Barely three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, roughly 5,500 Japanese troops landed on Guam, an American territory in the western Pacific defended by fewer than 550 lightly armed US Marines, sailors, and Guamanian insular guardsmen. The garrison, cut off and outnumbered ten to one, surrendered within hours. Guam remained under harsh Japanese occupation for nearly three years until US forces recaptured it in 1944.
Guam's fate was sealed the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The island, an American territory since 1898, sat deep within Japan's planned defensive perimeter in the Pacific and had been left almost undefended, a deliberate choice by Washington, which judged it indefensible against Japan's much larger military presence in the nearby Mariana Islands.
On December 10, 1941, Japanese naval and army forces, numbering around 5,500 troops, landed at multiple points on Guam. The defenders, fewer than 550 US Marines, sailors, and members of the Guam Insular Force, had only small arms and a single antiquated naval vessel, the USS Penguin, which its crew scuttled rather than surrender. Governor George McMillin, recognizing the hopelessness of resistance, surrendered the island within hours of the landing, one of the first American territories to fall in the Pacific war.
What followed was nearly three years of occupation marked by forced labor, restrictions on the Chamorro language and culture, and increasing brutality as the war turned against Japan. American forces did not retake Guam until July 1944, in a brutal three-week battle. The island's fall in 1941, swift and largely unremembered outside the Pacific, foreshadowed the string of Allied defeats that would follow across the region in the war's opening months.