In 1941 Germany's ally, Japan, initiated its own war against the European powers in the Pacific. Its instruments were to be chiefly those of amphibious warfare, including the aircraft carrier, though Japan's land war in China, which had begun in earnest in 1937, took the form of a traditional war of conquest. The Pacific war, though it included several important land campaigns, was principally a conflict between great triphibious task forces, in which aircraft carriers played the central role. Its action was perhaps the most dramatic ever played out in military history and culminated in the attack on Japan by the USA with nuclear weapons, an instrument of offence that called into question the utility of war as an inter-state activity. This history of World War II in Asia and the Pacific covers all these events.