The Journaling of Olsen 368

In 1931, without declaring war, Japan invaded Manchuria, seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industrial economy. By 1937, Japan controlled Manchuria and it was also ready to move deeper into China. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident on 7 July 1937 provoked full-scale war between China and Japan. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists suspended their civil war in order to form a nominal alliance against Japan, and the Soviet Union quickly lent support by providing large amounts of materiel to Chinese troops. In August 1937, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to fight about 300,000 Japanese troops in Shanghai, but, after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell.
Victory—a decisively rapid takeover of the island involving a debilitating cyberattack that would avoid a longer and more costly war with the U.S. Due to Taiwan’s level of networked sophistication and Beijing’s strategic imperatives, the unprecedented use of cyberwarfare in Taiwan is more likely than not. This lesson plan will focus on the overall strategies pursued by the Japanese and the Allies in the initial months of World War II in Asia and the Pacific. By examining military documents and consulting an interactive map of the Pacific theater, students will compare what each side hoped to accomplish with what actually happened.



The speeches and writings of Japanese statesmen and superpatriots in modern times reveal dozens of similar warnings of their intentions. Yet, in the summer of 1941, when their plan for conquest was officially published in The Way of the Subjects, the so-called “bible” of the Japanese people, many foreigners still did not take it very seriously. To understand what has to be done to prevent another ww2 Pearl Harbor we need to know something of the motives which led the Japanese to stake everything on this greatest gamble in their history. Americans have never before gone to war with a nation about which they knew so little. Since 1941 the people of this country have been too busy fighting Japan and the other Axis partners to spend much time investigating their history and politics.

At the end of World War II, millions of Japanese nationals are repatriated from China. In the Soviet Union, thousands of Japanese soldiers are forced into hard labor as prisoners of war. Most are repatriated in the first four years after the war, but the last major group of Japanese prisoners is sent back in 1956.
Therefore, due to this “lose-lose understanding,” all nations prefer to avoid world wars. Today, it is easy to convince other actors that goals are too costly, if not unachievable, therefore deterring threats emanating from other actors. However, the current world order is quite different from the post-World War II bilateral system. There are three main differences that changed during the course of the war for the current international system.

Hong Kong was attacked on 8 December and fell on 25 December 1941, with Canadian forces and the Royal Hong Kong Volunteers playing an important part in the defense. American bases on Guam and Wake Island were lost at around the same time. Two major British warships, HMSRepulse and HMSPrince of Wales, were sunk by a Japanese air attack off Malaya on 10 December 1941. Mexico provided some air support in the form of the 201st Fighter Squadron and Free France sent naval support in the form of Le Triomphant and later the Richelieu. From 1944 the French commando group Corps Léger d'Intervention also took part in resistance operations in Indochina. The commando corps continued to operate after the coup until liberation.
Few battles were as one-sided as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, or what the Americans called the Japanese counterattack, the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Japanese soldiers bled the Americans in their advance across the Pacific. At Iwo Jima, an eight-square-mile island of volcanic rock, seventeen thousand Japanese soldiers held the island against seventy thousand Marines for over a month. At the cost of nearly their entire force, they inflicted almost thirty thousand casualties before the island was lost. If Britain was safe from invasion, it was not immune from additional air attacks.
This raid revealed that the Japanese had virtually abandoned Truk as a naval base, and a plan to assault that atoll in June was abandoned. Instead, Nimitz drew up plane for an invasion of the Marianas in June, to be followed in September by an advance into the western Carolines. The operation was under the overall command of Vice Admiral Thomas E. Kinkaid, Commander, North Pacific. Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell commanded the assault force, and Maj. Gen. Albert E. Brown (who was replaced during the operations by Maj. Gen. Eugene M. Landrum) commanded the Army forces making the landing.

The Japanese had skillfully utilized terrain to inflict maximum casualties. Total American casualties were 49,451, including 12,520 dead or missing and 36,631 wounded. Japanese casualties were approximately 110,000 killed, and 7,400 were taken prisoner.
It may have been a year later than planned, thanks to the pandemic – but the Tokyo 2020 Olympics did finally take place in 2021. And they were the first Games in modern history to be held without spectators present. Of course, the social impact of the COVID-19 crisis will be felt for decades – perhaps nowhere more so than in the fight for gender equality. Indeed, as many women were forced to leave work to care for family during the pandemic, one report from the World Economic Forum and UN Development Programme suggested COVID-19 may have set gender parity back by an entire generation. In March, Heejung Chung, who has conducted research into the subject, told Cole the global health crisis may have changed the way we work forever. The coronavirus pandemic and the rolling lockdowns imposed around the world often came with orders from national governments to stay away from offices and work from home.

Aftermath of the November 25, 1943 kamikaze attack against the USS Essex. Fire-fighters and scattered fragments of the Japanese aircraft cover the flight deck. The plane struck the port edge of the flight deck, landing among planes fueled for takeoff, causing extensive damage, killing 15, and wounding 44. Landing barges loaded with U.S. troops bound for the beaches of Leyte island, in October 1944, as American and Japanese fighter planes duel to the death overhead.
Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur escaped the city in 1942 but vowed to return. He commanded forces that first landed north of Manila at Luzon and fought their way 100 miles south to the urban center. A lot of the military’s memory of the Pacific campaign during World War II focuses primarily on island fighting such as New Guinea, Tarawa and Iwo Jima, which began in the midst of the Manila fight.
Stilwell left China in late October and subsequently became Commanding General of the Army Ground Forces in the United States. In October 1944, American forces began retaking the Philippines from Japanese troops, who surrendered in August 1945. That same year, the United States Army Air Forces launched a strategic bombing campaign against Japan. In early 1945, American forces suffered heavy losses during the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa , an island of strategic importance off the coast of the Japanese home islands. Despite these casualties and suicidal Japanese air attacks, known as Kamikaze attacks, American forces conquered Okinawa in mid-June 1945.