What was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater during WWII? Okinawa?
Most battles I know of have less than 20K total military casualties which is relatively small compared to the hundreds of thousands that died in various battles in Europe.
I know a lot of civilians were killed during the Battle of Manilla but I was thinking more along military casualties.
Are you counting stuff going on in China?
Not really in this scenario. I'm thinking primarily Japan vs America and Japan vs Great Britain in the pacifc, not mainland asia.
It's proportional. Sure, that 20k doesn't sound like much, but you've got to bear in mind that it usually results in a total annihilation for the Japanese force.
Is it due to the fact that the battles are scattered all over smaller islands instead of a large front that makes the battles involve less personnel in general then?
Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, and Guadalcanal are the most well-known big battles of the Pacific.
Pretty much. You can't have 100k men in a pitched battle on an island smaller than a major city.
Don't forget Peleliu as well.
Iwo Jima was pretty brutal. I remember talking to a veteran of it a while back and he told me him surviving it was nothing to do with him being a great soldier. it was just this hurricane of piece of metal flying around and you could die at any time
Just pure dumb luck. Thats how you survived that battle. There was no system or anything like that.
Iwo. It's the only battle where U.S. casualties were higher than the Japs.
Do you know the battle of manila? Japanese Imperial soldiers killed thousands of civilians and done a suicide defence of the city every building has a japanese garrison. That left the americans to destroy every building pretty much leveling the city.
Not just that, but it was also so much more difficult to project force into the Pacific, especially on land. Dropping troops into these islands required enormous effort and a fleet to constantly supply them with food, ammunition, fuel, medicine, etc. And if you wanted to get away from the coast (when there was an inland anyway) you'd pretty much have to drag all your crap with you by hand.
For the U.S. at least, it cost something like 3 times as much to put an infantryman in the pacific as it did in the ETO.
Ironically, according to Saburo Sakai the Americans could have taken it with like 10 dudes at a certain point in.... 43? and they had a fleet nearby at the time. Coulda easily taken it with no bloodshed but hey, how could they have known?
well there's always cowardice
It was of no use then because there wasn't an air field yet.
The other problem is that in 1943, the Marianas hadn't been taken yet. While strike fleet elements could go there, you'd have a much tougher time regularly resupplying the island until you've knocked the Japanese out of their positions to the south.
nah i think there was an airfield.. sakai was a pilot and was stationed there
It's not like the Americans couldn't or didn't build airfields in the islands they grabbed: the CBs were a thing.
yeah i was gonna say the same thing but hey war's over now
Nope. No place for that at Iwo Jima. Where are you going to hide?
We (generally) didn't in the Pacific for two reasons:
1.) The airfield is already there and worth taking for our own use
2.) If we take the Japs airfield, they no longer have one.
Another issue is that the airfields the Japs built were in key strategic positions so the airfields we DID build weren't in as good of a position.
What about Tarawa?
Tarawa was tiny in scale next to some of the others. The combined death toll was about 6,000 or so.
Yeah but the wrap party was pretty dope
Although not in the Pacific theater, the Japanese campaign against the British in Malaysia during 1941-42 might be worth checking out.
Fuck, nevermind. Somehow missed the "bloodiest" part in the title.
Consider it this way;
Stalingrad- 70 dead per square mile
Okinawa- 200 dead per square mile
Peleliu- 2,600 dead per square mile
Iwo Jima- 2,800 dead per square mile
>Peleliu- 2,600 dead per square mile
Peleliu may have not been the bloodiest, but all the memoirs I've read give me the impression that it was as bad if not worse than Iwo. Over two months of fighting for only five square miles of coral rock. Rock you can't dig into. Corpses decomposing literally everywhere, even those of your side. Flies in numbers so large an audible hum was heard all day. An island with no strategic value. The justification for the invasion, covering MacArthur's flank, ends up being unnecessary. Iwo had no strategic value either, but at least they got an airstrip that would save the occasional bomber crew.
Wait didn't Iwo have a strategic value despite the massive battle for the island?
I always thought the airbase on the island was used for bombing of mainland Japan.
Marines missed out on the biggest land campaign in the Pacific: the Liberation of the Philippines.
Literally the only proper ground war between Nips and Yanks.
China is the CBI (China-Burma-India) Front. Hell its a concurrent war almost entirely (Second Sino-Jap War)
The Marines in the Pacific are a bit of a meme.
At least in the U.S. scheme of things, CBI was considered part of the PTO, hence me asking originally.
It was going to be used for servicing fighter escorts, which turned out to be unnecessary.
>mexico providing air support
????
Escuadron 201. They sent a squadron of pilots to the US to learn how to fly the P-47, and they got used in the Pacific.
>tfw you will never fly with Mexican bros who just wanted to help fight the Axis in any way they could
>yfw they do the yard work back at base upon returning from missions
>yfw the Japanese were hiding in the jungle
>yfw they were trimming trees on their missions
tips 4 memoires pls
i have read Leckie
I never feel bad about mistakes like that. The u.s. benefitted heavilly from intel in another battle, where they took an island with no resistance.
Battles are battles and wars war
With the Old Breed by Sledge is great.
I hope you end up serving, man.
'A Tomb called Iwo Jima' if you want the Jap perspective.
The main point was
-removal of the island as a fighter base for the japanese
-emergency landing area for bombers
-fighter base for escort fighters.
The last thing becomes more important when you remember that the allies were at this point deep into planning the invasion of the japanese home islands. The fear of heavy casualties from kamikaze attacks on the transports and landing ships pushed for the idea of as many fighter planes covering the beaches as possible, both carrier-borne and land-based. Fighter support to the bombing raids became less and less needed as 1945 went on, due to the japanese stockpiling of planes for kamikaze-operations.
So the japanese barely had fighters to attack allied bombers at the end of the war?
Here's a picture of B-29s flying past Mount Fuji completely unopposed.
If that isn't some of the heaviest symbolism for the downfall of the Japanese Empire I don't know what is.
If they had taken it at 1943, it would've been taken right back just as easily.
Well, they had several thousand fighters, and several thousand non-combat types on top of that( trainers and such), but several factors such as fuel, training and aircraft capabilities made them store and hide them for late use against the invasion fleets instead of useless attempts at stopping B-29's and fighter screens.