Historical Context Essay
By: Manuel de Juan

World war two lasted from 1939 to 1945. The battle fronts were the Pacific and the European front. The Pacific front started and “ended” with the surprise attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in the morning of December 7, 1941. The Japanese attempted to completely eradicate the naval fleet in Pearl Harbor to prevent the Pacific Fleet from interfering with Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya; to buy time for Japan to consolidate its position and increase its naval strength, and it was meant to deliver a severe blow to American morale. The opposite happened with the third wave the American morale dropped because of the shocking news, but it convinced that America should push back and much harder. The Japanese used the advantage of the damaged U.S naval fleet in Pearl Harbor to attack Hong Kong, British Malaya, and the Philippines. Then after the Japanese peak of power in 1942, backed by the industrial might and vast raw material resources the U.S started attack the Japanese empire back into what is now Japan. The U.S fought many battle such as the Battle of Coral Sea and the battle of Midway that pushed the Japanese empire into what is now Japan. Morotai's southern plain was taken by American forces in September 1944 during the Battle of Morotai, and used as a staging point for Allied invasion. In early 1945 the US had wrested control of the Ogasawara Islands, marking the beginning of the fall of the islands of Japan. In the end, it all ended with two atomic bombs which fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the Japanese responded by surrendering.