WWII history buffs - Pacific theater island hopping

look at the natural resources Japan has and how they must expand their footprint to compensate for shortcomings.

I know we bombed the shite out of them, then we landed and dug them out. My question is why we didnt just bypass them. Like I said they were stuck on these islands. They really didnt pose an a threat, we could have just left them and let them starve.

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Watching in HD and it has got me wondering why we didn't just bomb the shite out of or totally by pass many of the little atolls and islands we lost some many men on.

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We bypassed a shite load of them. One could even say we hopped over some of the islands.

I am sure we did it just seems like there really only a handful of islands we needed for FOBs and air strips. There were plenty of islands we could have skipped it seem like.

People seriously overestimate the power of bombing. It's very effective against mainly above ground targets in urban or soft soil locations. But when you have security defenses built deep underground in rock, it's a crap shoot as to effectiveness.

Okay I guess I should have left bombing out, thats seems to be confusing people on my actual point of just bypassing them because they were stuck and posed no imminent threat.

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I think there was some controversy over time and manpower spent on some of these piss ant islands. I read Sledge's book, With The Old Guard and I think he discussed that. His book was one of the ones they used to make "The Pacific".

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OP based on what I recall from history, this answer is closest to the probable truth. I'm sure there was tons of discussion during planning WRT which islands to take as opposed to which ones to skip.

There may have been a few taken that ultimately weren't necessary to take. However, in the end, the planners did hop over many islands and probably got close to implementing the best plan possible.

ALL of the islands were defended by the Japanese because the Japanese defense plan was to build up a defensive ring of fortified islands "radiating" out from the Japanese homeland. Keep in mind that as little as 5,000 dug-in defenders in rough terrain would turn a small isolated island into a very hard fortified target that had to be attacked frontally by infantry (because there were no flanks).

Attacking US infantry would take many casualties before they could manage to SPOT the bunkers and pillboxes raking them with MG fire and light cannon fire (which probably had canister fire rounds). Can you imagine how hard it is to take an enemy pillbox that raking your field of advance with canister and machine gun fire?

I worked with a guy that fought in the Pacific. He said the Japs were some fierce fighters with no quit in them. Death or victory were their only options. He said they had to go tunnel to tunnel and kill them all with fire or any means necessary.