Pacific Islanders in Transit

Having signed the Axis Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940, Japan demanded from defeated France the bases in French Indo-China that it required in order to win its three-year-old war against China. First securing its northern defences through a treaty of neutrality with the Soviet Union on 13 April 1941, Japan then occupied French Indo-China on 28 July and, from there, Thailand, with the consent of Thailand’s dictator Pibul Songgram. With this, Japan was also hoping to create a base of operations against the British possessions in Malaya and Burma, which were tagged to become Japanese. On the same day that Japan militarily occupied Thailand — 7 December 1941 — Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at its home base of Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i, disabling the Americans and allowing Japan to advance swiftly into Southeast Asia and the Pacific (see Map 10).