Guelton, Frédéric La Guerre du Pacifique

From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, from December 1941 to August 1945, the Allies, especially the Americans, and the Japanese faced each other in a war whose main feature was that it took place in the largest sea area on earth, the Pacific Ocean. Isn't it more than 8,000 km that separate Tokyo from San Francisco? And even though the Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii is only about 4,000 km from the American coast, the major air, sea and land battles, such as those at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, took place another 6,000 km further away. The Japanese often had to cover almost as great distances, as more than 5,500 km lie between Tokyo and Guadalcanal. But why such a war and so many battles so far away from home? Because the Japanese planned to build a vast empire around themselves, which they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. A prosperity zone that was to stretch from mainland China to the Dutch East Indies towards Australia. To achieve this, any intervention by the United States had to be made impossible by destroying its Pacific fleet. In the event of failure, the worst was to be feared, and the Japanese General Staff was aware of this. However, the attack on Pearl Harbor, a minor tactical success for Japan, was above all a major strategic defeat for the country. The reason was simple: the American aircraft carriers and key port facilities remained intact. From then until 1945, the balance of power inevitably shifted in favour of the United States, whose economic and industrial power was ten times greater than that of Japan. But this required four years of war with terrible human and material losses. The final chapter was written on 6 and 9 August 1945, when two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushering in a new era for the war and for humanity. The era of nuclear apocalypse!