On February 15, 1942 the city of Singapore fell to the Japanese. Fifty-five thousand British and Australian troops were taken captive. Of the 45,000 Indian troops allied with them, some 40,000 took up an offer to join the Indian National Army, created by the Japanese to fight against the British. This was the largest military surrender in the history of Britain.
In April of this same year, after several months of fighting, the Japanese took Bataan in the Philippines, capturing 78,000 of the American-led Allied troops. Corregidor fell next, leaving the Japanese in complete control of the country.
In the Battle of the North Atlantic, that conflict fought over a vast territory between German U-Boats and Allied convoys and their armed escorts, Allied shipping losses rose at staggering rates during the first six months of 1942, with 300 ships totaling more than a million tons of shipping sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic….