(AP Photo)
The crew of a US field artillery piece on Attu Island in action against Japanese occupation forces in 1943.
In the months after Pearl Harbor, fighting raged across the Pacific Ocean, as Allied forces sought to blunt Japan's advance.
Japan captured islands throughout the Central and South Pacific, including the Philippines, where on April 9, 1942, more than 20,000 Americans surrendered - part of the largest army under US command ever to do so - and then were forced into the brutal Bataan Death March.
By late spring, the Allies started to see success. On April 18, 1942, the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders mounted the first US strike on the Japanese mainland. In early May, US and Australian ships turned the Japanese back at the Battle of the Coral Sea - the first naval battle in which the ships involved were never in sight of each other.
During the first days of June 1942, another battle was just getting started in the far northern Pacific.
The Japanese, spooked by the Doolittle Raid, sent a force to occupy some of the frigid, windswept islands at the western end of the Aleutian Island chain, which extends more than 1,000 miles from the Alaskan mainland.
Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, chief of the Japanese navy, saw the Aleutians and Midway as anchors of a defensive perimeter in the northern and central Pacific. Attacking the former, he believed, would draw weakened US naval forces out of Pearl Harbor. At that point, he would attack the latter. When US forces were redirected to Midway, he would destroy them.