Less interest in the Pacific?

PTO a smaller area? You could take the whole ETO and drop it into the PTO twice with room left over. The PTO was from the Aleutians in the north, to Australia in the south. From the North American west coast to SEA and China.

 

I have a feeling he was thinking the area of the land battles, not the total area of the globe. In the PTO most of them were rather limited in "scope" as far as acreage and "set piece" battles in the mid-20th Century mode.

Tank battles, and infantry encounters in massive scales were pretty much limited to the ETO/MTO afterall. At least that is what I think was meant.

 

I think the ETO gets more attention because most Americans are (at least for the momment) of European descent and, therefore, are more interested in events in Europe than elsewhere. Also, geography needs to be considered. Most of the countries and cities of Europe are well known to Americans, whether through school, movies, or having visited them. Europe is also meore accessible to visit than the Pacific. There are more flights, more hotels, and more ammenities. Locations in the Pacific, apart from Hawaii and Australia, are not as well known to Americans. Even though I'm a WASP, I have always been more interested in the PTO than the ETO. Even so, I've visited European battlefields on each of my 5 visits to Europe over the years. In the Pacific, I've only visited Pearl Harbor and Guam, two of the more tourist freindly battlefields there.

 

American mentality has always been focused on Europe. In the 1930s, most Americans accepted the fact that we would have to return to Europe to defeat the Germans like in WWI. Rosevelt conceded at Casablanca Summit to Churchill that the US would send most of it's troops & material to Europe. In 1942, the British & the Russians were paranoid that US forces & material would be split 50/50 between Europe & the Pacific. As well they should be since both were desperate for the war materials we were sending them. I think the media emphasized the "Life & Death Struggle" of Britain & Russia. Weren't a number of the Pacific situation "Life & Death Struggles"? Nevertheless, the Japanese could have possibly take part of Australia if unopposed by the US, bombed & torpedoed shipping & cities such as Hawaii & US West Coast or if the German nuclear bomb materials had arrived in Japan on a sub - how about a nuclear weapon? It is evident that in the early going, the US came very close to losing quite a number of Pacific battles except for a narrow margin based on breaking the Japanese code and superior radar.

It is amazing that the American media has failed to give much attention to the Pacific Theater. No D-Day movies, No Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, No Ernie Pile like in the Italian campaign. No Nuremberg Trial Movie w/Spencer Tracy. I believe that Okinawa was a larger landing & certainly a bigger battle than D Day. I don't remember any movie or movies on Okinawa...certainly none w/John Wayne.

My Dad fought at Saipan & Okinawa and a number of other islands with the 27th Infantry Division. The 27th ID lost over 40% of their soldiers. I'm glad he's not here to see the Pacific Theater being called a "Sideshow."

 

Point well taken. Thanks Lou. George

 

Might have something to do with Germany being a world threat, Japan not so much?

 

Might want to recheck your facts. Japan threatened more of the worlds population and a greater amount of territory than did Germany. Germany had a greater industrial potential but Japan had a potential to field more troops. Germany lacked naval power which limited it's potential to expand outside of continental europe and the Soviet Union. Japan was only limited to the east by the United States.

 

You have to wonder what an average British citizen must have been thinking during the time of Battle of Britain (summer 1940). Hitler's armies had simply shoved every army in western Europe aside like so many bowling pins, and had done it in a matter of months. Now Hitler was threatening to invade England itself and was engaged in the preliminary bombardment by air. The RAF and the "Chain Home" radar were the only real things standing in Hitler's way of launching Operation SeeLowe - even the Royal Navy could have been destroyed by the Luftwaffe if the RAF had been weak.

Meanwhile half the British army is scattered all over the Mediteranean, busy getting defeated in Greece and Crete, later on fighting Rommel in North Africa, and defending Singapore (and losing), India, and many other far-flung British interests in Asia against the Japanese, far from home! (The Germans won the battle for Crete partly because almost the entire army of Crete had been killed or captured when Hitler invaded Greece to rescue dumb Mussolini's forces - and there was no guaranty such a fate would not befall England either in 1940-early 1941). Only when Hitler foolishly attacked Russia in June 1941 could the British really cease to worry about invasion, since everyone realized Hitler could not possibly invade BOTH countries.

Maybe the Pacific wasn't a side show since the Japs did actually occupy American (or what later became American) territory, the remote Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska (it was a decoy for the Midway operation, that failed - the US military forces did not even bother with their small Japanese force until mid-1943). Most sensible Japanese realized after a year or so that they were certain to lose the war they had started, but dared not say so in public, since the Japanese population was simply a bunch of sheep and did whatever the emperor or his delegates told them to, including die in battle. And it was obvious from the battle of Midway onwards that the US was certain to win against the Japanese- and that Hitler and the Nazi Germans were the stronger, more resourceful, and more dangerous opponent.

 

That's not entirely accurate.

The RN was very capable of operating in the Channel against any possible German invasion force with very good prospects of success. The Luftwaffe's track record against the RN up to that point certainly was not encouraging from the German perspective.

There was no British or Commonwealth involvement in the fighting in Asia until very late (December) in 1941. In fact, Britain was benefiting from Australian and New Zealand troops in North Africa and elsewhere.

The Aleutian Islands were American territory in 1941; there was also Guam which was American territory, and the Philippines, an autonomous American protectorate, all of which the Japanese occupied in 1941-42. No one with any sense took the Japanese offensives in the Pacific lightly.

Unquestioning Japanese obedience to the Emperor and the militarists is what made them so dangerous and such a formidable foe. It made little difference whether they thought they were going to lose the war or not; The worst US casualties actually were incurred in the last battles of the war in 1944-45.

It was obvious to informed Americans from before Pearl Harbor that the US would win any war with Japan, as Admiral Stark famously informed the Japanese ambassador, but that made the Japanese no less dangerous and costly to defeat. To downplay the Japanese threat in the Pacific War is to demean every Allied serviceman and woman who served in the Pacific and denigrates the sacrifices of the many tens of thousands who died in that service.

 

Ummmm ...... Japan never had the industrial capacity to equip more than a few divisions. The war in the Pacific was mostly fought by light infantry as compared to the war in Europe. Think Japan could have fielded and maintained 3 or 4 tank divisions?

Germany had the technical, industrial and scientific capabilities to develop and produce weapons that were a generation ahead of the allies. You think Japan could develop a V2 type rocket? Jet fighters? The type 21 U-boats?

Japan never had the logistics capabilities to seriously menace anyone outside its maximum expansion boundries in mid 1942.

 

The only accurate statement is your last one, but then that also applies equally well to Germany.

The entire Japanese Army was essentially an infantry organization with few supporting armor or artillery units, but at the outset of WW II the IJA had the equivalent of at least 38 divisions in China alone, and that doesn't include divisions in Japan itself or those additional units that were raised before the end of the war. The IJA did not fight in areas, where armor was considered to be especially useful but it did have tank regiments, and if necessary could have raised and equipped armored divisions. The Japanese just did not believe tanks were all that necessary. However, it was as formidable as any European Army and, when on defense, extremely effective and tenacious.

As for Germany's allegedly superior "technical, industrial and scientific capabilities", that is pure rubbish. Germany was, in most areas, industrially, technically, and scientifically inferior to the Western Allies. Germany was incapable of mass producing any significant new weapons systems. The V-2 rockets relied on American patents, and were, in any case, useless as military weapons. Germany's jet fighters were not significantly better than those of the Allies. BTW, Japan did develop a jet fighter at the end of the war, but like Germany, the naval blockade denied Japan the advanced materials it required to make jet engines reasonably reliable.

The Type XXI U-boat was neither revolutionary nor particularly effective. It simply carried the diesel-electric submarine paradigm to it's ultimate logical development in terms of battery power and streamlining. Both of these concepts had been tried in both the US and Japan but rejected as impractical for combat. Moreover, the Type XXI had numerous design flaws, such as the hydraulic system, the steering system, the diesels, and the batteries. These design flaws, coupled with very poor construction, and extremely poor habitability, made the Type XXI nothing more than a death-trap for it's crews, and targets for Allies ASW assets.

 

In fact the number of Japanese killed by enemy action in China is somewhat disputed. See the quote below from Wikipedia:

Clearly, the Japanese Defence Ministry uses a lesser number for Japanese military personnel killed by enemy action while the Chinese claim to have killed at a minimum more than three times that number. A credible independent historical source or sources is what is needed to calculate the number of Japanese personnel killed in China by Chinese forces, be they Communist or Nationalist. I'd be inclined to believe a figure higher than the 480,000 personnel quoted by the Japanese Defence Ministry. I vaguely recall a surviving Japanese general saying back in the 1960s that Japan's biggest strategic mistake was invading and occupying China, not attacking America.

 

Cheers, LR216. Those are useful comparative tables of belligerent countries' casualty statistics. And they quote from John Ellis' data book on the Second World War, which is a good reference.

 

First Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941 and then shortly after that on Dec 11 Germany & Italy declared war on the US, so technically war with Germany did not happen before war with Japan.

Much of post-WW2 media (books and movies) have focused on the war in Europe, however with the new series The Pacific coming up look for an increased interest in war in the Pacific.

 

Or you could say the war started when Japan attacked China back in the 30s. But they weren't white so we don't focus on them.