WWII: Scenes from the Pacific Arena

[The Godfather]

When it comes to World War II, we are normally occupied with scenarios from the European Theater and bombarded with images of Nazi Germany and its exploits. For the Pacific Theater the headliner is the attack on Pearl Harbor but it was so much more than Pearl Harbor.

The Pacific Theater has not been studied on equal footing with the European Theater. The political strategy of "Europe First" relegated war in the Pacific to secondary status. In addition, the places that were being fought for in the Pacific were more remote and unfamiliar sounding to the world. Very few had cultural ties to the Pacific. The languages were strange and the people had black, brown, or yellow skin. There were no familiar reminders of civilization in the jungles of Asia as there were in the countries of Europe. Furthermore, fathers who had participated in the First World War, who had fought in the countryside of France, now followed the young men of the European Theater, their sons, who repeated their fathers' experiences. Europe was familiar. The Pacific was not.

Okinawa or Normandy - Care to guess which is considered the biggest land-air-sea battle ever?