What Is The Battle Of The Pacific War?

What comes to mind when you think about World War II? The most common answers would be the Holocaust, the war in Europe, and Pearl Harbor. What most people would not mention is the rest of the Pacific campaign against the Japanese. The American capture of the Pacific islands under Japanese control was crucial to the defeat of the Japanese Empire during World War II.

Many islands were taken from the Japanese during the course of World War II, but a few of the most important islands in the Pacific were the Philippines and Iwo Jima. The battle of Leyte Gulf was also a critical point in the Pacific Campaign. The capture of the afore mentioned islands provided the United States Navy with a foothold in the Pacific as well as air bases within bombing range of Japan’s home islands.

The first step in procuring air bases with strategic value was obtaining naval and air superiority over the Japanese fleets. This was the reason that made the naval battle at Leyte Gulf the largest naval clash between the United States and Japan during World War II. Before the battle even began U.S. carriers were raiding the Philippines and destroying Japanese aircraft based there. These raids brought the Japanese planes down to around two hundred in number. Japanese tacticians were forced to reconsider their options because of this disadvantage. Days before the U.S. convoy planned to invade the Philippines, the Japanese had their plan. Splitting their forces into three groups, named Northern, Center, and Southern, the Japanese Northern Force would try to draw the U.S. ships protecting the main landing force away. This would allow the remaining two attack groups, Southern and Center Force, to trap the landing craft in a crossfire and destroy them. This plan, ...

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... very heavily used as an emergency landing strip for B-29 bombers and an air base for the bomber fighter escorts. Although the island was going to be used for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, this plan was never put into action. Instead a B-29 bomber took off from the island of Iwo Jima and dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The war with Japan ended days later.

The capture of these strategic islands along with many other islands in the Pacific made the defeat of the Japanese Empire a much easier battle than it would have been otherwise. If the U.S. had not had the islands to stage their offensives from then we might not have won the war easily. The Pacific campaign showed the might of the U.S. Navy and the determination of the U.S. Marines. It also closed the era of battleship warfare and proved that the U.S. was still not to be provoked lightly.