Island hopping
The so-called Iceland Hopping (translated: Island Hopping) or leapfrogging (dt. Leapfrog , literally "Frog Jumping") was a military strategy of the US forces in the Pacific War . It was based on the growing superiority of the American Navy since the Battle of Midway .
With the beginning of the conquest of the Solomon Islands on June 21, 1943 and the operations in New Guinea , General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz decided to cut off the Japanese troops from their supply lines. To do this, the Americans penetrated island by island in the direction of Japanese sovereignty, but did not capture every island, in particular bypassing the heavily fortified Japanese bases such as the Rabaul base in New Britain . In this way you should avoid high losses. In addition, a dilemma of the Japanese was exploited by establishing a focus : The Japanese army had to hold all the islands, otherwise they would offer the Americans a base for their attacks on their defended islands or even the main islands of Japan. This meant the Japanese had to spread their troops widely while at the same time setting priorities: it was impossible to optimally defend all the islands; there were not enough soldiers available for this.
The Americans, on the other hand, could choose their targets, they kept the initiative and could concentrate their troops on individual targets, which gave them numerical superiority. Since the Battle of Midway , they also had a superior navy, which enabled them to transport large quantities of supplies to their troops, while at the same time cutting off supplies for the Japanese. Especially towards the end of the war, the Japanese soldiers therefore not only lacked military supplies such as ammunition, machine guns, etc., but also food and medicine.
Amphibious vehicles and aircraft carriers as mobile base units supported the landing forces in their operations. In addition, an Australian division in New Guinea joined the Americans.
Prominent targets that were bypassed as part of the strategy were, in addition to Rabaul, for example the Wake Atoll (whereas the Marianas located much further to the west were occupied in 1944), Babelthuap as the largest island in the Palau archipelago (in contrast to the smaller islands of Angaur and Peleliu ), the Carolines with their naval base in Truk and large parts of Dutch India - at the end of the war the Allies had only advanced to New Guinea, in the north of Borneo and the Moluccan island of Morotai .
As a result of this strategy, even years after the end of the war, individual Japanese soldiers - so-called holdouts - were discovered on individual Pacific islands, some of whom did not know that the war was over. One of the most famous cases was the intelligence officer Onoda Hirō , who was only convinced in 1974 on the Philippine island of Lubang on the basis of an order from his former commander that the war was over.
The nevertheless enormous losses suffered by the Allies during island hopping on sometimes very small islands and atolls due to an unexpectedly strong resistance by the defending Japanese contributed and still contribute to the justification for the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .