World War 2
Here Come Japan
In the six months that followed Pearl Harbor, Japan cut a swathe through the Pacific, gaining vast territories for its 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'. Faced with scattered, ill equipped opposition, the Japanese secured victory with the brilliant use of intelligence, incisive central planning and the smooth co-ordination of navel, air and ground forces.
By May 1942 the territory in Japanese hands included the islands of Guam and Wake, the Philippines, French Indochina, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, three-quarters of New-Guinea and Papua, the Bismarck Archipelago and a substantial part of the Gilbert and Soloman Islands. To the north, they threatened the Aleutian chain and the approaches to Alaska; in the west, having overrun Malaya, captured the great navel base at Singapore and bundled the British out of Burma, they were close to the boarders of India; to the south they menaced Australia.
The Japanese had reached the limits of conquest predicted by Admiral Yamamoto the C-in-C of the Japanese Combined Fleet. To secure their vast perimeter, they now sought to lure the US Pacific Fleet into battle and destroy it.
At the Battle of the Coral Sea, from the 4th to the 8th of May 1942, the Japanese were halted, and a new era in naval warfare was opened. The first large-scale aircraft carrier clash was fought without either surface fleet sighting the enemy.
At Coral Sea the Japanese sank one of Admiral Frank Fletcher's two carriers, Lexington, and damaged the other, Yorktown. Believing both aircraft carriers had been sunk, the Japanese fleet pressed on with its plan to capture the island of Midway. The Americans, who had cracked the Japanese navel code, positioned their fleet to defeat the much stronger task force which the Japanese had assembled to take Midway. In the ensuing carrier battle - one of the most decisive of the war - American dive-bombers destroyed four Japanese carriers and reversed the balance of power in the Pacific.
The Japanese were now forced to defend a vast ocean empire which might be attacked at any point by the gathering might of the American war machine. The point the Americans chose was the Solomons chain. On the 7th of August 1942 US Marines stormed ashore on the island of Guadalcanal. The Japanese were not cleared from Guadalcanal until February 1943, after a series of savage ground, air and sea battles which stretched American endurance to the limit.