War in the Pacific

  • The Hopevale Martyrs

      The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. The American Catholic missionaries in Tapaz,Philippines probably could not be specified as vulnerable but the people they cared for were. additionally the missionaries themselves did not pose any threat themselves to the Japanese occupiers. The Hopevale Martyrs were Christian martyrs who…

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  • If you’d to believe the media nowadays you would think that severe storms are a 21st century phenomena. However they have been around for quite a while. On 18 Dec 1944, divine intervention interfered with human action again. Admiral William Halsey and his Task Force 38 were caught unaware amidst refueling when Typhoon Cobra struck…

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  • A bright Sunday in December Japanese planes blazed out of the sky to strafe and bomb an American warship while it lay at anchor. You’d be forgiven to think this was the Pearl Harbor attack, but you’d be wrong. The sinking of the USS Panay is pretty much forgotten now. But it was one of the…

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  • Tani was born 22 December 1882 in Okayama Prefecture. He graduated from the 15th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1903 and from the 24th class of the Army War College, where he became an instructor in 1924. The College used his texts on strategy and tactics as required readings. He saw service…

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  • The problem nowadays is there are no real heroes anymore,well at least no heroes that are honored in the media. The focus seems to be more on so called reality stars and overpaid athletes, and they are often being portrayed as being heroes for having survived the latest plastic surgery or knee injury. No wonder…

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  • The Goettge patrol.

    In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith (such as by raising a flag of truce) with the intention of breaking that promise once the unsuspecting enemy is exposed (such as by coming out of cover to attack the enemy coming to take the “surrendering” prisoners into custody). Perfidy constitutes a…

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  • On October 7, 1940, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a memo to Navy Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox (whose endorsement is included in the following scans). Captains Anderson and Knox were two of President Roosevelt’s most trusted military advisors. McCollum wrote that it would be in the interest…

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  • Operation Petticoat is a 1959 American World War II submarine comedy film in Eastmancolor from Universal-International, produced by Robert Arthur, directed by Blake Edwards, that stars Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. The film tells in flashback the misadventures of the fictional U. S. Navy submarine, USS Sea Tiger, during the opening days of the United States involvement in World War II. Some elements of the screenplay were taken from actual incidents that…

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  • Of all the enemies Allied soldiers confronted during World War II, malaria proved to be among the most stubborn. The mosquito-borne disease was a constant scourge for soldiers stationed in the Pacific and Mediterranean theaters. General MacArthur’s retreat to the malarial Philippine peninsula of Bataan in early 1942 led directly to his sickly army’s surrender to the Japanese a…

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  • Japan Surrenders

    The Jewel Voice Broadcast  was the radio broadcast in which Japanese Emperor Hirohito  read out the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War (, announcing to the Japanese people that the Japanese Government had accepted the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military at the end of World War II. This speech was broadcast at noon Japan Standard Time on August 15, 1945, after the Battle of Okinawa, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and…

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