Japan during World War II

Japan during World War II refers to the history of the Empire of Japan during World War II. This includes the invasion of the Republic of China, the annexation of French Indochina and the subsequent invasion of British India, the Pacific War and the Surrender of Japan.

Prelude[edit]

The Empire of Japan had been expanding its territory since the First Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese War, before World War I through the colonisation of Taiwan and Korea. In 1931, Japan invaded and conquered Manchuria in northeast China. The bordering Chinese territory of Jehol was also taken in 1933, and in 1936, Japan created a similar puppet state in Inner Mongolia.

Battle of Hong Kong, 8 December 1941, Downtown British Hong Kong under Japanese air raid

A map of Canterbury in New Zealand prepared by the Japanese Military following the attack on Pearl Harbour

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Imperial Japanese Army during the Pacific War

Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II

Japanese colonial empire

List of territories acquired by the Empire of Japan

Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II

"Big Six v. Little Boy" (review of Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War Two, Elliot & Thompson, 2023, 296 pp., ISBN 978 1 78396 729 2), London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 22 (16 November 2023), pp. 9–12. In 1947 Henry Stimson, in an article written for him by McGeorge Bundy, argued that there had been no alternative to the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as an invasion of Japan might have "cost over a million casualties to... American forces". However, in 1946 the US Strategic Bombing Survey had concluded that – thanks to the destruction of its economy by conventional bombing and a comprehensive blockade – "in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped." (p. 9.) General Curtis LeMay's B-29s had already laid waste to over 60 Japanese cities. (pp. 9-10.) Writes Cockburn: "[But t]he folklore endures. Among the exhibits at the US Air Force's... museum in Dayton, Ohio, is Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the Nagasaki bomb. It is proudly identified as 'the aircraft that ended World War Two'." (p. 12.)