Curated playlist
Battles of World War II involving Japan
- Battle of Northern Burma and Western YunnanThe Battle of Northern Burma and Western Yunnan traced its origins to the 4th of May 1942. That day, fifty-four Japanese aircraft struck Baoshan, the Millennium Ancient City of Yunnan Province. Six days later, Japanese troops entered…
- Western New Guinea campaignThe Allied command set a clear goal for early 1944. They needed to bypass heavily fortified Japanese positions in the Pacific theater. This strategy aimed to cut off enemy supply lines without costly frontal assaults. Operations Reckless…
- Battle of Changsha (1944)The Battle of Changsha of 1944 ended with a ceremony that defied every military convention of East Asia. On the 14th of December 1944, Chiang Kai-shek personally received General Fang Xianjue at his Chongqing residence. Fang had…
- Siege of MyitkyinaThe siege of Myitkyina began with a boast. General Joseph Stilwell predicted the coming battle for this town in Burma would be a feat which will live in military history. What made a jungle outpost worth that kind of promise? Why would a…
- Battle of Guilin–LiuzhouThe Battle of Guilin-Liuzhou put two of southern China's most storied cities in the crosshairs of the largest Japanese land offensive of the entire Second Sino-Japanese War. On the 1st of November, when Japanese forces began their assault…
- Arakan campaign (1942–1943)The Arakan campaign of 1942-1943 began with a single, strategic prize in mind: Akyab Island. Fighters and transport aircraft flying from its all-weather airfield could reach most of Central Burma. Medium bombers could range as far as…
- Battle of OkinawaThe Battle of Okinawa began on the 1st of April 1945, when American forces launched the largest amphibious assault ever attempted in the Pacific Theater of World War II. They called it Operation Iceberg. The island they were storming lay…
- Fall of SingaporeOn the afternoon of the 15th of February 1942, British Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival walked toward the Ford Motor Factory in Singapore bearing a white flag of truce and a Union Jack. He was about to hand over 85,000 soldiers to a…
- Battle of Guam (1941)The Battle of Guam began at 04:44 on the 8th of December 1941, when Captain George McMillin received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He commanded an island of 23,394 people, defended by a force that had no artillery on land, no…
- Battle of LuzonThe Battle of Luzon was the largest land battle of the Pacific Theater in World War II, pitting Allied forces from the United States, the Philippines, Mexico, and their allies against the Empire of Japan on the biggest island in the…
- Battle of LeyteThe Battle of Leyte began not with a single shot but with a promise. General Douglas MacArthur had vowed to return to the Philippines after President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered him to flee in 1942. That order came just a month before…
- Battle of Mount SongThe Battle of Mount Song in 1944 decided whether a vital supply road connecting Burma to China would reopen. The mountain sat immediately behind the Salween River, and whoever held it controlled whether Chinese forces could receive aid…
- Battle of Iwo JimaThe Battle of Iwo Jima began on the 19th of February 1945, when the first wave of Marines landed on the southeastern beaches of a small volcanic island eight square miles in area. What they found was not what American intelligence had…
- Battle of Manila (1945)The Battle of Manila began on the 3rd of February 1945, and within a month it had killed at least 100,000 civilians and reduced one of Asia's most celebrated cities to rubble. Historians would later compare it to Warsaw and Berlin as one…
- Battle of West HunanThe Battle of West Hunan began on the 6th of April 1945, just weeks before Germany's surrender in Europe, but on the other side of the world the Second Sino-Japanese War was still raging through its eighth year. Japan launched what would…
- Battle of Buna–GonaThe Battle of Buna-Gona lasted from the 16th of November 1942 to the 22nd of January 1943. It ended with evidence that starving Japanese defenders had cannibalised their own dead. Australian and United States troops had driven Japan back…
- Battle of ImphalThe Battle of Imphal began in March 1944 with a Japanese army crossing the Chindwin River, convinced it could destroy the Allied forces in northeast India and reshape the entire war. The city of Imphal, capital of Manipur, sat at the heart…
- Battle of the Philippine SeaThe Battle of the Philippine Sea, fought on the 19th and the 20th of June 1944, was the largest carrier-to-carrier naval engagement in history. Twenty-four aircraft carriers and roughly 1,350 carrier-based aircraft clashed as American and…
- Battle of KohimaThe Battle of Kohima came down, at one point, to a tennis court. In April 1944, British and Japanese soldiers occupied trenches on opposite sides of a small rectangle of flat ground beside a colonial administrator's bungalow in the Naga…
- Invasion of Lingayen GulfThe Invasion of Lingayen Gulf began on the 3rd of January 1945, and what followed over the next ten days would claim the lives of around 738 ship-based personnel and wound another 1,282. The operation was a massive Allied amphibious…
- Operation U-GoOperation U-Go began on the 6th of March, 1944, when Japanese forces crossed into northeast India on one of the most audacious bets of the Second World War. The man behind it, Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, had once called this same…
- Guadalcanal campaignThe Guadalcanal campaign began on the 7th of August 1942 with 11,000 U.S. Marines wading ashore between Koli Point and Lunga Point on a remote jungle island most Americans had never heard of. By 16:00 the following day, they had seized a…
- Battle of MadagascarThe Battle of Madagascar began on the 5th of May 1942, when British forces landed on a remote island in the Indian Ocean that most people had never given a second thought. Madagascar was Vichy French territory, officially neutral in the…
- Battle of Wake IslandThe Battle of Wake Island began within hours of Pearl Harbor, on the 8th of December 1941, when 36 Japanese bombers swept in from bases in the Marshall Islands and destroyed eight aircraft on the ground. What followed was a 15-day siege…
- Battle of Hong KongThe Battle of Hong Kong began on the 8th of December 1941, at almost the exact moment Japan struck Pearl Harbor. Within seventeen days, a British Crown Colony that had stood for a century fell to the Empire of Japan. The garrison defending…
- Kokoda Track campaignThe Kokoda Track campaign was fought between July and November 1942 in the Australian Territory of Papua, and it nearly cost Australia the war in the Pacific. At its most desperate point, Japanese forces stood within 32 km of Port Moresby,…
- Battles of Khalkhin GolThe Battles of Khalkhin Gol began on the 11th of May 1939, with a patrol of Mongolian cavalry, somewhere between 70 and 90 men, riding into disputed grassland to find grazing for their horses. Within days, what started as a skirmish over…
- Operation KeOperation Ke was the largely successful withdrawal of Japanese forces from Guadalcanal, concluding a six-month struggle that had defined the Pacific War's first year. Between the 14th of January and the 7th of February 1943, Imperial…
- Battle of HengyangThe Battle of Hengyang lasted 47 days in the summer of 1944, and when it ended, Japanese casualties far exceeded the total number of Chinese troops who had defended the city. That fact alone tells you something extraordinary happened here.…
- Battle of Rabaul (1942)The Battle of Rabaul began before dawn on the 23rd of January, 1942, when a South Seas Force of around 5,000 Japanese troops entered Simpson Harbour and started coming ashore on the island of New Britain. The Australian garrison defending…