It would be nearly nine months after Pearl Harbor before U.S. Although Roosevelt promised General Douglas MacArthur that reinforcements were on the way, no ground units and only a handful of air units were sent to Australia in the opening months of the war in the Pacific. These refugees were joined by others who came out of the islands as the Japanese began pushing the American and Filipino defenders onto the Bataan Peninsula. The Australians turned to the United States for help, but all they got were a few Army Air Corps stragglers who had been on their way to the Philippines when the war broke out and had been diverted to Australia when the Japanese Navy blocked the sea lanes. When war came, the British forces in Asia were as severely mauled as the Americans were in the opening days of the war. Australia is Left Threatened by Japanese Expansionīefore drawing off thousands of her young men for duty in North Africa, the British promised the Australian government that they would defend the country if the Japanese attacked. The Allied Java Campaign was a failure, and Australia was threatened as Japan moved its troops farther and farther south. On December 21, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt made the decision to write off the Philippines and throw the bulk of America’s might into the war in Europe, while sending a token force into the Netherlands East Indies to defend the oil fields. Pacific Fleet that there was very little they could do in 1942. While the Navy and its Marine Corps would fight in the Pacific, the Pearl Harbor attacks had so devastated the U.S. With only a few exceptions, they were then put into the training pipeline to staff units that were being organized to go to Europe to assist the British in defeating Germany. military facilities in Hawaii, hundreds of thousands of young men heeded the call from the White House and War Department to “Remember Pearl Harbor” and rushed to the nearest recruiting center to enlist. Immediately after the Japanese attack on U.S. Navy ship or carrier-based airplane involved. In the span of about 15 minutes the Japanese lost World War II. All of the Japanese plans fell apart, however, at 10 am on March 3, 1943, in the Bismarck Sea just off the New Guinea coast from Lae. There, the Japanese had established a series of bases as stepping-stones in their strategy of defeating the Allies by extending the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere to the very doorsteps of the continent of Australia. (Get full, in-depth coverage of the battles and conflicts that shaped the history of the South Pacific inside WWII History magazine.) However, in spite of the loss of most of their main aircraft carrier force at Midway in June 1942, the Japanese military was still very much a powerful force throughout the Pacific, especially in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in early 1943. Considering only the naval role, this is probably true. Most military historians consider the Battle of Midway to be the turning point of World War II in the Pacific.
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