THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC
U .S . troops were forced to surren- der in the Philippines in early 1942, but the Americans rallied in the following months . General James “Jimmy” Doolittle led U .S . Army bombers on a raid over Tokyo in April; it had little actual military significance, but gave Americans an immense psychological boost .
In May, at the Battle of the Coral Sea — the first naval engagement in history in which all the fighting was done by carrier-based planes — a Japanese naval invasion fleet sent to strike at southern New Guinea and Australia was turned back by a U .S . task force in a close battle . A few weeks later, the naval Battle of Mid- way in the central Pacific resulted in the first major defeat of the Japanese Navy, which lost four aircraft car- riers . Ending the Japanese advance across the central Pacific, Midway was the turning point .
Other battles also contributed to Allied success . The six-month land and sea battle for the island of Guadalcanal (August 1942-Feb- ruary 1943) was the first major U .S . ground victory in the Pacific . For most of the next two years, Ameri- can and Australian troops fought their way northward from the South Pacific and westward from the Central Pacific, capturing the Solomons, the Gilberts, the Mar-
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shalls, and the Marianas in a series of amphibious assaults .
THE POLITICS OF WAR
Allied military efforts were ac- companied by a series of important international meetings on the politi- cal objectives of the war . In Janu- ary 1943 at Casablanca, Morocco, an Anglo-American conference de- cided that no peace would be con- cluded with the Axis and its Balkan satellites except on the basis of “un- conditional surrender .” This term, insisted upon by Roosevelt, sought to assure the people of all the fight- ing nations that no separate peace negotiations would be carried on with representatives of Fascism and Nazism and there would be no com- promise of the war’s idealistic objec- tives . Axis propagandists, of course, used it to assert that the Allies were engaged in a war of extermination .
At Cairo, in November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek to agree on terms for Ja- pan, including the relinquishment of gains from past aggression . At Tehran, shortly afterward, Roose- velt, Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made basic agree- ments on the postwar occupation of Germany and the establishment of a new international organization, the United Nations .
In February 1945, the three Al- lied leaders met again at Yalta (now in Ukraine), with victory seemingly secure . There, the Soviet Union se-
cretly agreed to enter the war against Japan three months after the surren- der of Germany . In return, the USSR would gain effective control of Man- churia and receive the Japanese Ku- rile Islands as well as the southern half of Sakhalin Island . The eastern boundary of Poland was set roughly at the Curzon line of 1919, thus giv- ing the USSR half its prewar terri- tory . Discussion of reparations to be collected from Germany — payment demanded by Stalin and opposed by Roosevelt and Churchill — was inconclusive . Specific arrangements were made concerning Allied occu- pation in Germany and the trial and punishment of war criminals . Also at Yalta it was agreed that the great powers in the Security Council of the proposed United Nations should have the right of veto in matters af- fecting their security .
Two months after his return from Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage while va- cationing in Georgia . Few figures in U .S . history have been so deeply mourned, and for a time the Ameri- can people suffered from a numbing sense of irreparable loss . Vice Presi- dent Harry Truman, former senator from Missouri, succeeded him .