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World War II: The Pacific Theater Primary Source Analysis Activity
Instructions:
1. Consider the “guiding question” for the set of documents (documents 1-3).
2. Once in your groups, assign each member ONE document from your document set to read.
3. INDIVIDUAL WORK (8 minutes):
1. Each group member should read their document and answer the four questions below using the chart that correlates to their document on page 2. Answer the question set for YOUR ASSIGNED document! If you need help, ask me!
i. Who is writing? (author)
ii. Who is the author writing to? (audience)
iii. What is the author’s OVERALL theme? What do they want readers to know?
iv. SUMMARIZE at LEAST THREE examples from the text that relate to the overall theme. YOU MUST UNDERLINE AND LABEL EACH PART OF THE TEXT YOU ARE USING FOR EVIDENCE (“Example #1,” etc.)
2. If you finish sooner than your group members, spend your extra time going over your document and your answers so you can better explain it to your group members.
4. GROUP WORK (20 minutes):
1. Once everyone is finished, each member should “teach” their document to the rest of the group. DO NOT simply read what you put for your answers. DO NOT let group members copy your paper. You must EXPLAIN your answers to your group members.
2. Use each group members’ “teaching” of their document to complete the rest of the charts on page 2.
3. On page 3, as a group, answer the guiding questions by completing the chart. For the prompt, answer the prompt with a thesis statement and supporting evidence. Each group member is responsible for filling in his or her own chart.
i. A thesis is a sentence that states your argument (your answer to the guiding question).
ii. For each thesis statement, write down THREE pieces of evidence from the documents that support the thesis statement. Use at LEAST one piece of evidence from EACH document in the set.
USE THE CHECKLIST BELOW TO ENSURE YOU FULFILL ALL ASSIGNMENT REQUIREMENTS. Put your papers in the order shown in the checklist, staple them together, and turn them in to me.
Requirement / Completed?1. Complete ALL questions on charts on pages 2.
2. Attach YOUR assigned document from each document set with text you used for evidence UNDERLINED AND LABELED .
3. Complete ALL parts of the thesis/evidence chart on page 3.
Guiding Question Document Set (1-3): What were the experiences of soldiers in the Pacific Theater of World War II?
Document / Analysis#1 / 1. Who is writing? (author)
2. Who is the author writing to? (audience)
3. What is the author’s OVERALL theme? What do they want readers to know?
4. SUMMARIZE at LEAST THREE examples from the text that relate to the overall theme. YOU MUST UNDERLINE AND LABEL EACH PART OF THE TEXT YOU ARE USING FOR EVIDENCE
a. Example #1-
b. Example #2-
c. Example #3-
#2 / 1. Who is writing? (author)
2. Who is the author writing to? (audience)
3. What is the author’s OVERALL theme? What do they want readers to know?
4. SUMMARIZE at LEAST THREE examples from the text that relate to the overall theme. YOU MUST UNDERLINE AND LABEL EACH PART OF THE TEXT YOU ARE USING FOR EVIDENCE
a. Example #1-
b. Example #2-
c. Example #3-
#3 / 1. Who is writing? (author)
2. Who is the author writing to? (audience)
3. What is the author’s OVERALL theme? What do they want readers to know?
4. SUMMARIZE at LEAST THREE examples from the text that relate to the overall theme. YOU MUST UNDERLINE AND LABEL EACH PART OF THE TEXT YOU ARE USING FOR EVIDENCE
a. Example #1-
b. Example #2-
c. Example #3-
Prompt:
What were the experiences of soldiers in the Pacific Theater of World War II?
Thesis StatementEvidence #1
Evidence #2
Evidence #3
DOCUMENT #1
Fighter Pilot William Dyess Recalls the Bataan Death March in Interview (January 1943)
The [first] victim, an air force captain, was being searched by a three-star private. Standing by was a Japanese commissioned officer, hand on sword hilt….Before we could grasp what was happening, the black-faced giant had swung his sword. I remember how the sun flashed on it. There was a swish and a kind of chopping thud, like a cleaver going through beef.
The captain's head seemed to jump off his 'shoulders. It hit the ground in front of him and went rolling crazily from side to side between the lines of prisoners. The body fell forward. I have seen wounds, but never such a gush of. blood as this. The heart continued to pump for a few seconds and at each beat there was another great spurt of blood. The white dust around our feet was turned into crimson mud. I saw the hands were opening and closing spasmodically. Then I looked away.
When I looked again the big Jap had put up his sword and was strolling off. The runt who had found the yen was putting them into his pocket. He helped himself to the captain's possessions. This was the first murder….
Eventually the road became so crowded we were marched into a clearing. Here, for two hours, we had our first taste of the oriental sun treatment, which drains the stamina and weakens the spirit. The Japs seated us on the scorching ground, exposed to the full glare of the sun. Many of the Americans and Filipinos had no covering to protect their heads. I was beside a small bush but it cast no shade because the sun was almost directly above us. Many of the men around me were ill. When I thought I could stand the penetrating heat no longer. I was determined to have a sip of the tepid water in my canteen. I had no more than unscrewed the top when the aluminum flask was snatched from my hands. The Jap who had crept up behind me poured the water into a horse's nose-bag, then threw down the canteen. He walked on among the prisoners, taking away their water and pouring it into the bag. When he had enough he gave it to his horse.
The hours dragged by [as we marched] and, as we knew they must. The drop-outs began. It seemed that a great many of the prisoners reached the end of their endurance at about the same time. They went down by twos and threes. Usually, they made an effort to rise. I never can forget their groans and strangled breathing as they tried to get up. Some succeeded. Others lay lifelessly where they had fallen. I observed that the Jap guards paid no attention to these. I wondered why. The explanation wasn't long in coming. There was a sharp crackle of pistol and rifle fire behind us….
Our Japanese guards enjoyed the spectacle in silence for a time. Eventually, one of them who spoke English felt he should add a little spice to the entertainment.
'Sleepee?' he asked. 'You want sleep? Just lie down on road. You get good long sleep!'…
Conditions [at the prison camp] were the worst yet. The prison pen was jammed with sick, dying, and dead American and Filipino soldiers. They were sprawled amid the filth and maggots that covered the ground. Practically all had dysentery. Malaria and dengue fever appeared to be running unchecked. There were symptoms of other tropical diseases I didn't even recognize.
Jap guards had shoved the worst cases beneath the rotted flooring of some dilapidated building. Many of these prisoners already had died. The others looked as though they couldn't survive until morning.
DOCUMENT #2
James Fahey Describes Events at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in Interview (1944)
[Background: To protect themselves, American ships formed a defensive circle around the fuel-laden tanker while each took its turn at refueling. If the enemy arrived, sailors armed with axes aboard the refueling warship would cut the fuel lines to allow the ship to get into battle position and as far away from the tanker as possible.]
At 10:50 A.M. this morning General Quarters sounded, all hands went to their battle stations. At the same time a battleship and a destroyer were alongside the tanker getting fuel. Out of the clouds I saw a big Jap bomber come crashing down into the water. It was not smoking and looked in good condition. It felt like I was in it as it hit the water not too far from the tanker, and the 2 ships that were refueling….
It was not long after that when a force of about 30 Jap planes attacked us. Dive bombers and torpedo planes. Our two ships were busy getting away from the tanker because one bomb-hit on the tanker and it would be all over for the 3 ships. The 2 ships finally got away from the tanker and joined the circle. I think the destroyers were on the outside of the circle. It looked funny to see the tanker all by itself in the center of the ships as we circled it, with our guns blazing away as the planes tried to break through. It was quite a sight, better than the movies. I never saw it done before. It must be the first time it was ever done in any war.
Jap planes were coming at us from all directions. Before the attack started we did not know that they were suicide planes, with no intention of returning to their base. They had one thing in mind and that was to crash into our ships, bombs and all. You have to blow them up, to damage them doesn't mean much.
Right off the bat a Jap plane made a suicide dive at the cruiser St. Louis there was a big explosion and flames were seen shortly from the stern. Another one tried to do the same thing but he was shot down. A Jap plane came in on a battleship with its guns blazing away. Other Jap planes came in strafing one ship, dropping their bombs on another and crashing into another ship. The Jap planes were falling all around us, the air was full of Jap machine gun bullets. Jap planes and bombs were hitting all around us. Some of our ships were being hit by suicide planes, bombs and machine gun fire. It was a fight to the finish.
While all this was taking place our ship had its hands full with Jap planes. We knocked our share of planes down but we also got hit by 3 suicide planes, but lucky for us they dropped their bombs before they crashed into us. In the meantime exploding planes overhead were showering us with their parts. It looked like it was raining plane parts. They were falling all over the ship. Quite a few of the men were hit by big pieces of Jap planes…. One suicide dive bomber was heading right for us while we were firing at other attacking planes and if the 40 mm. mount behind us on the port side did not blow the Jap wing off it would have killed all of us. When the wing was blown off it, the plane turned some and bounced off into the water and the bombs blew part of the plane onto our ship.
...Planes were falling all around us, bombs were coming too close for comfort. The Jap planes were cutting up the water with machine gun fire. All the guns on the ships were blazing away, talk about action, never a dull moment. The fellows were passing ammunition like lightning as the guns were turning in all directions spitting out hot steel...The deck near my mount was covered with blood, guts, brains, tongues, scalps, hearts, arms etc. from the Jap pilots. The Jap bodies were blown into all sorts of pieces. I cannot think of everything that happened because too many things were happening at the same time.
DOCUMENT #3
Robert Sherrod Recalls Fighting on the Pacific Island of Tarawa (1944)
Now… we heard a great thud in the southwest. We knew what that meant. The first battleship [off the coast of the island] had fired the first shot. We all rushed out on deck. The show had begun...
Within three minutes the sky was filled again with the orange-red flash of the big gun, and Olympus [battleship] boomed again. The red ball of fire that was the high-explosive shell was again dropping toward the horizon. But this time there was a tremendous burst on the land... A wall of flame shot five hundred feet into the air, and there was another terrifying explosion as the shell found its mark. Hundreds of awestruck Marines on the deck of the Blue Fox [battleship] cheered in uncontrollable joy...The next flash was four times as great, and the sky turned a brighter, redder orange, greater than any flash of lightning the Marines had ever seen. Now four shells, weighing more than a ton each, peppered the island…. That was only the beginning…. The sky at times was brighter than noontime on the equator. The arching, glowing cinders that were high-explosive shells sailed through the air as though buckshot were being fired out of many shotguns from all sides of the island. The Marines aboard the Blue Fox exulted with each blast on the island...
All of a sudden they stopped. But here came the planes-not just a few planes: a dozen, a score, a hundred. The first torpedo bombers raced across the smoking conflagration and loosed their big bombs on an island that must have been dead a half hour ago!… Surely, I thought, if there were actually any Japs left on the island (which I doubted strongly), they would all be dead by now.
[At this point Sherrod and other Marines storm the beaches of Tarawa and Sherrod realizes that there are still many Japanese alive on the island]
We jumped into the little tractor boat and quickly settled on the deck….Now I knew, positively, that there were Japs, and evidently plenty of them, on the island. They were not dead. The bursts of shellfire all around us evidenced the fact that there was plenty of life in them!... There we were: a single boat, a little wavelet of our own, and we were already getting the hell shot out of us, with a thousand yards to go….
[We] scurried over the side of the [boat] into the water that was neck-deep. We started wading. No sooner had we hit the water than the Jap machine guns really opened up on us. There must have been five or six of these machine guns concentrating their fire on us... It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water. And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into that machinegun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto higher ground. I was scared, as I had never been scared before. But my head was clear. I was extremely alert…