The Pacific War (1941 to 45) was the theatre of the Second World War that saw Imperial Japan and the United States, with its allies, fight for control of various island archipelagos from the Solomon Islands in the south to the Ryukyu Islands in the north. In this article, the experiences of those directly involved in the air, land, and sea battles are presented.

The Pacific War began for the United States with the infamous attack by Japanese bombers on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941. The raid was carried out before a declaration of war had been made. Marine Richard Fiske was on the battleship USS West Virginia when the first attack wave flew in, and he caught a glimpse of a Japanese pilot overhead:

He had a real thick moustache and as he flew over he kind of smiled and looked at the ship and flew over towards the hangar over there and laid his bombs. The second group of aeroplanes peeled off and one came at us. They were torpedo bombers and one of them hit and blew me over towards the other side of the ship…I wasn't very scared at this particular time because I couldn't imagine that this was happening to us: it just wasn't real; it seemed like a nightmare. I didn't really comprehend the impact of it until afterwards when I swam ashore and then I realised, my God we're at war.

(Holmes, 201 to 2)

In May and June 1942, the US fought back against the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. The Japanese people were not fully informed about these setbacks, the start of a slow retreat back to the home islands. Naoki Hoshino, the fascist ideologist, recalls:

We were told only part of the Midway story; the Navy did not tell us the other part. What we were told was that one aircraft carrier was sunk and one was severely damaged. Since there were four carriers involved in the battle, the way we heard it three had come back, but the Anglo-American side was saying that all four had been sunk and there were similar reports in their newspapers…If four aircraft carriers were lost at Midway it means it was impossible for Japan to pursue the war effectively any further, so from that point on the military never let us know the real situation.

(Holmes, 246)

Japan might have been in retreat, but each occupied island group was defended vigorously, the intention being to cause as many casualties as possible and so deter the US and its allies from continuing amphibious operations, persuading them that a peace negotiation was the best option. As the war correspondent Richard Tregaskis notes, the fighting was intense but, in the first stages of the war, resources were scarce:

All the Pacific fighting was bitter, really, because the Japanese were in a kind of suicidal attempt to hang on…We had such a tiny fraction of America's forces, money and man-power resources. Ninety per cent went to Europe…on Guadalcanal there never was enough and what we had was so badly shot up that it was only through miracles that they could survive. Just nerve and, well, guts.

(Holmes, 247 to 9)

A series of amphibious landings was carried out against successive island groups. The typical formula of attack was to first bombard the island using naval guns and aircraft. One Japanese soldier experienced such a bombardment and noted in his diary:

While some of the planes fly overhead and strafe, the big bastards fly over the airfield and drop bombs. The ferocity of the bombing is terrific. It really makes me furious. It is past three o'clock and the raid is still on. At six the last two planes brought the raid to a close. What the hell kind of bastards are they? Bomb from six to six!

(Leckie, 34)

After the initial bombardment, the Marines would then be landed using amphibious landing vehicles. After a beachhead was established, more troops and heavier equipment like tanks and artillery could be landed, and then the invaders moved through the island's interior, often having to fight for every square foot. Most of the US soldiers were young men, as here described by Marine Lenly Cotton:

Our platoon was – other than the one that could vote – they were all under twenty. Ninety per cent were nineteen or younger, there were as many below eighteen as above, five or six that were sixteen, including myself, and one that was fifteen that I know personally.

(Holmes, 483)

The Marines were told the bombardment would effectively wipe out any opposition to the landing. The reality was rather different, as here recalled by Corporal Eddy Owen and his experience on Tarawa:

With the information we had before we went ashore we didn't figure there'd be too much opposition because we'd been told that they were going to drop all these bombs…Well, we though we'd just walk in, get a star on a bar, you know. So really the first time that I knew they were firing at us I was still on board and were were watching the bombardment, explosions, and we saw stuff hitting the water and we all thought it was some kind of large fish. Then all of a sudden someone screamed and we all dived into the paint locker, and I went ashore with two skinned knees.

(Holmes, 252 to 3)

The landing vehicles often had to release their men in the water since reaching the beach was too dangerous under heavy fire, and the vehicles were needed to return to the ships and bring another wave of men in. This meant many Marines died before they got to any land, as recounted here by Marine Pederson:

I saw a lot of bodies floating on the water, a lot of marines and they still had their packs on. They had the worst of it, really, out in the water…they were dropped in pretty deep water.

(Holmes, 254)

The naval fleets that had brought the invaders to a particular island were not immune to attack by the Japanese navy, naval aircraft, and land-based aircraft. Here, Seaman George Smith describes his experience on the carrier USS White Plains when attacked by a Japanese ship:

…I heard an explosion on the fantail. First I thought it was one of own planes exploding back there and I looked up and saw all this tin foil falling, this tin foil to jam our radar and of course it was general quarters and everybody manned their battle stations and then they started shooting, trying to get our range. Our skipper turned the ship where the shells landed, he was zigzagging, then we started to lay down smoke…they caught one of the carriers back there and they sank it. They got so close we could see the Japanese flag flying.

(Holmes, 485)

The contrast between the natural beauty of the Pacific islands being assailed and the reality of unpleasant and dangerous jungle wildlife struck many Marines, including Robert Leckie, who here describes Okinawa:

She was beautiful seen from the sea, this slender long island. Her towering central mountains ran down her spine in a graceful east-west keel. The sun seemed to kiss her timberline…Gentle waves washed her beaches white, raising a glitter of sun and water and scoured sand beneath fringing groves of coconut trees leaning languorously seaward with nodding star-shaped heads.

She was beautiful, but beneath her loveliness…she was a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence; of scum-crusted lagoons and vile swamps inhabited by giant crocodiles; a place of spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, of lizards the length of your leg…of ants that bite like fire, of tree-leeches that fall, fasten and suck…By day, black swarms of flies feed on open cuts and make them ulcerous. By night, mosquitoes come in clouds – bringing malaria, dengue or any one of a dozen filthy exotic fevers.

(Leckie, 54 to 5)

Meanwhile, getting across the beaches and moving inland was an ambition often blocked by withering enemy fire and natural obstacles like high ridges where the sand ended and the land proper began. The war correspondent Robert Sherod recalls:

People were always being shot just next to you, it seemed. After I'd got ashore and was leaning against the sea wall…a marine came by and he cheerfully waved at a friend of his and all of a sudden he spun around with a bullet straight through the head.

(Holmes, 255)

Another problem was the congestion on the beaches, as here explained by Marine Chuck Tatum:

On the landing beaches to our right chaos continued as increasing winds and sea smashed derelict, broached landing craft. Beaches remained closed to all but emergency traffic and wounded lay patiently in hastily prepared shelters while Corpsmen did what they could to save their lives.

(Wright, 36)

Getting off the beach was only the first stage of a battle. Most of the fighting in the Pacific War took place in difficult jungle terrain in the valleys and along the rocky ridges of an island's interior, terrain that provided the perfect shelter for the Japanese defenders. The worst element for the US Marines and Army troops was the determination of many Japanese soldiers to fight to the death, as explained here by Major General Collins, describing the battle for the Solomon Islands:

It was jungle fighting, but not entirely…our troops in the initial fighting went along the ridges in relatively open country. It was very tough fighting because these ridges were not very broad and furthermore the Japanese were tough fighters and they never would give up. We had isolated a Japanese regiment as a strong point and they fought until we actually had to annihilate them. We used loudspeakers after we had surrounded them and tried to persuade them to surrender but they wouldn't.

(Holmes 249 to 50)

Robert Sherod witnessed the strategies used to clear Japanese soldiers from their well-prepared hiding places:

They were awfully good at digging into those ravines, tunnels forty, fifty even one hundred feet long with a great many exits to them. They were hard to get out, you needed a number of weapons – the flame-thrower was always good for clearing caves. You used Bangalore torpedoes, hand grenades, you even used bulldozers…There must have been thousands of Japanese who suffocated to death across the Pacific because their caves were closed by bulldozers.

(Holmes, 482 to 3)

As the Pacific War reached ever closer to Japanese territory, the fighting intensified, and the casualties on all sides rose even higher. The Battle of Iwo Jima became the bloodiest encounter of the war in terms of US casualties. Marine Sergeant Wilson Cooke remembers:

…we stayed committed for twenty-six days…I have a picture taken on Iwo of my company. There's sixteen of us left out of two hundred and seventy that went in…We had lost so many people, my CO he just came round and said, 'Cooke, you're company commander. We'll talk about commissioning you later'.

(Holmes, 487 & 490)

Capturing an often suicidal enemy was a hazardous business, as here recounted by Marine John Greet:

Most of the time we had to use flame-throwers to get them out, they were buried so deep. Very few of them came out on their own and when they did, usually the one in the front he'd come out with his hands up and the one behind he'd come out with a grenade. ..they'd got the idea that we were going to torture them, like they did to our boys I guess. We saw some pretty terrible sights over there.

(Holmes, 491)

Japan's defence became increasingly desperate. A peculiar feature of the Pacific War was not only the suicidal tendencies of army soldiers but the deliberate kamikaze attacks using planes, piloted rockets, and boats. Not as effective as the Japanese commanders hoped, nevertheless, kamikaze attacks were extremely difficult to counter. Lieutenant Frank Manson was on board the destroyer USS Laffey when it was attacked by kamikaze pilots (but not sunk):

This attack went on for seventy to ninety minutes…There were twenty-six planes that made suicide attacks against our ship and seven of the planes were shot down by our gunners and fifteen managed to miss the ship and we were actually hit, direct hit, by four.

(Holmes, 494)

For the Japanese kamikaze pilots, their missions were not considered only in terms of suicide, as here explained by Lieutenant General Kawabe:

We believed our spiritual conviction in victory would balance any scientific advantage …You call our Kamikaze attacks "suicide attacks". This is a misnomer, and we felt very badly about your calling them "suicide attacks". They were in no sense suicide. The pilot did not start out on his mission with the intention of committing suicide. He looked upon himself as a human bomb which could destroy a certain part of the enemy fleet for his country. They considered it a glorious thing, while a "suicide" may not be so glorious.

(Largas, 38)

The Battle of Okinawa in April to June 1945 was the last major battle of WWII. This was the 32nd Japanese Army's slogan for the island's defence:

One Plane for One Warship
One Boat for One Ship
One Man for Ten of the Enemy or One Tank

(Leckie, 31)

Around 150,000 Japanese civilians died in the battle. Momoko Yonaha was an Okinawan conscripted as a nurse and expected to serve on the front lines:

I hid in the mountain all day but from the air the American bombers kept bombing us and we were also subjected to strafing attacks and also heavy bombardment from the warships lying offshore. Many who were with me died...I had already decided to die and one of the soldiers had a hand grenade and he said, 'Let's all commit suicide,' and we all agreed. And once we had made that decision I felt a great relief and calmness came over me. Just while I was waiting for the soldier to pull the pin, suddenly one of the soldiers took out a sword and started waving it around. 'You women and children get out,' he said, 'you shouldn't die here.'…Of course the air-raid shelter in which we were hiding was very small so one step back and we were outside. We looked up and there we saw a US soldier pointing a pistol to us, gesturing with his pistol to come out. This is how I managed to survive.

(Holmes, 494 to 5)

With casualties already so high – around 35% of Allied troops involved – launching further amphibious operations against the main islands of Japan was predicted to only increase that percentage. Consequently, although Tokyo and other cities had already been pounded by conventional bombs, it was decided to force a quick surrender by dropping two devastating atomic bombs, one on the city of Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki in August 1945. Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay Boeing B-29 Superfortress that delivered the bomb to Hiroshima, describes the immediate effects of the explosion:

It was a clear, sunshiny day and visibility was unrestricted so as we came back around again facing the direction of Hiroshima we saw this cloud coming up, two minutes and it was up at our altitude – we were at thirty-thousand feet – and the cloud was up there and continuing to go right on up in a boiling fashion. The surface was nothing but a black boiling – like a barrel of tar, that's probably the best description I can give. Where before there had been a city, distinctive houses, buildings and everything, now you couldn't see anything except black-boiling debris down below.

(Holmes, 571).

Michiko Nakamoto, then a schoolgirl in Hiroshima, describes what it was like to be caught in that black-boiling terror:

I knew something had happened to me but I was scared to find out what had happened. I knew one side of my face was injured but I couldn't put my hand to see how much it was injured. I was scared to find out and my arm was burned and my feet were burned and I was wearing a long-sleeve blouse, which we were required to wear during the war, but this was burned off and it left a mark on the arm. Then this lady told me it's better if I went down to the river and washed my burns so I tried to do this, but this burn was something that I could not touch it as it so deeply burned and I just couldn't do anything.

(Holmes, 574)

The Japanese military government surrendered shortly after the bombing, and so both the Pacific War and the Second World War came to an end.