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The invasion of Iwo Jima began on February 19, 1945, and continued to March 27, 1945. The battle was a major initiative of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. The Marine invasion was charged with the mission of capturing the airfields on the island, which up until that time had harried U.S. bombing missions to Tokyo. Once the bases were secured, they could then be of use in the impending invasion of the Japanese mainland.<br/><br/> The battle was marked by some of the fiercest fighting of the War. The Imperial Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with vast bunkers, hidden artillery, and 18 kilometres of tunnels.The battle was the first U.S. attack on the Japanese Home Islands and the Imperial soldiers defended their positions tenaciously. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, over 19,000 were killed and only 1,083 taken prisoner.
Soryu ('Blue Dragon') was an aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the mid-1930s. Soryu's aircraft were employed in operations during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s and supported the Japanese invasion of French Indochina in mid-1940. During the first months of the Pacific War, she took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Wake Island, and supported the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. In February 1942, her aircraft bombed Darwin, Australia, and she continued on to assist in the Dutch East Indies campaign. In April, Soryu's aircraft helped sink two British heavy cruisers and several merchant ships during the Indian Ocean raid.<br/><br/> After a brief refit, Soryu and three other carriers of the 1st Air Fleet (Kido Butai) participated in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. After bombarding American forces on Midway Atoll, the carriers were attacked by aircraft from the island and the carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown. Dive bombers from Yorktown crippled Soryu and set her afire. Japanese destroyers rescued the survivors but the ship could not be salvaged and was ordered to be scuttled so as to allow her attendant destroyers to be released for further operations. She sank with the loss of 711 officers and enlisted men of the 1,103 aboard. The loss of Soryu and three other IJN carriers at Midway was a crucial strategic defeat for Japan and contributed significantly to the Allies' ultimate victory in the Pacific.
Allied forces conducted many air raids on Japan during World War II, causing extensive destruction to the country's cities and killing between 241,000 and 900,000 people. During the first years of the Pacific War, sparked by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, these attacks were limited to the Doolittle Raid in April 1942 and small-scale raids on military positions in the Kuril Islands from mid-1943.<br/><br/> Strategic bombing raids began in June 1944 and continued until the end of the war in August 1945. Allied naval and land-based tactical air units also attacked Japan during 1945.
Operation Arc Light was the 1965 deployment of B-52D Stratofortresses as conventional bombers from bases in the US to Guam to support ground combat operations in Vietnam.<br/><br/> By extension, Arc Light, and sometimes Arclight, is the code name and general term for the use of B-52 Stratofortress as a close air support (CAS) platform to support ground tactical operations assisted by ground-control-radar detachments of the 1st Combat Evaluation Group (1CEVG) in Operation Combat SkySpot during the Vietnam War. At the same time, investigations of secret CIA activities in Laos revealed that B-52s were used to systematically bomb Laos and Cambodia. In fact, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than it did during World War II on Germany and Japan combined. To this day, vast areas of Laos and Cambodia are uninhabitable because of unexploded ordnance.<br/><br/> In 1964, the U.S. Air Force began to train strategic bomber crews in the delivery of conventional munitions. Under Project Big Belly, all B-52Ds were modified so that they could carry nearly 30 tons of conventional bombs. B-52s were deployed to air force bases in Guam and Thailand. Arc Light operations were most often CAS bombing raids of enemy base camps, troops concentrations, and supply lines.<br/><br/> Missions were commonly flown in three-plane formations known as 'cells' and were also employed when ground units in heavy combat requested fire support. Releasing their bombs from high in the stratosphere, the B-52s could neither be seen nor heard from the ground. B-52s were instrumental in nearly wiping out enemy concentrations besieging Khe Sanh in 1968 and An Loc and Kontum in 1972.
The Second Indochina War, known in America as the Vietnam War, was a Cold War era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the U.S. and other anti-communist nations. The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam and part of their wider strategy of containment.<br/><br/> The North Vietnamese government viewed the war as a colonial war, fought initially against France, backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state. U.S. military advisors arrived beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with U.S. troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962. U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Operations spanned borders, with Laos and Cambodia heavily bombed. Involvement peaked in 1968 at the time of the Tet Offensive.<br/><br/> U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973. The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese army in April 1975 marked the end of the US-Vietnam War.
Operation Linebacker II was a US Seventh Air Force and US Navy Task Force 77 aerial bombing campaign, conducted against targets in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) during the final period of US involvement in the Vietnam War. <br/><br/> The operation was conducted from 18–29 December 1972, leading to several informal names such as 'The December Raids' and 'The Christmas Bombings'. It saw the largest heavy bomber strikes launched by the US Air Force since the end of World War II.<br/><br/> Linebacker II was a resumption of the Operation Linebacker bombings conducted from May to October, with the emphasis of the new campaign shifted to attacks by B-52 Stratofortress bombers rather than tactical fighter aircraft. 1,600 civilians died in Hanoi and Haiphong in the raids.<br/><br/> During operation Linebacker II a total of 741 B-52 sorties were dispatched to bomb North Vietnam. 15,237 tons of ordnance were dropped on 18 industrial and 14 military targets (including eight SAM sites) while fighter-bombers added another 5,000 tons of bombs to the tally. The US admitted to ten B-52s shot down over the North and five others damaged and crashed in Laos or Thailand. North Vietnamese air defense forces claim that 34 B-52s and four F-111s were shot down during the campaign.