Pacific Theater Had Critical Consquences

Eighty years ago this month, the American entry into World War II was precipitated by the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. But the ensuing clash in the war’s Pacific theater has long been overshadowed in American memory by the battles in Europe. Compared to the famed ordeals of the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge, the battles of Guadalcanal, Saipan and Okinawa pale in the popular imagination. This skewed perspective unfairly slights the brave men who fought against Japanese aggression, and distorts our understanding of the conflict’s legacy. As the historian Richard Overy observes in “Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945,” his magisterial new history of World War II, “the Asian war and its consequences were as important to the creation of the post-war world as the defeat of Germany in Europe, arguably more so.”