Sunrise: Japan's Leap for Empire

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The Pacific War, fought between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America and her allies between 1941 and 1945, stands apart in the long annals of military history as an essentially unique conflict: a true sui generis war. The scale is an obvious place to begin; given that the theaters of the war encompassed much of the Pacific Ocean, continental East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean, it is fairly self evident that this war absolutely dwarfed all others in geographic scope. While Europe’s grand era of colonialism saw wars in which conflicts in continental Europe had colonial theaters in places like the Americas, India, and Africa, what distinguishes the Pacific War was the fact that this enormous battlespace - ranging some 4,500 miles north to south and nearly 7,000 miles east-west - was contiguous and connected by internal Japanese lines of communication. No other conflict in human history has ever come even remotely close in the size of its contiguous theaters. Size impresses, to be sure, but beyond the sheer scale of the conflict the Pacific War is unique in that it consisted of highly systematic operations with positional characteristics, but with the unique qualifier of being fought from the sea. Although the vast ocean gives the impression of immense operational flexibility and free movement, the dynamics of the Pacific War, in operational terms, reflected traditional continental warfare in ways that are not often appreciated at first glance, with systematic offenses moving through island strongpoints, great attention given to supply lines (in the…