Kategoria BISAC: History >> Wars & Conflicts - World War II - Pacific Theater

On 8th December 1941, as part of the simultaneous combine attack against Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) invaded the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia and the British colony of Hong Kong. After only 18 days of battle the defenders, a weak, undermanned brigade was overwhelmed by a superior force of two battle-harden IJA divisions. What makes the battle of Hong Kong was not the scale - just 14,000 defended the colony - but the intensity of this battle fought not only by the British Army, Navy and Air Force but also Canadians, Hong Kong's own defence force, the Indian Army as...

Santa Cruz is the forgotten carrier battle of 1942. Despite myth, the Japanese carrier force was not destroyed at Midway but survived to still prove a threat in the Pacific theater. Nowhere was this clearer than in the battle of Santa Cruz of October 1942. The stalemate on the ground in the Guadalcanal campaign led to the major naval forces of both belligerents becoming inexorably more and more involved in the fighting, each seeking to win the major victory that would open the way for a breakthrough on land as well.

The US Task Force 61 under the command of Rear Admiral Kinkaid and...

Following the devastating raids on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, lightning advances by Japanese forces throughout the Pacific and the Far East, and a desperate battle by the Allied command in the Dutch East Indies, it became evident that an attack on Australia was more a matter of when and not if.

On February 19, just eleven weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and two weeks after the fall of Singapore, the same Japanese battle group that had attacked Hawaii was ordered to attack the ill-prepared and under-defended Australian port of Darwin.

Publishing 75 years after...

Driven from the Philippines in 1942, General Douglas MacArthur returned three years later to force the Japanese off of its main island of Luzon. Containing the capital of Manila and vital natural resources as well as thousands of Allied prisoners of war, the triumph at Luzon would be a crucial step on the road to victory as the Americans continued to island-hop their way toward the Japanese home islands.

This new study details one of the hardest-fought campaigns of the Pacific War with Japanese fatalities alone on Luzon topping 200,000. Emphasizing the differences in Japanese and...

From the stunning victory at Pearl Harbor to its dramatic reversal at Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy swept all before it in its numerous victories in the Pacific and Far Eastern waters. The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War pulls from many of Osprey's bestselling books on the subject in addition to the most recent research on the subject, including many sources from Japan, and is the most recent and accurate book on this fascinating force.

Even after its setback at midway, the IJN remained a powerful force and inflicted sever setbacks on the US Navy at Guadalcanal and...

From the bestselling author of Hero Found comes the incredible true story of one of the greatest military rescues of all time, the 1945 World War II prison camp raid at Los Banos in the Philippines--a tale of daring, courage, and heroism that joins the ranks of Ghost Soldiers, Unbroken, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.

In February 1945, as the U.S. victory in the Pacific drew nearer, the Japanese army grew desperate, and its soldiers guarding U.S. and Allied POWs more sadistic. Starved, shot and beaten, many of the 2,146 prisoners of the Los Banos prison camp...

The loss of the Phillipines in 1942 was the worst defeat in American military history. General Douglas MacArthur, the 'Lion of Luzon', was evacuated by order of the President just before the fall, but he vowed to return, and in August 1944 he kept his word when he led the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War to date on the island of Leyte. This is the full story of that fateful battle, one of the most ferocious campaigns of World War II and one of huge strategic and symbolic significance. Preceding it had been the largest naval battle ever fought: the battle of Leyte Gulf, in...

The Guadalcanal campaign began with an amphibious assault in August 1942 - the US's first attempt to take the fight to the Japanese. It quickly escalated into a desperate attritional battle on land, air and sea, and by the time the Japanese had evacuated the last of their forces from the island in 1943, it was clear that the tide of the war had turned. The previously inexorable Japanese advance had been halted, and the myth of Japanese invincibility shattered. The fighting brought into sharp relief several crucial weaknesses of Japanese strategic planning and war economy, while the US was...

The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother's house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front...

For the British Empire it was a military disaster, but for Imperial Japan the conquest of Malaya was one of the pivotal campaigns of World War II. Giving birth to the myth of the Imperial Japanese Army's invincibility, the victory left both Burma and India open to invasion. Although heavily outnumbered, the Japanese Army fought fiercely to overcome the inept and shambolic defense offered by the British and Commonwealth forces.

Detailed analysis of the conflict, combined with a heavy focus on the significance of the aerial campaign, help tell the fascinating story of the Japanese...