The Pacific Theater during World War II is generally regarded as the area of military confrontation between the Allied powers and Imperial Japan. The Pacific Theater consists of the entire operational expanse of the war from the Aleutian Islands in the north to Australia in the south, including island chains such as the Solomons, Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas. The China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater is also considered a major component of the Pacific Theater.
Pacific Theater
Responding to a November 27, 1941, war warning message from Admiral Harold R. “Betty” Stark, chief of naval operations, America’s prized handful of aircraft carriers were fortuitously absent from Pearl Harbor when Japanese planes savaged the Pacific Fleet on Sunday, December 7. Read more
Pacific Theater
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
Pacific Theater
Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain consists of 69 measurable islands. Just as many more exist, too small to measure as an island. Read more
Pacific Theater
Two warships have been named in honor of Seaman Bartlett Laffey, a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient. Read more
Pacific Theater
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
Pacific Theater
As he watched the preliminary bombardment from the railing of his ship, Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller had deep reservations. Read more
Pacific Theater
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
Pacific Theater
In an age before television and instant communications, Americans wanted to see what was going on in the world’s “deadliest conflict in human history,” and LIFE magazine was making a name for itself as THE war magazine during World War II. Read more
Pacific Theater
In early 1945, the island of Iwo Jima in the Volcanoes Group, only 660 miles from the Japanese capital of Tokyo, became the focus of the American drive across the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Read more
Pacific Theater
At exactly three o’clock in the afternoon on February 25, 1944, a crowd gathered at the Boston Navy Yard for the commissioning ceremony of the USS O’Brien (DD725), a destroyer of the Sumner class. Read more
Pacific Theater
The island of Guadalcanal loomed in the distance as the warships of Task Force 36.1 approached the waters of Iron Bottom Sound on July 5, 1943. Read more
Pacific Theater
On a serene Sunday morning the residents of Oahu enjoyed the dawning of another gorgeous day in paradise. Read more
Pacific Theater
“All I knew about Biak was that it was an island a degree south of the equator, one of the Schouten group lying north of Geelvink Bay toward the western end of New Guinea.” Read more
Pacific Theater
Special Sea Attack Force (SSAF) was an ordinary-sounding name for the pitifully tiny remnant of what was once the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). Read more
Pacific Theater
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
