The war in the Pacific began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which led to the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay a month later. The Pacific was a theater of great naval battles--such as those in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and at Leyte--as well as grim jungle warfare at Guadalcanal, New Guinea, and Burma. This book, the first in a six-volume set on World War II, explores the many facets of this complicated conflict, which reshaped Asia and forever splintered European invincibility as a colonial power.