the European War had a lot of combatants but it was mostly Germany vs the USSR from what I know.
From what I’ve gathered from documentaries, the pacific theater was mostly the US navy and US marines on one side, and the Japanese army and Japanese navy on the other side.
Is this an accurate representation of the battles in the pacific? Did the US Air force or US army play a major role? Did other nations play a major role in the pacific theater?
The concept I’ve always been exposed to is that the US navy would shell an island that the Japanese Army had inhabited, then after shelling it the US marines would invade. I’m not sure if the air force or army had much of a role.
Depends on your definition of the Pacific Theater. Do you include China-Burma-India in the Pacific Theater? If just the Pacific Island campaigns, the US Army and US Army Air Force were involved heavily, especially in the Southwest Pacific, under General MacArthur. Australia was a major combatant in New Guinea.
The Central Pacific campaign was mostly as you describe it, though often Army divisions would participate.
Yes, as gnarator said. The “Army Air Corps” (precursor to USAF) and the Army participated where they could, i.e. land battles and land-based air power projection. While Guadalcanal was the first land battle won by the US Marines, the Army joined and helped out, ultimately taking over, as the Marines were needed elsewhere.
It was also the Army Air Corps who intercepted and shot down Admiral Yamamoto (Japanese Navy) over Bougainville Island, on the NW end of the Solomons, while Guadalcanal is at the SE end.
But to your original question, in terms of numbers, it was largely Japan vs. China. That is where a huge portion of the Japanese Army was.
The part they sent out into the Pacific faced British and Dutch forces at the start, pretty much removing them from the Pacific for good (Dutch Indochina, British Hong Kong and Singapore fell to the Japanese Army early on). They fought Australia in New Guinea and lost. Then, they faced the US forces as described.
Who “beat” the Japanese forces? The Navy, Marines and…US Submarines. You can’t run a sea-based Empire without shipping, and the unrestricted submarine warfare pretty much reduced the Japanese ability to maintain their supply lines to zero.
Yeah, good points. I was only thinking of the small dispersed islands all over the pacific ocean, I wasn’t thinking of southeast Asia.
I really don’t know a lot about the pacific theater, I don’t really know how the Japanese were driven out of east asia (China and Korea) or southeast asia. Whenever I see war documentaries they’re mostly about the smaller islands in the pacific. If there are good documentaries for how Japan was drive out of east asia and southeast asia that are on streaming I’m open to suggestions.
When the war ended, the Japanese still had many troops in China, Korea, and Formosa (Taiwan). Submarines were very effective against Japan, and they were close to collapse before the A-bomb.
The US essentially had two advances against Japan: MacArthur’s and Nimtz’s. When I was a kid reading about World War II, this was presented as brilliant strategy, as “the Japanese would never know where the next advance would come.” The truth was that the Navy didn’t want to serve under MacArthur, who was senior to any admiral in the Navy.
It didn’t really cost the US, but the lack of interservice cooperation meant there was always competition for resources, and a single approach may have worked better. It also could have allowed the Japanese to outnumber and defeat divided forces.
Nearing the end of the war, though, the US basically had combined both advances against the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. They were planning for the last big push, operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese home islands, when the war ended.
They weren’t. They were still in occupation of large areas of east Asia, from Korea down to Singapore, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and Japan surrendered.
And, ironically, for several weeks after the surrender, Japanese troops were the only force in
south-east Asia in sufficient quantity to maintain civil order, so they remained armed and on various policing duties under Allied command.
There was a contingent of Canadian troops helping guard Hong Kong when the Japanese initially invaded the area. They became PoW’s. I remember in the late 60’s when I was growing up, campaigns to get more recognition and help for their special circumstances - the hunger and torture they went through for years as PoW’s was very debilitating later in life.
I remember hearing an interview with one, and he told the reporter about the end of the war. They would see the bombers in the sky from time to time - then one day, all the guards were quiet and huddled together. A few days later, all the guards were gone, nobody was supervising the camps. They found an old cook and asked him what was happening. He said “Hiroshima - awadi!” [Gone]. “Nagasaki - awadi.”
They asked him “a lot of bombs fell on them?”
He demonstrated by putting a sheet of paper on the table, then swept it off with his hand and said “awadi!”
The Russians also participated in the Pacific - for a few days.
At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Joseph Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin agreed to Allied pleas to enter World War II in the Pacific Theater within three months of the end of the war in Europe.
The commencement of the invasion fell between the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August.
So they got into the war just in time, while there was still a war. They still hold some islands to the north of Japan.
Generally yes, the primary combatants who determined the outcome of the war were the United States and Japan. However, the US Army played a much larger role in the PTO than the US Marines did. Twenty-two US Army divisions saw active combat in the Pacific compared to six Marine divisions, the totality of the divisions that the USMC raised during the war. Not wanting to short shift other nations that fought in the Pacific, there’s the UK, India, the Dutch, Australia, New Zealand, China (the Nationalists, Communists, and puppet Japanese government forces), two divisions of West African commonwealth troops (the 81st and 82nd West African divisions), the Soviet Union in the final days, Canada (2,000 troops of the Hong Kong garrison on December 7th 1941 were Canadian). I’m sure I’m missing others, but I’m very tired.
Oh, France - New Caledonia declared for Free France and was a major forward base in the Southwest Pacific in 1942, and French Indochina declared for Vichy France and garrisoned Indochina for the Japanese until the Japanese removed the in a coup d’etat in early 1945 fearing that they were going to switch sides.
While the war in the Pacific was largely a US/Japanese affair, we, the British did play a far from small part.
One of the largest fleets ever assembled by the Royal Navy, it consisted of over two hundred ships and submarines and more than 750 aircraft; including four battleships and six fleet aircraft carriers, fifteen smaller aircraft carriers, eleven cruisers and numerous smaller warships, submarines, and support vessels. The fleet took part in the Battle of Okinawa and the final naval strikes on Japan.
While the shelling was going on the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) would swim up to the beaches, survey, then plant explosives on the reefs and barriers that the Japanese installed to block the landing craft. They would then sometimes lead the landing craft through the gaps they had created. They would sometimes have air support from the US or Australia. My dad was in UDT11. The only casualty they had was when a pilot didn’t pay attention to the briefing and drop his bombs offshore instead of onshore. After the surrender UDT11 was sent to Nagasaki to survey the harbour. The stench of death made several men physically sick.
Burma saw the biggest commitment of Japanese forces outside of China and bigger than ANY US engagement in the Pacific, outside of perhaps post Oct 1944 Philippines.
The attention focused on the battles by popular culture and the viciousness of them has obscured the fact just how tiny the size of the (land) engagements really was. Japanese forces were a regiment at Tarawa, a brigade group at Guam and Saipan, a division at Iwo Jima and a corps at Okinawa.
Compare with 3 reinforced corps for Operation U Go in Burma in March to June of 1944.
In the Far East, the Royal Navy submarine fleet from 1943 also made it very difficult for the Japanese to transfer material from their SE Asian holdings.
Some of this stuff gets into definitional quagmire. As it is presented in U.S. pop culture, most history books written for laymen, most English language documentaries and etc there were two theaters to WWII (from an American perspective), the European and Pacific Theaters. In the context of that point of view, the Pacific Theater was primarily the “island hopping” campaigns of MacArthur and Nimitz and the larger USN/IJN battles going on, the aerial devastation of Japan’s home islands and the ultimate nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
China and Southeast Asia are traditionally treated as “asides” or ancillary elements of the war from this perspective. There’s somewhat understandable reasons for that, while there’s a few exceptions, the overwhelming majority of committed American military force in the war against Japan was tied up in these campaigns. It isn’t so much the position of America that the land war in Asia didn’t matter, but that it wasn’t “America’s part of the story” so to speak.
If you wish to quibble even more, during WWII itself the U.S. viewed the Pacific as actually subdivided into two theaters–the Pacific Ocean Theater and the South West Pacific Theater. The POT corresponding largely to Nimitz advances and the SWPT to MacArthur’s. Nimitz was appointed “Supreme Allied Commander Pacific Ocean Areas” in 1942, and MacArthur was appointed “Supreme Allied Commander South West Pacific Area” in that same year.
The large land wars occurring in Asia at the time have a number of different names. Some historians use the term “Pacific War” and date it as a continuous war going back to the early 1930s. The Allied position was that this area was covered by the “South East Asia Command”, Lord Mountbatten was the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, his deputy was U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell. Stilwell was also at the same time a deputy to Chiang Kai-Shek in the organization of the land war in China. The U.S. military referred to this theater of operations as the China-Burma-India Theater.
It is probably understood but worth saying–while the two U.S. Theaters that were mostly focused on acquiring islands and defeating the Japanese Navy are what laid Japan low and exposed the home island to ruin, there were far more troops on both the Allied and Japanese side in mainland Asia and there had been very large-scale warfare there since before WWII had even broken out.
The USMC has fantastic PR. But yeah, there were a lot of USAAF and US Army units in the PTO. In fact, a lot of the big “Marine” battles were fought in tandem with Army units. Peleliu (1 USMC, 1 Army division), Guam (1 USMC, 1 Army divsion), Okinawa (3 USMC, 4 Army divisions). And other battles were strictly Army- the invasion and conquest of the Phillipines for example, with something like 5 Corps fighting for nearly a year, with 16,000 dead and 47,000 wounded.
In addition, there were British/Indian units fighting the Japanese in Burma and SE Asia, as well as Australian units fighting in New Guinea and Borneo. Both countries had ships fighting in the Allied fleets as well, including the battles off Okinawa and elsewhere.