, 1945. 80-G-413988. Pictures of World War II US National Archives http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/ww2-156.jpg http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/?template=print#iwo
Related http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5685028
The photograph, taken on Feb. 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press.
Joe Rosenthal, Photographer at Iwo Jima, Dies August 21, 2006 NYT By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/business/media/22rosenthalcnd.html Related http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5685028
Put all your might into the Mighty 7th War Loan Collection: Ad*Access Company: F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Co. Product: 7th War Loan Publication: New Yorker Publication Type: Magazine
Military Item Number: W0250 Duke University http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess_W0250/
Large armada of US Navy ships bringing American Marines & supplies toward beachheads along island of Iwo Jima during opening hours of the battle to take the island from occupying Japanese forces.
Location: Mt Suribachi, Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands Date taken: February 19, 1945
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=ef8f537a9a2be101
Iwo Jima Action
American Marines crouch below hillside while detonating large explosive charge intended to destroy cave network connecting Japanese fortifications dug into the ground of Iwo Jima.
Location: Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands Date taken: 1945
Photographer: W. Eugene Smith Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=377b111e2396cff2
Dead Japanese soldier following battle for Iwo Jima during WWII.
Location: Volcano Islands Date taken: February 1945
Photographer: W. Eugene Smith Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=85635bd2747feb33
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/23/newsid_3564000/3564547.stm http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124232057 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7227947.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5270434.stm http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5685028 https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/letters-iwo-jima/ http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.09749/ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/business/media/22rosenthalcnd.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pacific-major-battles/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/16/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/japanese-prime-minister-iwo-jima
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iwo-jima-graves-japanese-soldiers
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/nyregion/20iwo.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/20/secondworldwar.japan
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/20/
Philippines Leyte Gulf 20 October 1944 - 15 August 1945
Hospital On Leyte Black-veiled Philippino women kneeling at benches before alter where priest conducts mass while badly burned American Army officer lies swathed in bandages as he convalesces on cot in Cens Cathedral turned into a makeshift Army hospital.
Location: Leyte, Philippines Date taken: December 1944
Photographer: W. Eugene Smith Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=91bfe450df41e89c
One of the most memorable images of World War II is that of MacArthur wading ashore at Leyte, making good on his pledge to return to and liberate his beloved Philippines.
But often lost in the story is the epic battle being waged around him, which included the greatest naval engagement in history and a long, difficult land campaign.
As both prongs of the Allied advance -- MacArthur's and Nimitz's -- gained speed in 1944, the Japanese grew determined to make a stand in the Philippines.
Most American war planners expected the greatest resistance in Luzon, where Japanese air bases in China, Formosa, Okinawa and Indochina could play a decisive role.
But the Japanese defense plan, code-named "Sho-1," called for a massive commitment at Leyte to cripple the American fleet and destroy the invading force.
The plan nearly worked. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/maps/leyte01.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pacific-major-battles/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/03/04/
June and November, 1944
Pacific Ocean
Mariana and Palau Islands campaign
Offensive launched by United States forces against Imperial Japanese forces in the Mariana Islands and Palau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_and_Palau_Islands_campaign
July 21-August 8, 1944
Second Battle of Guam
American capture of the Japanese held island of Guam
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5220.htm
Saipan 15 June-9 July 1944
A member of a Marine patrol on Saipan found this family of Japs hiding in a hillside cave. The mother, four children and a dog, took shelter from the fierce fighting in that area.
Cpl. Angus Robertson, June 21, 1944. 127-GR-113-83266. Pictures of World War II > Island Campaigns US National Archives http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/ww2-144.jpg http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/
D-Day for Saipan was June 15, 1944.
Twenty thousand Marines made it to shore by nightfall.
U.S. forces had come to understand that the enemy they faced did not believe in surrender.
Two days before the battle ended on July 9, in one of the Pacific war's most horrifying suicide charges, 3,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors attacked the U.S. Army's 27th Division using whatever weapons they had left -- grenades, rifles, mortars and even rocks, swords and rusty bayonets attached to bamboo sticks.
The Japanese preference for suicide over capture had been repeated throughout the war in the Pacific.
But it was civilian suicides that would forever mark the memories of American troops on Saipan. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/pacific-koyu-shiroma/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pacific-koyu-shiroma/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pacific-major-battles/
19-21 June 1944
Battle of the Philippine Sea (Marianas Turkey Shoot)
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5220.htm
7 March - 18 July 1944
South East Asia Northern Burma and north east India
Defence of Imphal and Kohima
The Battle of Kohima and Imphal was the bloodiest of World War II in India, and it cost Japan much of its best army in Burma.
(...)
The battlefields in what are now the Indian states of Nagaland and Manipur — some just a few miles from the border with Myanmar, which was then Burma — are also well preserved because of the region’s longtime isolation.
(...)
The battle began some two years after Japanese forces routed the British in Burma in 1942, which brought the Japanese Army to India’s eastern border.
Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi persuaded his Japanese superiors to allow him to attack British forces at Imphal and Kohima in hopes of preventing a British counterattack.
But General Mutaguchi planned to push farther into India to destabilize the British Raj, which by then was already being convulsed by the independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi.
General Mutaguchi brought a large number of Indian troops captured after the fall of Malaya and Singapore who agreed to join the Japanese in hopes of creating an independent India.
The British were led by Lt. Gen. William Slim, a brilliant tactician who re-formed and retrained the Eastern Army after its crushing defeat in Burma.
The British and Indian forces were supported by planes commanded by the United States Army Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell.
Once the Allies became certain that the Japanese planned to attack, General Slim withdrew his forces from western Burma and had them dig defensive positions in the hills around Imphal Valley, hoping to draw the Japanese into a battle far from their supply lines.
But none of the British commanders believed that the Japanese could cross the nearly impenetrable jungles around Kohima in force, so when a full division of nearly 15,000 Japanese troops came swarming out of the vegetation on April 4, the town was only lightly defended by some 1,500 British and Indian troops.
The Japanese encirclement meant that those troops were largely cut off from reinforcements and supplies, and a bitter battle eventually led the British and Indians to withdraw into a small enclosure next to a tennis court.
The Japanese, without air support or supplies, eventually became exhausted, and the Allied forces soon pushed them out of Kohima and the hills around Imphal.
On June 22, British and Indian forces finally cleared the last of the Japanese from the crucial road linking Imphal and Kohima, ending the siege.
The Japanese 15th Army, 85,000 strong for the invasion of India, was essentially destroyed, with 53,000 dead and missing.
Injuries and illnesses took many of the rest.
There were 16,500 British casualties.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/world/asia/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/ff6_imphal.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/world/asia/
Burma
Britain’s Fourteenth Army
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jun/26/
In June 1942, Japan invaded and occupied Kiska and Attu, the westernmost islands of Alaska's Aleutian Chain, an archipelago of 69 islands stretching some 1,200 miles across the North Pacific Ocean toward Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
From a strategic perspective, Japan wanted to close what they perceived as America's back door to the Far East.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/
April 18, 1942
Doolittle raids
America’s first strike against the Japanese homeland in World War II
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/us/
On April 18, 1942, sixteen B25 bombers, with 80 volunteers commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, took off from the aircraft carrier Hornet.
Their mission was to drop the first bombs on Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.
All reached their targets successfully, with little Japanese response.
Then, low on fuel, fifteen of the planes crashed or were abandoned in China.
(The Japanese would eventually execute 250,000 Chinese for helping the American fliers escape.)
A sixteenth plane landed near Vladivostok.
Two of the Doolittle raiders came down in enemy territory and three crewmen were executed.
But 71 men eventually came home.
The raid caused minor damage, but the psychological effect, on both the Americans and the Japanese, was incalculable.
Still recovering militarily and emotionally from Pearl Harbor, America had, through a bold stroke by real heroes, brought the war home to Japan.
Film of the raid was widely distributed; 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (1943), was a bestseller. http://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/battlefield/doolittle_raid_midway/
The raid led by Colonel Doolittle inflicted relatively light damage on military and industrial targets, but it delivered a moral victory to Americans, disconsolate since the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor less than five months earlier, and it was a stunning psychological blow to the Japanese, who had been led to believe that their homeland was inviolable.
The raid became the basis for the 1944 movie “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” adapted from the book of the same title by Capt. Ted W. Lawson, a pilot who took part in the attack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/
http://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/battlefield/doolittle_raid_midway/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
August 7, 1942 - February 9, 1943
Northeast of Australia Solomon Islands Guadalcanal
Guadalcanal Gruesome severed head of a napalmed Japanese soldier propped up below gun turret of a disabled Japanese tank.
Location: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands Date taken: February 1943
Photographer: Ralph Theodore Morse (USA, 1917-2015) Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=3dec57e9e439ffb4
Bitter contest between the Japanese and the Americans that marked a turning point in the Pacific war.
The struggle on Guadalcanal was protracted, and the period from August 1942 to February 1943 saw some of the most bitter fighting of the war.
In all, there were some 50 actions involving warships or aircraft, 7 major naval battles, and 10 land engagements. http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5210.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/japan_no_surrender_01.shtml
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5210.htm
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/dogfight-over-guadalcanal/240/
Tarawa Atoll Battle of Tarawa November 20 - November 23, 1943
US Marines dashing for cover while assaulting Japanese positions on Betio Island.
Location: Betio, Tarawa, Gilbert Islands Date taken: November 21, 1943
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=22a82f93f23885eb
The Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony is occupied by Japanese forces.
The Tarawa Atoll sees some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific between Japan and the Allied forces. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/country_profiles/2944816.stm
US Marine preparing to throw a hand grenade while under fire on Betio Island during the invasion of Tarawa.
Location: Betio, Tarawa, Gilbert Islands Date taken: November 20, 1943
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=939bb2fa024c0e18
Tarawa Raid And Landing
Photographer: John Florea Undated
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=ffe58804cd654fd7
Tarawa Raid And Landing Undated
Photographer: John Florea
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=f33b9706e8db266f
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tarawa
1942
Navajo code talkers
Samuel Billison 1926-2004
Chester Nez 1921-2014
For Mr. Nez and his fellows, World War II was quite literally a war of words.
Their work, and the safety of tens of thousands of American servicemen, depended crucially on the code that they had created during 13 fevered weeks in 1942, as the prospect of Allied victory in the Pacific seemed increasingly uncertain.
Members of other Native American tribes, including the Comanche, Choctaw and Winnebago, using codes based on their languages, were also recruited for the war effort, serving in Europe and North Africa.
But the Navajo, who served in the Pacific, furnished the war's single largest contingent of code talkers.
About 400 Navajos followed the original 29 to war;
(...)
Serving on the front lines in the Pacific's key battles, Mr. Nez and other members of the Marine Corps's 382nd Platoon — made up entirely of Navajos recruited for their fluency in the language — used the code to relay movements of American and enemy troops, casualty reports, coordinates of strategic targets and other vital intelligence to Marines in the field.
or other devices that could scramble voice communications that could be used on the front lines,” David A. Hatch, the National Security Agency's historian, said in an interview on Thursday.
“What the code talkers did was to provide absolute security for the information we transmitted on the radios, denying to the enemy vital information that we were picking up from their communications.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/06/us/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/dec/07/guardianobituaries.usa
Philippines
Internment of American Civilians
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/html.php?section=6
Bridge on River Kwai
The Japanese used Allied prisoners of war and laborers from Malaysia, India and Singapore beginning in June of 1942 to complete the strategic railway bridge linking Thailand and Burma, now known as Myanmar.
More than 300,000 prisoners and slave laborers worked on the 268-mile rail line.
An estimated 90,000 died from disease, malnutrition and ill treatment.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-19-mn-3584-story.html
1942
Philippines
Fall of Bataan - April 9, 1942
American troops surrender to Japanese forces - May 1942
https://www.archives.gov/research/military/ww2/photos
http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.02940/
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_war_timeline_1942.htm
April 9, 1942
Philippines The fall of Bataan
News of this atrocity sparked outrage in the US, as shown by this poster. The newspaper clipping shown refers to the Bataan Death March. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-Japan2.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March
Creator: Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. Bureau of Special Services. (03/09/1943 - 09/15/1945) NARA ARC ID: 515483 / Local ID: 44-PA-1804 http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=515483&jScript=true
The Bataan Death March from Bataan to Cabanatuan, the prison camp
as many as 11,000 soldiers died at the hands of the Japanese in the Philippines during the Bataan Death March in 1942 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/us/16brown.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/macarthur-siege-bataan/ https://www.archives.gov/research/military/ww2/photos http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.02940/ http://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_war_timeline_1942.htm http://www.pbs.org/thewar/about_episode_guide_01.htm https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124054&page=1
https://www.ina.fr/video/AFE98000046/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/08/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/19/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/us/16brown.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/books/17garner.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/books/excerpt-tears-in-the-darkness.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/opinion/25norman.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/opinion/26kotler.html
Military operations in the Pacific Timeline
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/
June 4-7 1942
Pacific ocean USA Japan Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway is viewed as a turning point of the war in the Pacific because of the island's strategic importance.
Its location would allow an occupying Japanese force to launch attacks against Hawaii and the American fleet based there, as well as Alaska http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/94/9412/wwii.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/battle_midway_01.shtml http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/7/newsid_3499000/3499378.stm http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/battle_midway_01.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/us/
https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,127521,00.html
15 February 1942
Singapore forced to surrender
British forces in Singapore surrender unconditionally to the Japanese seven days after enemy troops first stormed the island.
(...)
comes one week after Japanese forces invaded Singapore and only two weeks since their onslaught on the Malay Peninsula forced the British troops' withdrawal to the island. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/15/newsid_3529000/3529447.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/15/
at the end of 1941 (...) the Japanese launched their great assault across a front stretching from the Malayan peninsula to the central Pacific.
An all-conquering, lightning march down the Indochina peninsula brought 30,000 Japanese troops to the Strait of Johor, between Malaya and Singapore Island.
The British garrison numbered nearly 140,000 but was in total chaos, under‑equipped with no aircraft or tanks, demoralised and disorganised.
General Arthur Percival surrendered the island on 15 February 1942 – the greatest defeat in British military history.
The prisoners – British, Australian, Indian and Malayan - were initially force-marched to Changi, which rapidly became an overcrowded and insanitary concentration camp.
From there, many thousands went to Burma to work on the railway to Siam (now known as Thailand) in appalling conditions.
Brutal interrogations and gratuitous torture became routine. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/09/eric-lomax
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/09/
Pacific Campaign 1941-1945
By Lt. Victor Jorgensen, May 1945. Pvt. J.B. Slagle, USA, receives his daily dressing of wounds on board USS SOLACE enroute from Okinawa to Guam.
1999 digital print. General Records of the Department of the Navy, 1798-1947. (80-G-413963) http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/picturing-the-century-photos/pvt-j-b-slagle.jpg
Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives Eight Portfolios from Part II http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/1930-census-photos/photos-2.html
Torpedoed Japanese destroyer photographed through periscope of U.S.S. Wahoo or U.S.S. Nautilus, June 1942.
80-G-418331. Pictures of World War II > Navy & Naval Battles US National Archives http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/ww2-62.jpg http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/asia_pac_world_war_ii_in_the_pacific/html/1.stm
South-East Asia Burma Campaign 1941/42-1945
Battle-weary soldier who is a member of Merrill's Marauders, pausing with a cigarette during Burma campaign in WWII.
Location: Myanmar Date taken: 1944
Photograph: Bernard Hoffman
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=496fa633d8db3f08
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/burma_campaign_01.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/launch_ani_burma_campaign.shtml
Micronesia becomes major battleground during World War II
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-15519757
Japan American POWs
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/13/
Japan Kamikaze pilots
thousands of young Japanese men tasked to give their lives in last-ditch suicide missions near the end of World War II.
(...)
In dogfights, pilots were instructed to “aim to carve the enemy with our own propellers,”
(...)
The tactics hinged on the belief that Japanese airmen were more willing to die than their enemies.
The force of that conviction was put to the test in October 1944, when Japan’s Navy decided to gamble everything to stop an American attack on its forces in the Philippines, during what would become known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/
Japan aircraft
Zero — the agile Japanese fighter plane that dominated the Pacific skies in the war’s early years —
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/
USA > Japanese-Americans internment camps
USA > Pearl Harbor - 7 December 1941
Related > Anglonautes > History > 20th century > WW2 (1939-1945)
Japan > Hiroshima and Nagasaki - August 1945
USA > Pearl Harbor - 7 December 1941
Related > Anglonautes > Vocapedia
conflicts, wars, climate > civilians > migrants, refugees
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