ABSTRACT
The war in the Far East-more commonly known as the Pacific War-began with a series of Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Malayan peninsula, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and islands in the Central Pacific. The Second World War suddenly spread to the other side of Eurasia, spilling into the huge Pacific Ocean. Hearing of Japan’s December 1941 onslaught, one official in the British Foreign Office noted in his diary: ‘We never thought she would attack us and America at once. She must have gone mad.’ In Australia, a newspaper reported it as the ‘Gravest hour in the country’. Panic engulfed the United States: people in the West coast claimed that ‘Japanese planes had been over San Francisco on the night of 7 December’, while in Washington, DC, several senators claimed that they heard that enemy planes were only ‘150 miles from Washington’. The White House’s response was one of relief: ‘the indecision was over, and a crisis had come in a way that would unite all our people’.1 Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, reacted similarly: when he retired to bed on the day of Pearl Harbor, he said ‘so we had won after all’. The entry of the United States on the side of Britain increased Churchill’s confidence in achieving victory in the global conflict. As he recalled, ‘Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese they would be ground to powder.’2
