United States

During the Washington Conference of 1920, the Americans took a hard look at their Navy. They had a Navy second only to the British, and like the Royal Navy, they had to protect interests in two oceans. Yet voluntarily they gave up building several ships and scrapped others.

The cultural difference between the western notion of an honorable surrender and the Japanese notion of fight to the death was a big contribution to the ferocity of the Pacific War.

Throughout the Nineteenth Century, Japan dealt with a population that it could not sustain with its national food production by encouraging immigration. Thousands of Japanese traveled abroad. Many settled in the Hawaiian Islands, and on the American Pacific Rim.

The battle raging in Berlin signaled the end of the Third Reich. Soviet Red Army Forces and the western Allies pressed the Wehrmacht so far into Germany that neither Western commands nor Eastern commands had room to maneuver.

Huge numbers of Allied POWs were captured by the Japanese between December 1941 and May 1942.

Deep racial hatred, led many Allied soldiers to prefer death to capture. But the large numbers of soldiers surrendered by their commanders in the Philippines and Singapore did not have much choice. They entered captivity at the start of the war, and only about half of them would leave the POW camps alive.

The rapid advance of the Japanese stunned even them. Their advance - formed by superior equipment, training, tactics, and in some cases, numbers - left the Allies confused and in disarray.