12 World War II Moments (That Hardly Anybody Ever Talks About)

The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia was swift. Bar Burma and parts of India and China, they invaded almost everywhere for thousands of miles in every direction, including French Indochina (modern day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam), the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia and East Timor), the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands (modern day Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu), Solomon Islands, Hong Kong, Malaya (modern day Malaysia), Singapore, the Philippines (then administered by the USA) and parts of Papua New Guinea (then administered by Australia).

This greatly bolstered the holdings they had already picked up before and after World War I (including Korea, Taiwan and all of Germany’s former Pacific territories such as the Marshall Islands). The only places in Southeast Asia and Oceania not to ultimately be occupied were the New Hebrides (modern day Vanuatu), Samoa, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand and Siam (modern day Thailand, which allied with the Japanese).

Bar the outlying island chains, most of these never saw combat during the war, their populaces forgotten about and left to fend for themselves by their colonial masters. Their suffering is still largely forgotten today, as is the sheer volume of the world that Japan was able to annex so quickly.

As a result, many do not know that Japan actually conquered a very small part of the USA. Having not considered an invasion of Hawaii feasible in the wake of Pearl Harbour, they occupied two of the Aleutian Islands (off of Alaska) for just over a year.