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 James Early. Hello and welcome back to Key Battles of the Pacific Theater of World War II.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And I am, as always, joined by my friend and my podcast partner, Scott Rank.

Scott, we've got a big one today, don't we?

Yes, we do.

A battle as big as the sea after which it is named.

Yes, this is key battle number six, the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

And Scott and I are both excited about this one. This one is huge.

It has a lot of moving parts. This episode is going to be a little longer than some of the other

ones because there's just so much to talk about. Now, in our previous episode, we talked about

our fifth key battle. It's kind of funny because we went several episodes without a key battle and

now bang bang two in a row. In fact, number seven will be next episode. So the pace is picking

up, the pace of major operations. In our last episode, we talked about the Battle of Saipan,

which is the really Saipan and the Philippine Sea are two sides of the same coin.

Saipan is the land operation, but going on at pretty much the same time was the Philippine Sea.

The Philippine Sea was the naval side of the operation, and that was started by the Japanese fleet's attempt to stop the invasion of Saipan.

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