Pacific Theater

Pacific Theater

Marine Fight for Tinian

The island of Tinian is located in the Northern Marianas, three miles southwest of Saipan, 100 miles north of Guam, and 1,500 miles from mainland Japan. Read more

Pacific Theater

British Submarine Operations in the Pacific

By Arnold Blumberg

After the Royal Navy’s traumatic departure from the Pacific Ocean in early 1942, the 4th Submarine Flotilla and its depot ship, the HMS Adamant, operated with the Eastern Fleet based at Trincomalee––a large, natural harbor located on the coast of Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean. Read more

Pacific Theater

The U.S. Navy’s Defective Mark 14 Torpedo

Lieutenant Dan Daspit, captain of the U.S. submarine Tinosa could not believe his luck. Framed neatly in the periscope eyepiece was a sitting duck. Read more

Pacific Theater

General Harry Schmidt: World War II’s Quiet Marine

He organized, trained, and commanded the 4th Marine Division in the Marshall Islands and Saipan campaigns before taking command of the Fifth Amphibious Corps and leading it against Tinian and Iwo Jima. Read more

Pacific Theater

The Few, the Proud, the Black Marines in World War II

Prior to the summer of 1941, the United States Marine Corps did not want them. The Navy barely tolerated them in restricted capacities as cooks, waiters, servants for officers, and dockside stevedores. Read more

Pacific Theater

Desperate Los Baños Raid

Henry Muller had an important job. He was the intelligence officer of the 11th Airborne Division, known in military parlance as the G-2. Read more

Pacific Theater

Battle of the Java Sea: Desperate Delaying Action

The ships left just before sunset on February 26, 1942, passing out of a harbor jammed with wreckage, battered docks, fires, the stench of burning oil, and Dutch women, children, and old men—most of them relatives of the crews heading out—waving their men goodbye and good luck. Read more

Pacific Theater

WWII Pioneers of Skip Bombing

By September 1942, after numerous aerial strikes against the advancing Imperial Japanese Navy, the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, and numerous attacks against enemy convoys along the New Guinea coast in the summer of that year, Maj. Read more

Pacific Theater

P-40 Fighter Pilot: Fighting for His Life

The four Curtiss P-40 Warhawks plummeted 10,000 feet over NewGuinea’s coastline to ambush their quarry. Flight leader 1st Lt. Read more

Pacific Theater

Night Battleship Action Off Guadalcanal

Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee has been called, among other things, “one of the best brains in the Navy.” Read more

Pacific Theater

The M29 Weasel: The WWII Track Vehicle Never Used as Intended

The M29 Weasel was a machine conceived by a bizarre British chemist obsessed with ice for a unit that did not exist and a mission that never occurred. Read more

Pacific Theater

Ordnance: The Piper L-4 “Eyes in the Sky”

Despite being caught up in the tide of isolationism prevalent duringthe interval between the world wars, the United States Army was lucky enough to have Congressional funding for the further development and expansion of its fledgling air arm, known initially in 1926 as the Army Air Corps and in 1941 renamed the Army Air Forces. Read more

Pacific Theater

Great Raid on Cabanatuan

On January 30, 1945, a group of U.S. Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Filipino guerrillas set out on a daring nighttime raid on Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines.   Read more

Pacific Theater

Profiles: ROTC Success

More than 16 million Americans served in the U.S. military during World War II, but as fluid as the situation was in the Pacific, and considering the priority given to the European Theater, it is difficult to obtain an accurate count of how many served in the Pacific at any one time during World War II. Read more

Pacific Theater

The Soviet Invasion of Manchuria led to Japan’s Greatest Defeat

By Nathan N. Prefer

To the Soviet military, it is known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Although it had no official name to the Japanese, it has become known in the West as Operation August Storm.  Read more

Pacific Theater

Pearl Harbor Attack Cover-up

BACKSTORY: Although for the past 75 years history has had little to say about “Bally’s Project,” an effort to falsify State Department records to remove evidence of gross miscalculations prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor—the author recently discovered a small file of documents in the Frank A. Read more

Pacific Theater

The U.S. Navy’s Seabees: Bulldozing a Road to Victory

By Glenn Barnett

As war clouds gathered over the vast Pacific Ocean in the late 1930s, the United States belatedly began to think of protecting the nation’s possessions of far-flung islands and atolls. Read more

Pacific Theater

USS Nevada’s Run to the Sea

During the dark daysof December 1941, when it seemed as if American and British bases were falling like dominoes across the Pacific, two incidents during the Japanese attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor gave American morale a much needed boost. Read more

Pacific Theater

Dumbos, Black Cats, and Coastwatchers during World War II

Even after the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the Japanese were still in a commanding position in the western Pacific. Read more

Pacific Theater

World War II British Submarine Operations in the Pacific

By Arnold Blumberg

During World War II, after the Royal Navy’s traumatic departure from the Pacific Ocean in early 1942, the 4th Submarine Flotilla and its depot ship, the HMS Adamant, operated with the Eastern Fleet based at Trincomalee––a large, natural harbor located on the coast of Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean. Read more