PH 1941 JanL.jpg \BPearl Harbor, aerial view, looking north, with the Navy Yard in the foreground, 7 January, 1941. Ford Island Naval Air Station is in the centre left, and Pearl City is in the extreme upper left.\b \ShPreface The Pearl Harbor attack entered the consciousness of contemporary Americans more forcefully than any other single event. Regarded as a dastardly "surprise attack" and an act of "infamy", during the Second World War every effort was made to keep its memory bright. Posters, popular songs and other media were staples of wartime popular culture, regular memorial services were held to commemorate the dead, and flags that had flown at the Capitol and White House on 7 December, 1941, were raised over fallen enemy capital cities. Even after the conflict ended, the Pearl Harbor "surprise" helped shape a generation of National defense policy and was not forgotten by those who had lived through the war. Monuments, large and small, were erected on the battle sites. Around the country, veterans' reunion groups met regularly to keep the memory alive. Even now, some six decades plus later, Pearl Harbor remains the subject of a regular flow of documentaries, dramatic productions, books and articles. \ICredit: text and pictures: Department of the US Navy -- Naval Historical Center.\i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go directly to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T09:37:05+11:00 false 3 3 2008-05-14T14:36:03+10:00 Neosho_Yorktown 1L.jpg \BUSS \INeosho\i refueling USS \IYorktown\i, 1 May, 1942, shortly before the Battle of the Coral Sea.\b \ShPreface The Battle of the Coral Sea, fought in the waters southwest of the Solomon Islands and eastward from New Guinea, was the first of the Pacific War's six fights between opposing aircraft carrier forces. Though the Japanese could rightly claim a tactical victory on "points", it was an operational and strategic defeat for them, the first major check on the great offensive they had begun five months earlier at Pearl Harbor. The diversion of Japanese resources represented by the Coral Sea battle would also have immense consequences a month later, at the Battle of Midway. The Coral Sea action resulted from a Japanese amphibious operation intended to capture Port Moresby, located on New Guinea's southeastern coast. A Japanese air base there would threaten northeastern Australia and support plans for further expansion into the South Pacific, possibly helping to drive Australia out of the war and certainly enhancing the strategic defenses of Japan's newly-enlarged oceanic empire. The Japanese operation included two sea borne invasion forces, a minor one targeting Tulagi, in the Southern Solomons, and the main one aimed at Port Moresby. These would be supported by land-based airpower from bases to the north and by two naval forces containing a small aircraft carrier, several cruisers, seaplane tenders and gunboats. More distant cover would be provided by the big aircraft carriers \IShokaku\i and \IZuikaku\i with their escorting cruisers and destroyers. The U.S. Navy, tipped off to the enemy plans by superior communications intelligence, countered with two of its own carriers, plus cruisers (including two from the Australian Navy), destroyers, submarines, land-based bombers and patrol seaplanes. Preliminary operations on 3-6 May and two days of active carrier combat on 7-8 May cost the United States one aircraft carrier, a destroyer and one of its very valuable fleet oilers, plus damage to the second carrier. However, the Japanese were forced to cancel their Port Moresby sea-borne invasion. In the fighting, they lost a light carrier, a destroyer and some smaller ships. \IShokaku\i received serious bomb damage and \IZuikaku's\i air group was badly depleted. Most importantly, those two carriers were eliminated from the upcoming Midway operation, contributing by their absence to that terrible Japanese defeat. \ICredit text and pictures: Department of the US Navy -- Naval Historical Center.\i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T11:18:44+11:00 false 4 3 2008-04-23T08:05:01+10:00 Marines beach.jpg \B4th Marine Division troops on Iwo Beach.\b \ShPreface It was a long, hard pull for the US Navy across the Pacific to within striking distance of Japan; but, by the time Saipan in the Marianas had been conquered (August 1944) and the major part of the Philippines liberated, two practicable routes were open to the ultimate objective -- the Nanpo Shoto and the Nansei Shoto island chains. The first, better known to Americans and Europeans as the Bonins, begins not far off Tokyo Bay and continues southerly for some 700 miles to Minami Shima, which is 290 miles northwest of the northernmost Marianas, and 615 miles north of Saipan. Most of these islands are tiny volcanic cones, too small for an airfield. But Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima had distinct possibilities. The other island chain, the Nansei Shoto (better known to Americans and Europeans as the Ryukyus –- Okinawa being the largest island), forms a great arc some 600 miles long, from Honshu, southernmost of the Japanese home islands, to Formosa, making the eastern border of the East China Sea. For a number of reasons, Iwo Jima was chosen as the next most important island that America needed to conquer in order to defeat Japan. It was very important for the success of the B-29 bombing of Japan as well as a base for fighter plane escorts for the B-29 bombers. The battle of Iwo Jima featured the employment of three US Marine divisions (less one regiment) under a single tactical Marine command, the largest body of Marines committed to combat in one operation during World War II. Secondly, enemy resistance under General Kuribayashi was such that American casualties sustained in this operation exceeded those of the Japanese. Over one-third of the total Marines who participated in the invasion were either killed, wounded or suffered from Battle Fatigue. \ICredits: text and pictures: US Marine Corp., US Navy.\i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T11:53:12+11:00 false 5 3 2008-04-23T08:04:32+10:00 Midway Atoll L.jpg \BAerial photograph of Midway Atoll looking just south of west across the southern side of the atoll, 24 November, 1941. Eastern Island, then the site of Midway's airfield, is in the foreground. Sand Island, location of most other base facilities, is across the entrance channel.\b \ShPreface The Battle of Midway, fought over and near the tiny U.S. mid-Pacific base at Midway atoll, represents the strategic high water mark of Japan's Pacific Ocean war. Prior to this action, Japan possessed general naval superiority over the United States and could usually choose where and when to attack. After Midway, the two opposing fleets were essentially equals, and the United States soon took the offensive. Japanese Combined Fleet commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto moved on Midway in an effort to draw out and destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet's aircraft carrier striking forces, which had embarrassed the Japanese Navy in the mid-April Doolittle Raid on Japan's home islands and at the Battle of Coral Sea in early May. He planned to quickly knock down Midway's defenses, follow up with an invasion of the atoll's two small islands and establish a Japanese air base there. He expected the U.S. carriers to come out and fight, but to arrive too late to save Midway and in insufficient strength to avoid defeat by his own well-tested carrier air power. Yamamoto's intended surprise was thwarted by superior American communications intelligence, which deduced his scheme well before battle was joined. This allowed Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, to establish an ambush by having his carriers ready and waiting for the Japanese. On 4 June, 1942, in the second of the Pacific War's great carrier battles, the trap was sprung. The perseverance, sacrifice and skill of U.S. Navy aviators, plus a great deal of good luck on the American side, cost Japan four irreplaceable fleet carriers, while only one of the three U.S. carriers present was lost. The base at Midway, though damaged by Japanese air attack, remained operational and later became a vital component in the American trans-Pacific offensive. \ICredit text and pictures: Department of the US Navy -- Naval Historical Center. \i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T12:13:39+11:00 false 6 3 2009-01-08T07:20:40+11:00 Troops moving OK.jpg \BAmerican troops moving through Okinawa alert for any enemy ambush.\b \ShPreface Okinawa was the site of one of the last major island landings of World War II and scene of some of its heaviest fighting. The operation, under the strategic command of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, began with 5th Fleet air strikes against Kyushu on 18 March 1945, and initial landings on Okinawa itself on Easter Sunday, 1 April. An enormous assemblage of ships participated in the operation, during which 36 of them of destroyer size or smaller were lost, most to the heaviest concentration of kamikaze attacks of the war. Almost 8,000 enemy aircraft were destroyed in the air or on the ground. As part of the action on 7 April, last remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy ventured forth, only to be met by the overwhelming Navy airpower. Japanese super-battleship \IYamato\i, a cruiser, and four destroyers were sunk in the one-day battle. As a result of securing Okinawa, the supply lanes of the East China Sea were blocked, isolating all southern possessions still in Japanese hands; and the last obstacle in the path to the Japanese Home Islands was cleared. \ICredit text and pictures: US Army.\i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T12:31:07+11:00 false 7 3 2008-04-23T08:04:52+10:00 Macarthur.jpg \BGeneral MacArthur wades ashore in the 24th Infantry Division sector, 20 October, 1944.\b \ICredit: National Archives.\i \ShPreface Allied invasion of the Philippines forced the hand of the Japanese High Command. It was evidently decided to make an all-out effort to drive U.S. forces from the Philippines, even at the risk of a major action. When Allied troops went ashore at Leyte ("A" Day, 20 October, 1944), reports now indicate that most Japanese heavy surface units were in the Southwest area, and that the carrier fleet was in the Empire. The enemy apparently had decided to join these forces in the Central Philippines at the earliest practicable moment. Maximum use was to be made of shore-based air. A series of naval engagements and, in terms of victory, ones which may turn out to be among the decisive battles of modern times, were won by American forces against a three-pronged attack by the Japanese in an attempt to land reinforcements on Leyte Island and wipe out the American covering force. The naval battle lasted around two days; the land-based battle for the Island of Leyte took two months. \ICredit: text and pictures (unless noted), US Navy, US Army.\i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, click on Chapter 2, if you so desire.\i 2008-03-05T13:15:30+11:00 false 8 3 2008-04-23T08:05:14+10:00 Solomons 1.jpg \BA U.S. destroyer steams up what later became known as "Iron Bottom Sound", the body of water between Guadalcanal and Tulagi during landings on both islands, 7 August, 1942.\b \ShPreface In the six months between August, 1942, and February, 1943, as part of the Solomons campaign, the United States and its Pacific Allies fought a brutally hard air-sea-land campaign against the Japanese for possession of the previously-obscure island of Guadalcanal. The Allies' first major offensive action of the Pacific War, the contest began as a risky enterprise since Japan still maintained a significant naval superiority in the Pacific Ocean. Nevertheless, the U.S. First Marine Division landed on 7 August, 1942, to seize a nearly-complete airfield at Guadalcanal's Lunga Point and an anchorage at nearby Tulagi, bounding a picturesque body of water that would soon be named "Iron Bottom Sound". Action ashore went well, and Japan's initial aerial response was costly and unproductive. However, only two days after the landings, the U.S. and Australian navies were handed a serious defeat in the Battle of Savo Island. A lengthy struggle followed, with its focus the Lunga Point airfield, renamed Henderson Field. Though regularly bombed and shelled by the enemy, Henderson Field's planes were still able to fly, ensuring that Japanese efforts to build and maintain ground forces on Guadalcanal were prohibitively expensive. Ashore, there was hard fighting in a miserable climate, with U.S. Marines and Soldiers, aided by local people and a few colonial authorities, demonstrating the fatal weaknesses of Japanese ground combat doctrine when confronted by determined and well-trained opponents who possessed superior firepower. At sea, the campaign featured major battles between aircraft carriers that were more costly to the Americans than to the Japanese, and many submarine and air-sea actions that gave the Allies an advantage. Inside and just outside Iron Bottom Sound, five significant surface battles and several skirmishes convincingly proved just how superior Japan's navy then was in night gunfire and torpedo combat. With all this, the campaign's outcome was very much in doubt for nearly four months and was not certain until the Japanese completed a stealthy evacuation of their surviving ground troops in the early hours of 8 February, 1943. Guadalcanal was expensive for both sides, though much more so for Japan's soldiers than for U.S. ground forces. The opponents suffered high losses in aircraft and ships, but those of the United States were soon replaced, while those of Japan were not. Strategically, this campaign built a strong foundation on the footing laid a few months earlier in the Battle of Midway, which had brought Japan's Pacific offensive to an abrupt halt. At Guadalcanal, the Japanese were harshly shoved into a long and costly retreat, one that continued virtually unchecked until their August 1945 capitulation. \ICredits text and pictures: US Army and Naval History and the US National Archives.\i \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T13:29:29+11:00 false 9 3 2008-04-23T08:05:22+10:00 Nuremberg Trials.jpg \BDefendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials: Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, and Keitel in front row, ca 1945-46.\b \ICredit: National Archives and Records Administration.\i \ShPreface \IIncluded here is information from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia, courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. - USA.\i Upon taking power in the early 1930s, the Nazis began immediately to rid Germany of its Jewish citizens. In the Aryan Paragraph of 1933, the regime decreed that Jews could not hold civil service positions. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of the right to citizenship and restricted relationships between "Aryans" (racially pure Germans) and Jews. After the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) of November 9, 1938, an organised act of violence perpetrated by Nazis against Jews in all parts of Germany, the persecution of Jews entered a new phase. Random acts of violence, by then commonplace, were replaced by the systematic isolation of the Jewish population in Germany, which had numbered about 600,000 in the early 1930s. Hitler had always wanted to "cleanse" Germany of Jews by gathering them together and expelling them from the Reich. One plan had as its goal the transfer of Germany's Jews to Madagascar. A contingent of Jews had even been moved to southern France in preparation. However, wartime conditions and the presence of millions of Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, and other occupied areas in Eastern Europe gradually led to the adoption of another plan: the systematic extermination of all Jews who came under German control. Techniques that had been developed for the regime's euthanasia program came to be used against Jews. Discussions in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference on the outskirts of Berlin led to the improved organisation and coordination of the program of genocide. Killing came to be done in an efficient, factory-like fashion in large extermination camps run by Himmler's Special Duty Section (Sonderdienst--SD). The tempo of the mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children was accelerated toward the end of the war. Hitler's preoccupation with the "final solution" was so great that the transport of Jews was at times given preference over the transport of war materiel. Authorities generally agree that about six million European Jews died in the Holocaust. A large number (about 4.5 million) of those killed came from Poland and the Soviet Union; about 125,000 German Jews were murdered. \IPlease select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-05T15:24:23+11:00 false 12 3 2008-04-23T08:05:53+10:00 KagaL.jpg \BJapanese aircraft carrier \IKaga\i steams through heavy north Pacific seas, en route to attack Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, early December 1941. Carrier \IZuikaku\i is at right. Frame from a motion picture film taken from the carrier \IAkagi\i. The original film was found in 1943.\b \ShPreface The build up was slow, at least six years, but on September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany and this can probably be taken as the “Official” start of World War II. Germany had been working on it through most of the 1930s. Hitler, appointed German Chancellor in January, 1933, had has his one goal –- the revitalization of his country from the humiliation of a World War I defeat, and the creation of an empire that would dominate Western Europe. He withdrew his country from the League of Nations, stepped up German rearmament, remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of various treaties, occupied Austria, took over parts of Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland. Japan, on the other hand, invaded China in 1931 and through the rest of that decade continued to move further and further into attempting to control China. The start of World War II in Europe gave Japan the excuse to make its move into dominating the whole Pacific area. America stood on the sidelines, not wanting to become involved in another war and may have stayed that way, except for Japan’s fatal mistake of bombing Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. America immediately declared war on Japan and then Germany and Italy. The whole world was now virtually at war, certainly all the Northern Hemisphere and some countries, notably Australia and South Africa, in the South as well. The end came with the suicide of Hitler and the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan in August, 1945. From 1939 until the formal surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, almost 60 million people died in this worst of all wars. \ICredits: www.historyofengland.net; US Army; US Marine Corps.; US Navy; Tatyana Gordeeva, German Culture at http://www.germanculture.com.ua; US Dept. of State; National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) USA. Please select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-06T15:22:03+11:00 false 18 3 2009-04-22T13:36:44+10:00 Hitler 1.jpg \BHitler performing the Nazi salute.\b \ICredit: National Archives and Records Administration.\i \ShPreface As well as a world-wide depression, the 1930s was a period of unstable world peace through the expansionist designs of totalitarian regimes in Japan, Italy, and Germany. In 1931 Japan had invaded Manchuria, crushed Chinese resistance, and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. Italy, under Benito Mussolini, enlarged its boundaries in Libya and in 1935 conquered Ethiopia. Germany, under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, militarised its economy and reoccupied the Rhineland (demilitarised by the Treaty of Versailles) in 1936. In 1938, Hitler incorporated Austria into the German Reich and demanded cession of the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. By then, war seemed imminent. To understand the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich, it is important to start looking at Germany from just after World War I right through to the end of World War II. Chapter 1 starts with the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in 1918 and follows the unstable political situation through to Hitler’s total domination of Germany in 1933. Chapter 2 looks at Hitler’s consolidation of power and his transformation of Germany into a dictatorship. Germany becomes a one-party state, with terror used to maintain control. Police harass and arrest Communists, Socialists and Jews. The chapter continues with the outbreak of World War II through to Hitler’s suicide in April, 1945, and Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Chapter 3 discusses the Nuremberg Trials and the Denazification of the country. \IText credit Tatyana Gordeeva, German Culture at: http://www.germanculture.com.ua.\i Please select the first link below to go to the start of the title. Alternatively, select any Chapter link to go to that Chapter.\i 2008-03-18T08:38:54+11:00 false 68 3 2008-04-23T08:05:45+10:00