Main Idea

Japan was the first country to collapse the idea of U.S. immunity to other countries. The U.S. thought they would never be attacked because of their location and geography of having oceans on both sides of the country separating them from other countries for thousands of miles. Luckily many U.S. ship were not based at Pearl Harbor when the Japan attacked, so the U.S. could go to war and effectively fight them in the Pacific. The U.S. used the tactic of island hopping to fight the Japanese. The U.S. would fight the Japanese on islands outside of Japan and try to gain territory circling around the Japanese mainland. This tactic was effective until the U.S. invaded the large island closer to Japan, the U.S. and Japanese were deadlocked in fighting, and hundreds of thousands of lives were lost during their battles. The war in the Pacific started first, but ended later than the war in Europe. The war ended in August 1945, when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on major Japanese cities in order to make them surrender.