World War II Pacific Terms & Definitions Study Set

1941:

•decisive U.S. role not clear

•Pearl Harbor (Dec. 1941)

•Rapid German victory over France (summer 1941)

•Soviet Union under siege (winter 1941)

•Focus war on Germany or Japan?

•Roosevelt decides: "Europe first"

Why Japan attacked

•U.S. also fighting Germany

•Confidence after defeat of Russia (1905)

•U.S. will refuse a costly fight?

U.S. as commercial culture, Japan as a military culture

•Japanese desire for empire in China and across Asia

•U.S. freezes Japanese assets over expansionism

•Oil shortage convinces Japan:

1) Take oilfields in Dutch Indonesia

2) Must eventually fight U.S. (or give up empire)

Japanese hope for quick victory ...

or long war that is too costly for U.S.

•Philippines attacked 9 hours after Pearl Harbor

•U.S. forces unprepared

•Siege at Bataan: mass surrender of U.S./Filipino troops

•Bataan Death March

Japanese victories

•Two Alaskan islands occupied

•Japanese underestimated

...but soon perceived as superhuman

•Racial brutality in Pacific theater

•Opponents seen as subhuman but deadly

•Japanese propaganda movies shown to U.S. troops

•Total loyalty to emperor, etc.

•Japanese as unthinking herd - barbaric and suicidal

•China atrocities

•"banzai" charges, suicide before surrender

•Japanese officers make surrender difficult

"Vermin":

subhuman & superhuman

Japanese "internment"

•110,000 Japanese-Americans rounded up in western states

•Fear of spying

•Economic harm

•Young Japanese serve in U.S. Army in Europe

Turning the tide

•Japanese advance halted mid-1942

•Battle of Midway

•4 Japanese carriers sunk, loss of offensive capability

•Submarine warfare on Japanese shipping

•No food or raw materials to main islands

•No supplies to troops

Island Hopping

A military strategy used during World War II that involved selectively attacking specific enemy-held islands and bypassing others

1944:

•U.S. begins bombing Japanese "home islands"

•Firebombing of Tokyo, 1944

•Death of 80-100,000 in a single night