Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Japanese renamed Guam Ōmiya-jima (Great Shrine Island). The Japanese occupation of Guam lasted about 31 months. During this period, the indigenous people of Guam were subjected to beatings, forced labor, family separation, concentration camps, massacres, beheadings and rape. [27] [28] [29] [30]
Guam was similarly the site of Operation New Life, the processing of Vietnamese refugees after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. [2] Guam is a linchpin of the "Second Island Chain" in the Island Chain Strategy first described by the U.S. during the Korean War, but which has become an increasing focus of Chinese foreign policy.
The island was a major stopover for Manila Galleons sailing from Acapulco, until 1815. Guam was taken over from Spain by the United States during the Spanish–American War in 1898. As the largest island in Micronesia and the only American-held island in the region before World War II, Guam was occupied by the Japanese between December 1941 and ...
Satellite image of the Big Island of Hawaii, the largest island in the United States. Scale depiction of the 5 largest islands in the US, with some other significant islands This is a list of islands of the United States , as ordered by area.
Guam, at 212 square miles (543 square kilometers), is the largest island of the Marianas, with a length of 32 miles (52 km) and a width ranging from 12 miles (19.31 km) to four miles (6.44 km) at different points of the island.
The Japanese built military constructions on the island in the 1930s and, in December 1941, used it as a staging area to invade Guam, which was part of the U.S. at that time. During the Japanese mandate, the main economic focus was sugar production, and for example, about 98% of Tinian island was used to grow sugarcane .
In 1521, the first European to see Rota was the lookout on Ferdinand Magellan's ship Victoria, Lope Navarro.However, Magellan's armada of three ships did not stop until they reached Guam, so the first European to arrive in Rota (in 1524), was the Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, who annexed it together with the rest of the Mariana Islands on behalf of the Spanish Empire.
The island chain geographically consists of two subgroups, a northern group of ten volcanic main islands, all are currently uninhabited; and a southern group of five coralline limestone islands (Rota, Guam, Aguijan, Tinian and Saipan), all inhabited except Aguijan. In the northern volcanic group a maximum elevation of about 2,700 feet (820 m ...