Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in 1940 in an attempt to control the Mediterranean and take Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the Middle East.
The obvious prize was the oil, without which the modern military machine could not run. But Mussolini's
troops failed to complete this conquest and were thrown out of Egypt and eastern Libya. The Germans
then moved into North Africa under the command of one of its most able generals, Field Marshal Erwin
Rommel (1891-1944).
Fought from late October to November 1942, the Battle of El Alamein was one of the turning points
of the Second World War. El Alamein was a small railway junction located west of Alexandria, Egypt, in
the desert on the Mediterranean coast. The British, under Bernard Montgomery (1887-1976), held a line
of defense that stretched 40 miles (64 km) from El Alamein into the desert. To attempt to take the Suez
Canal, Rommel would have to pass this line. But Rommel's attack was pushed back and Montgomery then
went on the offensive in an attempt to force the Germans west, where the newly arrived Americans, under
Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, were landing in Algeria and Morocco. With this pincer action, the
Allies hoped to force the Germans and Italians out of North Africa and prepare for an invasion of Europe
through Italy. Twelve days of vicious fighting across heavily mined desert wasteland laced with barbed
wire ended with a British victory; it was their first in a land battle over the previously invincible Germans,
who were forced to withdraw from North Africa. The Middle East's oil was safe and the Allies had a sta-
ging area for their next campaign, the 1943 assault on Sicily, the Mediterranean island whose possession
would allow naval control of the sea and an invasion of Italy to follow in 1944.
Two days after Rome fell to the Allies, the largest invasion force in history assaulted the beaches of
Normandy on the coast of France's English Channel between the port cities of Cherbourg and Le Havre.
On June 6, 1944—D-Day—4,000 invasion ships, 600 warships, 10,000 planes, and more than 175,000
troops were committed to the assault. After four days, the Allies had secured the beachhead from which
they would launch the counteroffensive against Germany. Nearly a year of intense fighting across France,
Belgium, and finally into Germany itself followed before Berlin fell in May 1945.
After the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the United States had committed most of its forces to the European
theater. But fighting in the Pacific against Japan continued, with the Japanese military machine virtually
unchecked until well into 1942. By that time, Japan's forces controlled nearly 10 percent of the earth's sur-
face.
When the Americans finally took the offensive in the summer of 1942, it marked the beginning of a
grueling, grinding, hard-fought campaign to retake a series of small Pacific islands that would provide
stepping-stones for the eventual planned invasion of Japan. The first of these islands was Guadalcanal, and
the huge losses taken there by both sides were a grim indicator of the horrific warfare that would continue
in the Pacific for the next few years. The succession of islands—Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, and the
Philippines—saw desperate battles between beach-landing U.S. Marines and Japanese defenses that had
been prepared for years.
The deadly progression through the Pacific culminated with the invasion of Iwo Jima, an eight-square-
mile piece of volcanic rock dominated by an extinct volcano, Mount Suribachi. A well-protected but critic-
al obstacle in the way of American operations, Iwo Jima was home to a Japanese airfield that both alerted
Japan to impending American air raids and sent up fighters to attack Allied bombers on their way to the
main islands. If taken, the Japanese airfield would provide an airstrip from which American fighters could
protect bombers and where any crippled American planes could safely land after striking Japan.
The island was bombed around the clock for three months before the Marines were sent in. But the
Japanese were well protected in a honeycomb of concrete bunkers and well-stocked tunnels beneath the is-
land's hard volcanic surface. It took weeks of intense fighting to finally take control of Iwo Jima, an event
immortalized in a photograph of the American flag being raised on Mount Suribachi (a staged, not spontan-
eous, event, according to recent revelations). The Marines suffered nearly 7,000 ,dead and another 15,000
