Pacific War

The Pacific War was a theatre of World War II including East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania, separate from World War II in Europe.

Western accounts generally consider the war to have started with the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941. Chinese accounts date it from Japan's invasion of central China in July 1937, or even their expansion into Manchuria in 1931. The war ended with Japanese surrender in August, 1945; an important factor was that the first, and so far the only, atomic bombs used in warfare had just been detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Understand

“

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

”

—US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, December 8, 1941

Japan began to expand in the late 19th century, annexing Okinawa in 1879, then defeating China in a short decisive war in 1894/95, annexing Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, and forcing China to give up its influence over its vassal state Korea. In the same period, the US became more active in the Pacific, taking over the Philippines in 1898 after a war with Spain, and annexing Hawaii and Guam. Various European powers also expanded their holdings or influence in the region.

Japan won a war against the Russian Empire in 1905, the first time in centuries that a non-European power defeated a European one. Once the Russians were out of their way, they annexed Korea outright in 1910. Japan would join the Allies during World War I, and would thus gain more territory from the defeated Central Powers, including the former German concessions in China, following the end of that war in 1918. Japan then staged the Mukden Incident and used it as a pretext to occupy Manchuria in 1931, and invaded central China in 1937.

There was a faction fight among the Japanese high command in the late 30s; they all agreed that expanding the empire was a fine idea, but how? Should they "Strike North", expand into Mongolia and Siberia and fight only the Russians, or "Strike South" which would mean fighting the US and the British Empire? Striking north was tried, but in 1939 the Soviets gave Japanese forces a thorough thrashing at the Battle of Kalkhin Gol in Mongolia; after that, they concentrated on striking south.

China

During the course of the war, the Japanese managed to occupy much of eastern China, including the then-capital Nanjing. The invasion, however, turned out to be a disaster for both sides.

The Chinese were fighting an invader with far better armament and training, making do with whatever weapons their allies could send (many of them World War I surplus), enduring some spectacularly vicious oppression, and taking enormous numbers of casualties — over ten million military and civilian deaths, far more than any other nation except the Soviet Union. Moreover, they were disunited; the Communists and the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were sometimes more interested in their own disputes than in battling Japan.

Despite all that, the Chinese Army (run by the Nationalists with American advisors) managed to give the Japanese a remarkably hard time. Japanese planners thought they could take all of China in three months, leave a small force to hold it, and move most of their armies elsewhere. Actually, it took them three months just to take Shanghai and in eight years of fighting, 1937-1945, they never managed to take more than about half of China. The Chinese Army fought on through the entire war, often retreating but always at a cost to the enemy. Chinese guerrillas and saboteurs — Nationalist, Communist and independent — harassed the Japanese everywhere. Roughly half of the total Japanese ground forces were tied down in China throughout the war, including troops they had planned to use elsewhere. All the Allied land victories in the Pacific War were partly due to Chinese tenacity.

American, British and Dutch sanctions were imposed on Japan after the invasion of China; those, in particular restrictions on oil imports, were the main reason Japan gave for going to war with those nations. The western powers also sent supplies to China via the Burma Road.

Japan joins the world war

Meanwhile, World War II in Europe began with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and became more complex when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

The conflict became global in December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, other US bases in the Pacific, the Philippines, and British possessions such as Hong Kong, Burma and Malaya. The United States and the entire British Empire immediately declared war on Japan, and Germany declared war on the US. The Soviet Union did not declare war on Japan until after the end of the war in Europe.

Japanese conquests

After that, Japan proceeded to invade and occupy much of Southeast Asia and parts of Oceania; they even managed to bomb the city of Darwin in Australia. By the middle of 1943, virtually all of Southeast Asia had been conquered by Japan, with the colonial powers of the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United States all having suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the Japanese.

The Japanese took effective control of some areas without fighting. The Vichy government in France, essentially a German puppet regime, ordered French administrators in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) to co-operate with Japan, and most did. Thailand, the only country in Southeast Asia not colonized by Western powers, remained nominally independent but was forced to dance to the Japanese tune. Japan was able to establish military bases in these countries and to freely move troops and supplies through them.

Japanese propaganda claimed they were driving out Western imperialists, leading an "Asia for Asians" movement, and this got them some support; countries such as India had both pro-Japanese and pro-Allied movements. Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the pro-Japanese Indian National Army (INA), is widely regarded as a national hero in India. In many areas, this was also divided along ethnic lines; in Malaya, at least initially, the Japanese were welcomed by the ethnic Malays and Indians, but opposed by the ethnic Chinese. In China both the Kuomintang and the Communists opposed Japan, but they were sometimes more interested in fighting each other. Everywhere, the local political movements were jockeying for control and trying to use the war to gain independence and/or domestic political influence for the time after the war.

Japanese rule in the occupied territories was brutal, and by the end of the war, the Japanese had lost the support of much of the local population who initially supported them (e.g. Burmese independence hero Aung San). In the occupied areas, Japanese troops engaged in mass rapes, massacres and pillaging, with Nanking Massacre of 1937-38 being the most notorious. Many women from China, Korea and other occupied areas were forced to serve as "comfort women", sex slaves in Japanese military brothels. The Japanese also performed inhumane experiments on captive locals from the occupied territories, the most famous being Unit 731 in Manchuria (listed below), though other similar units existed throughout the occupied territories. They also treated prisoners of war very badly; perhaps the most famous incidents were the "Bataan death march" and the Bridge on the River Kwai, but there were many others.

As retribution for their role in resisting Japanese rule in China, the ethnic Chinese — both in China and in Southeast Asia — were singled out for the harshest treatment; in all the occupied territories, they were rounded up for "screening" by the Japanese, and the unfortunate ones who were identified (often arbitrarily) as anti-Japanese were brought to remote locations and shot.

The tide turns

The Japanese suffered two important naval defeats at the hands of the Americans early in 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea in May and the Battle of Midway in June. These were the first naval battles in history fought mainly by aircraft carriers which never came within sight of each other. The Americans were intercepting Japanese communication, and had broken many Japanese codes, which was an advantage in both battles. At Midway they surprised the Japanese by destroying their aircraft carriers when the planes were away on a bombing raid.

Two land campaigns, both hard fought and both starting in mid-1942 and lasting until early 1943, also went badly for Japan. In what is now Papua New Guinea a mainly Australian force gave them their first defeat on land of the war at Milne Bay then drove them back along the Kokoda Track. Meanwhile the Americans took the island of Guadalcanal after a prolonged and intense fight, allowing them to defend their supply and communication lines to Australia and New Zealand and to create a forward base for island-hopping toward Japan. This marked the turning point in the Pacific War.

After that the Aussies continued the New Guinea campaign while the British re-took Burma with the help of the Chinese, and reopened the Burma Road to supply Chinese forces. The Japanese had spread their forces too thinly in China, and the Chinese were able to counterattack and reclaim some of the occupied territories. The Americans re-took the Philippines and captured a series of islands across the Pacific, including some like Guam that Japan had taken from them in the first months of the war. In early 1945 they won fierce battles in Okinawa and Iwo Jima and occupied those islands, putting them in position to bomb or invade the Japanese mainland.

The invasion never took place. The Americans dropped the first (and to date only) atomic bombs to be used in actual combat on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, followed by Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on 15 August 1945, bringing World War II to an end.

Aftermath

Following the surrender, Japan was occupied by the Americans and forced to give up all its colonies. While the Emperor remained on his throne, many political and military leaders were indicted in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and many were sentenced to death. Taiwan and Manchuria were returned to China, though the Chinese Civil War would resume following the Japanese surrender, eventually resulting in victory for the Communists in the mainland, and the Nationalists being forced to retreat to Taiwan, which continues to be governed separately to this day. Korea regained its independence, but would be split into the communist North Korea and the capitalist South Korea, leading up to the Korean War. The Americans would eventually leave mainland Japan in 1952, though the American military continues to maintain several bases in different parts of the country. Okinawa was only returned to Japan in 1972, though the United States continues to maintain a strong military presence there.

The Western colonial powers also got their colonies back, but the war had galvanised many nationalist movements, which were to come of age in the years to come and eventually lead to the independence of the colonies. The first was the Philippines, where American rule ended in 1946; the largest was the end of the British Raj in 1947, which became the modern countries of India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh. The Indochina Wars were a brutal example of lingering national and ideological conflict in Asia. Hong Kong and Macau would eventually be given back to China in the 1990s but part of the agreement between China and the former colonial powers stipulates a "one country two systems" arrangement that makes both act like independent countries in some regards.

Sites

Many places that were sites of battles, atrocities or other wartime activities can be visited. There are also many museums with exhibits wholly or partly related to this war.

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Map of Pacific War