Pacific War Quotes

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

Now we must smash Japan. We must carry the war to every part of her empire no matter how remote.

We had won many pacific islands where the Japanese fought to the death rather than surrender …. We had killed 100,000 people in Tokyo in a single night. It destroyed the city but as far as we could tell it had no effect on their morale. We had to shock the Japanese into surrender.

In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.

Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima 5 August at 7:15 PM Washington time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years.

Dictator governments are arming heavily and penetrating economically and politically in Central and South America. Japan is establishing a "new order" in China and has been informed that we will have something to say about this "new order." These activities emphasize the possibility of this nation becoming involved in war in the Atlantic, in the Pacific, or in both these areas

I do not see how the Japanese can hold out against this united front.

The main American naval forces were shifted to the Pacific region and an American admiral made a strong declaration to the effect that if war were to break out between Japan and the United States, the Japanese navy could be sunk in a matter of weeks.

We had news this morning of another successful atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. These two heavy blows have fallen in quick succession upon the Japanese and there will be quite a little space before we intend to drop another.

We have listened here to the delegates who have recalled the terrible human suffering, and the great material destruction of the late war in the Pacific. It is with feelings of sorrow that we recall the part played in that catastrophic human experience by the old Japan.

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

The Japanese scored an important victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack pulled the United States into World War II, and four years later, Japan was in ruins, utterly defeated.

The first bomb so far as our government knew had not had any impact on the Emperor or the Japanese war cabinet—nor did we have any other indication that their minds were changing with respect to the war.

For a while I got into the South Pacific theater of World War II. I read "American Caesar" by William Manchester, the biography of General MacArthur. Because of that I ended up reading "Tales of the South Pacific" by James Michener and then because of that reading his "Hawaii." That is what happens.

I guess HBO did a giant 'War in the Pacific' mini-series that cost, like, a fortune, and there was a little moment where they literally had no money. And even though the show had become kind of a cult hit, there was an issue of whether they could actually afford to do it.

An absolute and unconditional defeat of Japan is the essential ingredient for a lasting peace in the Orient. Only complete military disaster and stinging defeat and colossal losses will prove to the people that the military machine is vincible and that their fanatical leadership has taken them the way to disaster.

After the war the Japanese leadership with the cooperation of the American authorities produced a whitewash of the role of the Emperor in the atrocities and war crimes.

Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II.

American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

We were overjoyed that somebody at last was visiting destruction upon the Japanese—that we were really paying them off. There was an immense delight in the revenge we were perceiving there. We were very excited about that, and we stayed up all night talking about the possibility, wondering about whether we might not actually have to invade Japan and not all be killed.

V-J Day, or Victory in Japan Day, marks the date of the Japanese surrender that ended fighting in the Pacific.

Australian troops had, at Milne Bay, inflicted on the Japanese their first undoubted defeat on land. Some of us may forget that, of all the allies, it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the Japanese army.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.