Pacific Campaigns

Pacific Campaigns, military actions by Japan and the Allies in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The surprise Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, followed very shortly thereafter by coordinated attacks against British and American positions at Hong Kong, in Malaya, and the Philippines heralded the outbreak of war in the Pacific, although the Japanese had been at war in China since at least 1937 (and arguably since the forcible incorporation of Dongbei in 1931). The Japanese conquered the area they designated the “Southern Resources Zone”, Malaya and the Netherlands Indies, within a few months, consolidating that conquest by victories in the Philippines and against the British in Burma. Japan then set out to ensure uninterrupted exploitation of South East Asia by the creation of a southern buffer zone stretching from New Guinea through Fiji and the islands of the South Pacific, intended to isolate Australia from the United States and thus prevent the latter from creating a major base in Australia from which to launch a counter-offensive.

The final seal on the Japanese victory was to be provided by the destruction of the remaining US naval presence in Pacific waters west of Hawaii, but Japanese plans were frustrated through successive American air/naval victories in the Battle of the Coral Sea (aided by ships of the Royal Australian Navy) in May 1942 and the Battle of Midway in June. After these reverses, Japan gradually conceded naval mastery of the Pacific, not least through an American campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare which began at the war's outbreak and which by 1944-1945 had successfully throttled Japanese naval and seaborne communications even around the Japanese home islands.

The Pacific campaigns were dominated by the Americans on the Allied side, although the Americans had considerable forces provided by Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Indies in the South-West Pacific and South Pacific Areas. All the higher command arrangements in these theatres were American, however, and a mixture of America's industrial and manpower preponderance, and the egotistical propensity of General Douglas MacArthur to refuse to share the credit for Allied successes with his allies, even, or especially, where they had contributed to success, ensured that international attention, and much subsequent memory, depicted the war as one fought almost exclusively between the Americans and Japanese.

Until 1944 Australia supplied the preponderance of forces available to MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area, and Australian industrial and agricultural production continued to supply American forces to the war's end. New Zealand provided a substantial base facility for the US navy and marines operating in the Solomon Islands, and although New Zealand's major military commitment remained in Europe for the war's duration, the New Zealand 3rd Division of two brigades was raised in 1942 for service alongside the Americans in the Solomons campaign; it was ultimately disbanded in 1944.

As the war moved northwards to the Philippines and then further towards Japanese territory itself, other national forces were largely excluded, and the final campaigns were very largely American ones, although Australian ships and aircraft participated in the reconquest of the Philippines while the British Pacific Fleet, based in Australia, joined its much larger American partner for the final air/naval battles in the northern Pacific in 1945. The mass destruction of Japanese cities by firebombing was conducted almost entirely by American B-29 bombers. MacArthur's plans for an invasion of the Japanese homeland included provision for a British Commonwealth corps, which was to include a British and an Australian division, but these plans were rendered unnecessary by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 which finally brought the war to an end.

The toll of death and suffering in the Pacific campaigns was enormous, and must include civilian casualties occasioned through Japanese occupation and Allied military action. The defeat of the European colonial powers by the Japanese in the opening months of war, however, was a significant factor in the subsequent decolonization struggles in South East Asia waged throughout the 1940s and 1950s.