War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its size,

and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history

through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Music host, James Early. Greetings.

Welcome back to our series on the key battles of the Pacific War and World War II.

This is James again, and I've got Scott with me as always.

Scott, how are you, sir?

Doing all right. The Imperial Navy of Japan has taken a severe beating, and who knows, America's thinking, oh, way, we can go on offense. Let's try this out a little bit.

Yes, it's time to use the football analogy. You can think of it as the U.S. is recovering a

fumble, and they are going to start running the ball now. But Japan is not going to throw in the towel.

They are not. They're down, but they're not out. So here we are at Key Battle 4. And I'm sorry in our last

episode, I failed to mention that the

Battle of Midway was Key Battle 3. Hopefully you guys figured that out. I will, so I can kind of

recap, the first key battle was the attack on Pearl Harbor. Key Battle 2 was the Battle of the

Coral Sea, which we did a couple episodes ago, for three, and Key Battle 3 was Midway.

Now we're coming to an epic, long-lasting campaign.

It's not really even a single battle.

You know, like Midway was a few days, but this is going to last six months.

...