War in the Pacific and the Big Three Conferences
Overview
Statewide Dual Credit Modern World History: Unit 14, Lesson 10
A discussion of the War in the Pacific highlights key battles and the involvement of the United States, Australia, and China, and a summary of the Big Three Conferences, where leaders from Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union met to strategize and shape the postwar world.
War In The Pacific
In April 1942, the United States launched a risky bombing raid against Japan. Led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle (1896-1993), 16 Mitchell bombers launched from the USS Hornet dropped bombs on Tokyo and other targets throughout the island of Honshu. Forced to abandon their aircraft in China, Japanese forces captured many of the U.S. pilots involved in the raid. The following month, American and Australian forces defeated a Japanese invasion fleet off the coast of New Guinea. In June, U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz (1885-1966) led a fleet of three aircraft carriers, seven heavy cruisers and 15 destroyers against a large Japanese fleet led by Admiral Yamamoto. U.S. forces forestalled future Japanese raids on Hawaii by sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers.
At the grueling Battle of Guadalcanal, fought from August 1942 to February 1943, 60,000 U.S. marines and sailors defeated 36,000 entrenched Japanese defenders determined to fight to the death (less than a 1,000 of the Japanese soldiers surrendered). By securing Guadalcanal’s airfield, the United States could now conduct direct bombing of the Japanese home islands.
While the United States engaged in an “island hopping campaign” across the Pacific, Chinese forces under the command of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek (1887- 1975) continued to tie down half a million Japanese troops. Isolated by Japanese armies that controlled the eastern Coast of China and large areas of Burma and French Indochina, Chiang’s forces, headquartered in Chongqing, relied on Allied supplies flown in by air over the “hump” of the Himalaya Mountains from British-controlled India for survival. Chiang also contended with a growing Chinese communist movement led by former schoolteacher turned revolutionary Mao Zedong (1893-1976). In fact, Chiang considered wiping out his communist rivals as more important than fighting the Japanese. Although treated as an equal by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the 1943 Cairo Conference, Chiang was, in reality, relegated to the status of a junior partner in the overall Allied war effort.
Big Three Conferences
While German and Russian forces engaged in bloody combat along the Eastern Front and Chinese and American forces battled the Japanese in Asia and the Pacific, the leaders of the three strongest Allied powers— Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union— held a series of conferences to plan war strategy as well as determine the map of the postwar world.
In November 1943, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in Tehran, Iran. In addition to discussing the date for a cross-channel invasion from Britain and the willingness of the United States to supply military aid to the USSR, the three leaders issued the Tehran Declaration, which called for Poland and other Eastern European countries to enjoy the right of self-determination once the war was over. At the subsequent Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed to divide control of Germany and Austria between their nations and France, establish a coalition government in Poland, and lend their support to creating a United Nations. At the third and final conference, held in Potsdam, Germany, in July and August 1945, Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), Clement Attlee (1883-1967) and Joseph Stalin demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan, planned to divide Germany and Berlin, discussed the donation of American money to rebuild Europe, and promised to hold free and fair elections in Eastern Europe.