Thailand allies with Japan in the War of Greater East Asia begun by the Japanese, declaring war on the US and Great Britain in January 1942.
In these countries, Free Thai movements organize to liberate Thailand from Japanese control.
The Japanese methodically deploy ground forces and air power to destroy the Allies Dutch East Indies positions, then cripple an Allied fleet in a sequence of Java Sea battles.
The Japanese complete their conquest of Malaya with the February 15, 1942 capture of Singapore, the key to British and Dutch defenses in East and Southeast Asia.
By late February, combat deaths, dysentery, malaria and a mere trickle of supplies reduce the Bataan troop’s strength to the extent that Roosevelt orders MacArthur to escape to Australia and assume supreme command of the Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific.
He doses so, stating “I shall return.”
The Dutch islands surrender in March 1942.
The British, pushed northward in Burma by the Japanese, evacuate Rangoon on March 7, 1942.
In mid-March, Jiang Jeishei sends his newly-appointed chief of staff, US Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, to command the Fifth and Sixth Chinese armies in Burma.
Tarrying too long in southern Burma, Stilwell’s forces are cut off from the Burma Road in April.
Japanese general Yamashita accepts the Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright’s April 9 surrender of 36,000 US troops on the Philippines Bataan Peninsula.
Most of the men not killed on the “Death March” to internment camps die in the camps.
3,500 troops remain and retreat to join the defenders of Corregidor, a fortified island.
An anti-fascist guerrilla movement, led mainly by a coalition of Filipino socialists and communists known by their acronym, HUKS, resists the occupying Japanese forces.
Stilwell’s forces cover the British retreat into India, then retreat themselves in a hardship-ridden journey to India and China.
US Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, having spent months preparing a group of enthusiastic volunteers for the mission, departs from the deck of the carrier Hornet on the morning of April 18, 1942 with a force of 16 North American B-25 medium-range bombers.
Flying below radar level towards the Japanese mainland islands, they bomb industrial targets at treetop level, then head for China, leaving behind an astonished Japanese public, who had been assured that their islands were invulnerable to attack.
A US spotter plane over the Coral Sea spots a great gathering of Japanese war vessels, stationed there to secure Japanese control of New Guinea and the Solomons and thus sever the US supply lanes to Australia.
US planes launched from American carriers met the Japanese armada’s fighters in the May 4—8 Battle of the Coral Sea, in which more than 25 Japanese ships were sunk or disabled and its heavy carriers damaged.
For the first time in naval history, surface ships exchanged not a single shot in the battle.
The defenders of Corregidor surrender on May 6, 1942.
By mid-May 1942, the Japanese bring nearly all of Burma under their control and inherit the heavy equipment abandoned by the retreating British.
The Burma Road is closed to the Allies.
The Japanese strategists of the Naval General Staff plan a secret strike on the US-held island of Midway, regarded by the Americans as the sentry for Hawaii.
The approach of the assembled task force of 200 ships and 600 planes, the largest naval operation in history, is anticipated by US intelligence, which continues to break key Japanese codes and ciphers.
A US patrol plane spots the task force as it approaches Midway on the afternon of June 3, 1942.
When 100 Japanese planes depart their carriers the following day and head for Midway, a strong US force of torpedo planes and fighters rises from the carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown to sink four Japanese carriers.
Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku turns back the invasion force, which US planes harry and damage as the armada retires.
Over the next four days, the US planes sink two heavy cruisers, severely damage three destroyers and destroy 322 planes.
The Americans lose the carrier Yorktown, a destroyer, and 147 aircraft.
By July 4, 1942, the Flying Tigers have destroyed 297 Japanese planes and killed 500 enemy soldiers.
The Japanese, in preparation for an invasion of Australia, begin construction of an airbase on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomons in early July 1942.
Japan sets up a puppet Burmese government in August 1942.
On August 7, 1942, a well-equipped US task force appears off the Solomons and bombards the Japanese installations, then lands US Marines on Guadalcanal and its satellite islands.
After the Marines establisha beachhead the next day and seize the half-completed airfield, the Americans face intense Japanese resistance launched from their powerful air and naval base at Rabaul on New Britain Island’s eastern tip, just east of New Guinea.
In autumn 1943, MacArthur begins to move his combined American and Australian forces northward up New Guinea in a plan to cross over to New Britain and outflank Rabaul from the west while American forces on the Solomons side begin their island-hopping northward drive towards Japan, hoping to neutralize the Japanese stronghold on Rabaul by air attacks and outflank it on the east, thus avoiding altogether a costly frontal assault.
In December 1942, thousands of Chinese implement Stillwell’s suggestion to construct a new Burma Road, the Ledo Road, from Ledo in India to the old Burma Road beyond Mytkyina.
