Pacific Theater of Operations

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A map of the Pacific Theatre.

This article concerns the Pacific Theater of Operations as defined by the U.S. military. For information on campaigns and battles in Asia and the Pacific during World War II, see Pacific War. For information on campaigns and battles in the Pacific Ocean and its islands, see Pacific Ocean theater of World War II.

The Pacific Theatre of Operations (PTO) is the term used in the United States for all military activity in the Pacific Ocean and the countries bordering it, during World War II. Pacific War is a more common name, around the world, for the broader conflict between the Allies and Japan, between 1937 and 1945.

Partly because of the nearly equal roles of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy in conducting war in the Pacific Theatre, but largely for domestic political reasons, there was no single Allied or US commander for the theatre (comparable to Eisenhower in the ETO). Indeed, the organizational structure was rather tangled, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff frequently required to be involved, and the Army and Navy commanders reporting to both the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of War. (No doubt the attendant difficulties helped motivate the formation of the Department of Defense in 1947.)

The two main Allied commanders in the PTO were Commander-in-Chief Pacific Ocean Areas, the title held by Admiral Chester Nimitz and Supreme Allied Commander South West Pacific Area¹, General Douglas MacArthur (following termination of the short-lived ABDACOM, in early 1942.)