Word: guam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pearl Harbor represented just one small part of the Japanese master plan for the conquest of Southeast Asia. Tokyo launched attacks in that same December week not only against U.S. outposts in the Philippines, Wake Island and Guam but also against the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the British colonies of Malaya, Burma and Hong Kong. The methodical Japanese had printed the currencies for their occupation of all these lands as early as the spring of 1941. And they conquered this vast sweep of territory so easily that the immediate worry was whether they would strike next...
...first actual loss of U.S. territory was a small but symbolic one. Some 400 Japanese naval troops swarmed onto Guam at dawn on Dec. 10 and soon swept into the capital of Agana. After half an hour of gunfire, Guam's Governor, U.S. Navy Captain George McMillin, learned that an additional 5,000 Japanese were landing. He sounded three blasts on an auto horn to signal surrender. McMillin attempted negotiations in sign language, but he and his men finally had to strip to their undershorts and stand in embarrassed silence while the Rising Sun replaced the Stars and Stripes atop...
More heroic but no less doomed was Wake Island, a tiny atoll between Hawaii and Guam. A Japanese fleet closed in to start landing troops at dawn on Dec. 11. U.S. Marines under Major James Devereux scored four direct hits on the flagship Yubari and sank two destroyers. The force withdrew -- the first small U.S. victory in World War II and the only time in the war that defenders beat back an invasion fleet. In reporting this small triumph to Pearl Harbor, according to a story that may be apocryphal, one of Devereux's men added a bit of bravado...
...destroy it. His strategy, which he hoped would win the war for Japan or at least open the way to California, was to seize the two tiny islands known as Midway. A lonely outpost 1,100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, this was the westernmost U.S. base now that Guam, Wake and the Philippines were lost. The U.S. Navy would have to defend Midway, Yamamoto figured, and then he would attack it with the most powerful fleet ever assembled: 11 battleships, 8 carriers, 23 cruisers, 65 destroyers -- 190 ships in all, plus more than 200 planes on the strike-force...
...falling Roman Empire, Adams saw a rising empire. Another visitor to the fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered a famous paper there, saying that the internal frontier was closed; but America would, by the end of the decade, add to its dominion Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa and Wake Island, while occupying Cuba. The American Century had begun...