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Attack on Pearl Harbor
Japan's carrier strike of 7 December 1941 was meant to knock out the US Pacific Fleet long enough for Japan to seize the oil and rubber of South-East Asia. It damaged or sank eight battleships and killed more than 2,000 Americans, civilians among them, for the loss of 29 Japanese aircraft and five midget submarines.
Tactically it succeeded; strategically it fell short. The American carriers were at sea and escaped, and a further strike on the harbour and oil reserves was called off, leaving the base able to repair ships. Above all, the surprise attack united a divided American public behind a war Japan could not hope to win in a long contest.
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Fall of Singapore
Singapore was the keystone of British power in Asia, and its loss on 15 February 1942 showed how quickly the old empires could fall. Japanese forces advanced down the Malayan peninsula and crossed to the island with a force about half the size of its defenders, then took the surrender of the garrison within a week of landing.
Around 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops became prisoners at once, many later forced to work on the Burma-Siam railway. Churchill called it the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. For the region's people, especially its Chinese community, it began more than three years of occupation, and the defeat badly damaged British prestige across Asia long after 1945.
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Battle of Bataan
After Japanese landings on Luzon in December 1941, more than 80,000 American and Filipino troops withdrew into the Bataan peninsula to hold Manila Bay. Short of food and medicine, and with hopes of relief dashed once MacArthur left on 11 March, they held out until 9 April 1942, when the remaining force of about 75,000 surrendered to General Homma's army.
The surrender led straight into the Bataan Death March, a forced march of about sixty miles to prison camps on which thousands of prisoners died. Corregidor held out for almost another month. The defence did not change the outcome in the Philippines, but its cost and the treatment of its prisoners shaped American and Filipino memory of the war for generations.
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Battle of the Coral Sea
Fought from 3 to 8 May 1942, this was the first direct carrier-against-carrier battle of the Pacific War, with the two carrier forces striking at each other from around 200 miles apart. Japan wanted Port Moresby in New Guinea, a base that would threaten northern Australia.
On points Japan did slightly better: it sank the US carrier Lexington and lost only the light carrier Shoho. But Admiral Inoue ordered the invasion fleet bound for Port Moresby to reverse course, and the battle ended as the first major Japanese setback of the war. Just as important, neither Shokaku nor Zuikaku took part in the fighting at Midway a month later, which is why Coral Sea earns its place as the prelude to the turning point.
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Battle of Midway
Japan planned to take Midway and draw out the American carriers that had escaped Pearl Harbor. Codebreakers at Station Hypo in Hawaii spoiled the plan: a false message that Midway was short of fresh water drew a Japanese report that "AF" was short of water, confirming the target.
On 4 June 1942 American dive bombers set Akagi, Kaga and Soryu ablaze, and a later strike left Hiryu burning until it sank. Japan lost four fleet carriers, hundreds of aircraft and about 3,057 men; the US lost Yorktown, sunk by a submarine on 7 June. After Midway Japan's expansion in the Pacific stopped, and the long series of island-hopping invasions became possible.
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Kokoda Track campaign
With the sea route to Port Moresby blocked after Coral Sea, Japan tried to reach it overland. A force landed near Gona on 21 and 22 July 1942 and pushed south along a single mountain track through the Owen Stanley Range, until by mid-September it was close enough that Imita Ridge was the last barrier before the town.
The Australians fought a long retreat and then a pursuit, retaking Kokoda on 2 November. More than 600 Australians were killed and over a thousand wounded, and perhaps three times as many fell ill. The campaign could not have been fought without the Papuan carriers who moved rations and ammunition forward and the wounded back. For Australia it remains the defining battle of the war.
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Guadalcanal campaign
US Marines landed on 7 August 1942 to take an airstrip Japan was building in the Solomon Islands, which became Henderson Field. Guadalcanal was the first battle in the American amphibious campaign to push Japan back across the Pacific, and it turned into six months of attrition on land, at sea and in the air.
Both navies fought a string of night actions in the waters nearby, and Japanese air raids on Henderson Field were frequent. In early February 1943 Japan withdrew its surviving troops. Where Midway stopped Japan's advance, Guadalcanal showed that the Allies could take territory back and keep it, and it drained ships, aircraft and men that Japan could not replace.
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Battle of Tarawa
The assault on Betio, in the Tarawa atoll of the Gilbert Islands, began on 20 November 1943, almost two years after Pearl Harbor. The island is ringed by a reef reaching up to 1,200 yards out to sea, and warnings about the tide were ignored in favour of a fixed timetable, leaving many Marines to wade ashore under fire.
The Marine Corps suffered more than 3,000 casualties, around 1,000 of them killed. The garrison of nearly 5,000 was wiped out almost to a man; only 17 Japanese and 129 Korean labourers were taken prisoner. The lessons, above all the need for many more amphibious tractors and the limits of bombardment against dug-in defences, shaped every Central Pacific landing that followed.
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Battle of Imphal
Fought together with the siege of Kohima, March to July 1944
Japan's Operation U-Go invaded north-east India to destroy the Allied build-up there. On 3 April a force of 15,000 attacked Kohima, where the District Commissioner's house and tennis court saw brutal hand-to-hand fighting, while the main Japanese army encircled Imphal.
The Fourteenth Army, drawn from across undivided India alongside British and African units, held both. On 3 July the surviving Japanese forces fell back, most of their losses caused by starvation and disease. More than 8,000 Commonwealth servicemen were killed, wounded or missing at Imphal. It was by far the worst Japanese land defeat of the war to that date, and it opened the way to retaking Burma.
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Battle of Saipan
Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, mattered because its airfields could put B-29 bombers within reach of the Japanese home islands. US forces invaded on 15 June 1944, and the island was declared secure on 9 July after some of the hardest fighting of the war.
By most counts the Americans lost more than 3,000 killed and about 13,000 wounded. Of about 30,000 Japanese defenders, fewer than 1,000 were alive at the end. The battle closed with a mass suicide at Marpi Point at the northern end of the island, where civilians died alongside soldiers, a warning of what an invasion of Japan itself might bring. Prime Minister Tojo and his cabinet resigned on 18 July, and B-29s were soon flying from Saipan against Japan.
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Battle of the Philippine Sea
Japan's navy came out to stop the invasion of the Marianas and met the American carrier fleet on 19 and 20 June 1944. The result was so lopsided that it became known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
On the first day Admiral Ozawa sent out 373 aircraft and only 130 returned. Across the battle Japan lost roughly 500 or more carrier and land-based aircraft, depending on the count, and some 450 aircrew, along with the carriers Taiho, Shokaku and Hiyo, while the Americans lost 23 aircraft in the great air battle. Saipan's fate was sealed, and Japan's naval air arm never recovered the trained pilots it lost here, which shaped how its fleet fought at Leyte Gulf four months later.
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Battle of Leyte Gulf
When MacArthur's army returned to the Philippines in October 1944, Japan threw almost its entire remaining fleet at the landings on Leyte. The result, from 23 to 26 October, was one of the largest and most complex naval battles in history, fought in several separate actions across the islands.
The most dangerous moment came off Samar, where a powerful Japanese force caught a group of small escort carriers and destroyers. But Japan lost three battleships, among them the giant Musashi, four carriers, ten cruisers and at least nine destroyers. Its navy never again fought as an effective force. Leyte was also where American sailors first faced organised kamikaze attacks, a tactic that would reach its peak at Okinawa.
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Battle of Manila (1945)
The fight for the Philippine capital, from 3 February to 3 March 1945, is the entry here where the dead were overwhelmingly civilians. Japanese naval troops under Rear Admiral Iwabuchi held the city rather than withdraw, and the battle became a month of street fighting through Manila's districts and its walled old city.
About 100,000 Filipino civilians are usually counted among the dead, killed both in massacres by Japanese troops and in the American artillery bombardment of Japanese positions; estimates vary and the true figure is uncertain. Manila ended the war as one of the most devastated capitals of the Second World War, and its fate shows why fighting for cities came to be dreaded.
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Battle of Iwo Jima
Iwo Jima was invaded on 19 February 1945 to secure its airstrips, giving B-29 crews bombing Japan an emergency landing and refuelling field. General Kuribayashi abandoned the usual defence of the beaches and had more than ten miles of tunnels dug, linking over 1,500 underground bunkers, so the Marines had to clear the island position by position.
The battle ended on 26 March. More than 6,000 Americans were killed and nearly 20,000 wounded, more casualties in total than the Japanese suffered. Around 20,000 Japanese defenders died and only a few hundred were taken prisoner. By the end of the war more than 2,000 B-29 landings had been made on the island, though historians still argue over how many were true emergencies.
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Battle of Okinawa
The last great battle of the war began on 1 April 1945 with the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War, and lasted 82 days. Okinawa was to be the staging area for an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Its cost was the highest of any Pacific battle. More than 12,000 Americans died, many of them sailors, as kamikaze attacks hit the fleet: 36 ships were sunk and 368 damaged. Roughly 90,000 Japanese combatants were killed, by one common estimate. Okinawan civilians suffered worst of all: estimates of their dead run from about 100,000 to 150,000, killed by crossfire, bombardment, starvation and suicide. That toll weighed on American planning for an invasion of Japan, and was one factor in the decision to use atomic bombs.
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