Combat Pacific

History & service

For six months following the Pearl Harbor disaster, the outnumbered and ill-supplied Allied forces in the Pacific could do little more than attempt to delay the Japanese advance. Australia was a key stronghold for the buildup of Allied forces, but in early 1942 the last Allied outpost north of Australia was Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea. Only 200 air miles from Port Moresby across the rugged Owen Stanley Mountains, the enemy had occupied Lae and Salamaua on the Huon Gulf.

However, in May 1942, a Japanese fleet bound for Port Moresby was intercepted by a U.S. naval force and after an aerial engagement -- the Battle of the Coral Sea -- the enemy fleet withdrew. A month later in the central Pacific, a Japanese invasion fleet steaming toward Midway Island was defeated by U.S. naval airpower supplemented by a small force of AAF B-17s and B-26s in the Battle of Midway. These victories stabilized the outer perimeter of enemy expansion in the Pacific although the threat to Australia remained.

Aircraft change the battlefield

In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.

The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.

Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.