Hirohito

Kenji Doihara: Japanese General and Convicted War Criminal

By Wil Deac

At 11:30 pm on December 22, 1948, four handcuffed men were led by guards into the chapel of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison. Read more

Hirohito

Battle of Sibuyan Sea

By John Wukovits

In warfare, desperate times call for desperate measures, and in the fall of 1944 the empire of Japan found itself in precisely that predicament. Read more

Hirohito

Saipan: A Crucial Foothold in the Marianas

By John Wukovits

On June 10, 1944, as his troop transport churned through the Pacific toward the Japanese-held island of Saipan, Pharmacist’s Mate First Class Stan Bowen wrote a letter to his sweetheart, Marge McCann. Read more

Hirohito

A Suicide Mission From the President?

By Ron Gilliam

As he read the decrypt of the radiogram from Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, several things bothered Admiral Thomas C. Read more

Hirohito

Was It Right to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima & Nagasaki?

By Sam McGowan

The most controversial decision of the 20th century—probably in all of history—was the one reportedly made by President Harry S. Read more

Hirohito

Why the U.S. Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan in WWII

By Robert A. Rosenthal

How did we get to dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Who was responsible? Where and when did it begin? Read more

Hirohito

Attack on the USS Panay

 By Chuck Lyons

For some Americans, World War II started early. In December 1937, four years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into the war, Japanese planes attacked an American gunboat, the USS Panay, on China’s Yangtze River, strafing and bombing the boat, sinking it, killing three American crew members, and the wounding 45 others. Read more

Hirohito

The Last Fighter Pilot: An Account of the Final Combat Mission of World War Two

Guest Post By History on the Net

The following is an account of Captain Jerry Yellin, who flew the last combat mission of WWII on the morning of August 15, 1945, out of Iwo Jima. Read more

Hirohito

The Nevada and I Survived the War

By Charles T. Sehe

I am of Polish, Irish, and American Indian descent and grew up in the small (population 3,800) northern Illinois town of Geneva. Read more

Hirohito

The Men Against the Bomb

By Andrew J. Rotter

The men and women who imagined and then built the atomic bomb thought they were doing something different from what makers of “conventional” weapons did. Read more

Hirohito

A Company K in the Pacific: From Guadalcanal to Peleliu

By Jason Abady

In April 1942, a group of young Marines, having recently graduated from Officers Candidate School, arrived at New River, North Carolina, a sprawling tent city that stretched over a vast area and would eventually become known as Camp Lejeune. Read more

Hirohito

The Children of WWII: Remembering the Conflict That Stole Their Childhoods

By Susan Zimmerman

World War II affected nearly every area of the world. It was the deadliest conflict in all of human history. Read more

Hirohito

Pathfinder Fire Storm: the B-29s Over Tokyo That Helped End the War

By Robert F. Dorr

Major Sam P. Bakshas woke up that morning with the secrets in his head. He was one of the men flying B-29 Superfortress bombers from three Pacific islands—Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. Read more

Hirohito

The Airborne Defenders of Midway

By Colonel Dick Camp (ret.)

Prologue: At the start of World War II, Midway Atoll was a key U.S. base in the central Pacific. Read more

Hirohito

Japan’s Road to War

By Eric Hammel

Japan’s road to World War II was a long one. Throughout the late 19th century, the island nation broke out of its feudal past on a path to modernity with a ruthlessness and singlemindedness that would have scared Western nations had they been paying attention. Read more

Hirohito

Target: America’s West Coast

By Steven D. Lutz

It seemed like just another ordinary day at sea. Early on December 7, 1941, a U.S. Army-chartered cargo vessel, the 250-foot SS Cynthia Olson, under the command of a civilian skipper, Berthel Carlsen, was plying the Pacific waters about 1,200 miles northeast of Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii, and over 1,000 miles west of the Tacoma, Washington, port from which she had sailed on December 1. Read more

Hirohito

Axis Powers: The Infamous Tripartite Pact

By Blaine Taylor

On the evening of September 26, 1940, American radio announcer and journalist William L. Shirer noted in his later famous Berlin Diary that the next day Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano would arrive there from Rome, adding that most people thought it was for the announcement that Francisco Franco’s Spain was entering the war on the side of the Axis. Read more

Hirohito

The Real Hirohito/Emperor Showa

by Blaine Taylor

He was the longest-reigning monarch and head of state in the 20th century, and the third-longest in history behind King Louis XIV of France (72 years) and England’s Queen Victoria (64 years). Read more

Hirohito

MacArthur’s Occupation of Japan: Lessons on Counterinsurgency

By Lieutenant Colonel Michael F. Trivet

As the months of 1945 passed at an agonizingly slow pace, Allied forces in the Pacific struggled unwaveringly toward Japan. Read more

Hirohito

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto: Japan’s Naval War Leader

By Michael D. Hull

Brave, urbane, and complex, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was Japan’s greatest naval strategist and the architect of one of the most stunning achievements in the history of modern warfare. Read more