The Turn of the Tide in the Pacific War

The Turn of the Tide in the Pacific War
Author: Sean M. Judge
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700625984
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Midway through 1942, Japanese and Allied forces found themselves fighting on two fronts—in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. These concurrent campaigns, conducted between July 1942 and February 1943, proved a critical turning point in the war being waged in the Pacific, as the advantage definitively shifted from the Japanese to the Americans. Key to this shift was the Allies seizing of the strategic initiative—a concept that Sean Judge examines in this book, particularly in the context of the Pacific War. The concept of strategic initiative, in this analysis, helps to explain why and how contending powers design campaigns and use military forces to alter the trajectory of war. Judge identifies five factors that come into play in capturing and maintaining the initiative: resources, intelligence, strategic acumen, combat effectiveness, and chance, all of which are affected by political will. His book uses the dual campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands as a case study in strategic initiative by reconstructing the organizations, decisions, and events that influenced the shift of initiative from one adversary to the other. Perhaps the most critical factor in this case is strategic acumen, without which the other advantages are easily squandered. Specifically, Judge details how General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, in designing and executing these campaigns, provided the strategic leadership essential to reversing the tide of war—whose outcome, Judge contends, was not as inevitable as conventional wisdom tells us. The strategic initiative, once passed to American and Allied forces in the Pacific, would never be relinquished. In its explanation of how and why this happened, The Turn of the Tide in the Pacific War holds important lessons for students of military history and for future strategic leaders.

The Turn of the Tide, July 1942-February 1943

The Turn of the Tide, July 1942-February 1943
Author: Sean M. Judge
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Military art and science
ISBN:
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"Military historians and military professionals often refer to strategic initiative and most assume a common understanding of the term. Yet the term has not been carefully defined or closely studied. This dissertation aims to fill the void by crafting a definition for the concept and examining the role and influence of shifting strategic initiative in the Pacific War between mid 1942 and early 1943. Strategic initiative grants the combatant possessing it greater influence over the course of the war and therefore provides the possessor with more options in waging the war. The underlying elements that influence possession of this initiative include resources, intelligence, strategic acumen, combat effectiveness, chance, and political will. The study contains several descriptive chapters. The first examines the organization of the Japanese and the American high commands and their decision-making bodies. These organizations had many similarities, but significant differences as well. The Japanese army and navy did not create joint organizations in the same manner as the Americans, who created the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization based upon a British Imperial General Staff model. The two combatants also differed in their approach to intelligence organizations and emphasis. They both leveraged similar types of intelligence, but the Japanese created a system designed to gather tactical intelligence for battlefield success. The Americans and Allies created and grew more joint and combined organizations that helped better integrate their intelligence and improved their estimates. The heart of the study examines the course of the war and shifting strategic initiative in the Pacific War during 1942 and 1943. The Japanese attacked and seized the strategic initiative in December 1941 with advantages in nearly all the underlying elements. Six months later the Americans won an important victory at the Battle of Midway, which altered the naval balance and allowed them to vie for the strategic initiative. Over the following eight months and through two symbiotic campaigns on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and on Papua, New Guinea, the Allies gained the strategic initiative. The Allies did so predominantly through the exploitation of advantages in intelligence, strategic acumen, and combat effectiveness. The Americans and Allies thus took control of the war before they held the preponderance of resources with which they closed out the last two years of the war."--Abstract.

The Fleet at Flood Tide

The Fleet at Flood Tide
Author: James D. Hornfischer
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 690
Release: 2017-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0345548728
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary story of the World War II air, land, and sea campaign that brought the U.S. Navy to the apex of its strength and marked the rise of the United States as a global superpower Winner, Commodore John Barry Book Award, Navy League of the United States • Winner, John Lehman Distinguished Naval Historian Award, Naval Order of the United States With its thunderous assault on the Mariana Islands in June 1944, the United States crossed the threshold of total war. In this tour de force of dramatic storytelling, distilled from extensive research in newly discovered primary sources, James D. Hornfischer brings to life the campaign that was the fulcrum of the drive to compel Tokyo to surrender—and that forever changed the art of modern war. With a close focus on high commanders, front-line combatants, and ordinary people, American and Japanese alike, Hornfischer tells the story of the climactic end of the Pacific War as has never been done before. Here are the epic seaborne invasions of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, the stunning aerial battles of the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, the first large-scale use of Navy underwater demolition teams, the largest banzai attack of the war, and the daring combat operations large and small that made possible the strategic bombing offensive culminating in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the seas of the Central Pacific to the shores of Japan itself, The Fleet at Flood Tide is a stirring, authoritative, and cinematic portrayal of World War II’s world-changing finale. Illustrated with original maps and more than 120 dramatic photographs “Quite simply, popular and scholarly military history at its best.”—Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture “The dean of World War II naval history . . . In his capable hands, the story races along like an intense thriller. . . . Narrative nonfiction at its finest—a book simply not to be missed.”—James M. Scott, Charleston Post and Courier “An impressively lucid account . . . admirable, fascinating.”—The Wall Street Journal “An extraordinary memorial to the courageous—and a cautionary note to a world that remains unstable and turbulent today.”—Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, author of Sea Power “A masterful, fresh account . . . ably expands on the prior offerings of such classic naval historians as Samuel Eliot Morison.”—The Dallas Morning News

The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Vol. 2) (The Pacific War Trilogy)

The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Vol. 2) (The Pacific War Trilogy)
Author: Ian W. Toll
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 635
Release: 2015-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393248208
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A New York Times Bestseller "A beautiful blend of history and prose and proves again Mr. Toll’s mastery of the naval-war narrative." —Wall Street Journal This masterful history encompasses the heart of the Pacific War—the period between mid-1942 and mid-1944—when parallel Allied counteroffensives north and south of the equator washed over Japan's far-flung island empire like a "conquering tide," concluding with Japan's irreversible strategic defeat in the Marianas. It was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative and logistically complicated amphibious war in history, and it fostered bitter interservice rivalries, leaving wounds that even victory could not heal. Often overlooked, these are the years and fights that decided the Pacific War. Ian W. Toll's battle scenes—in the air, at sea, and in the jungles—are simply riveting. He also takes the reader into the wartime councils in Washington and Tokyo where politics and strategy often collided, and into the struggle to mobilize wartime production, which was the secret of Allied victory. Brilliantly researched, the narrative is propelled and colored by firsthand accounts—letters, diaries, debriefings, and memoirs—that are the raw material of the telling details, shrewd judgment, and penetrating insight of this magisterial history. This volume—continuing the "marvelously readable dramatic narrative" (San Francisco Chronicle) of Pacific Crucible—marks the second installment of the Pacific War Trilogy, which will stand as the first history of the entire Pacific War to be published in at least twenty-five years.

The Conquering Tide

The Conquering Tide
Author: Ian W. Toll
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015
Genre: World War, 1939-1945
ISBN: 9781490693668
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Presents an account of the Allied effort to reclaim thousands of Japanese-occupied islands, detailing the campaign's technical innovations, logistic complications, and human and economic costs.

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy)

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy)
Author: Ian W. Toll
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 732
Release: 2011-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393083179
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Winner of the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction "Both a serious work of history…and a marvelously readable dramatic narrative." —San Francisco Chronicle On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss, a blow that destroyed the offensive power of their fleet. Pacific Crucible—through a dramatic narrative relying predominantly on primary sources and eyewitness accounts of heroism and sacrifice from both navies—tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history to seize the strategic initiative.

Midnight in the Pacific

Midnight in the Pacific
Author: Joseph Wheelan
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0306824604
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A sweeping narrative history--the first in over twenty years--of America's first major offensive of World War II, the brutal, no-quarter-given campaign to take Japanese-occupied Guadalcanal From early August until mid-November of 1942, US Marines, sailors, and pilots struggled for dominance against an implacable enemy: Japanese soldiers, inculcated with the bushido tradition of death before dishonor, avatars of bayonet combat--close-up, personal, and gruesome. The glittering prize was Henderson Airfield. Japanese planners knew that if they neutralized the airfield, the battle was won. So did the Marines who stubbornly defended it. The outcome of the long slugfest remained in doubt under the pressure of repeated Japanese air, land, and sea operations. And losses were heavy. At sea, in a half-dozen fiery combats, the US Navy fought the Imperial Japanese Navy to a draw, but at a cost of more than 4,500 sailors. More American sailors died in these battles off Guadalcanal than in all previous US wars, and each side lost 24 warships. On land, more than 1,500 soldiers and Marines died, and the air war claimed more than 500 US planes. Japan's losses on the island were equally devastating--starving Japanese soldiers called it "the island of death." But when the attritional struggle ended, American Marines, sailors, and airmen had halted the Japanese juggernaut that for five years had whirled through Asia and the Pacific. Guadalcanal was America's first major ground victory against Japan and, most importantly, the Pacific War's turning point. Published on the 75th anniversary of the battle and utilizing vivid accounts written by the combatants at Guadalcanal, along with Marine Corps and Army archives and oral histories, Midnight in the Pacific is both a sweeping narrative and a compelling drama of individual Marines, soldiers, and sailors caught in the crosshairs of history.

The Pacific War

The Pacific War
Author: William B. Hopkins
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2010-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1616732407
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This “important comprehensive study” of WWII in the Pacific examines the high-level decision-making and strategy that led to victory (Roanoke Times). Once the stories have been told of battles won and lost, most of what happens in a war remains a mystery. So it has been with accounts of World War II in the Pacific, a complex conflict whose nature is often obscured by simple chronological narratives. In The Pacific War, William B. Hopkins, a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific war and respected military history author, opens the story of the Pacific campaign to a broader and deeper view. Hopkins investigates the strategies, politics, and personalities that shaped the fighting. His regional approach to this complex war conducted on land, sea, and air offers an insightful perspective on how this multifaceted conflict unfolded. As expansive as the immense reaches of the Pacific, and as focused as the most intensive pinpoint attack on a strategic island, Hopkins’ account offers a fresh way of understanding the hows—and more significantly, the whys—of the Pacific War.