The men of the 182nd Infantry Regiment deployed to the Pacific barely a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After a brief stop in Australia, they spent much of 1942 on New Caledonia, where they prepared defenses and were one of the units cobbled together to form the Americal Division. The had their first taste of combat on the island of Guadalcanal, where they joined with the US Marines to drive the Japanese back for the first time in the Pacific. After nearly a near of recuperation on Fiji, at the end of 1943 they entered their second campaign, further up the Solomon Islands chain on Bougainville. There, they saw some of their fiercest action of the entire war, and spent all of 1944. Early in 1945 they deployed to the Philippines, where they immediately found themselves pulled into the tail end of the fighting on Leyte. Their war culminated with an amphibious assault on the island of Cebu, followed by a month of bloody fighting into the imposing inland hills. The Japanese were forced to retreat to the northern end of Cebu, where they surrendered en masse in August 1945. The victorious Americal Division soldiers boarded ships for Japan, serving as an occupying force for several months, before returning to the west coast of the United States for inactivation.
This website features a chapter for each step in the journey of the 182nd Infantry Regiment during World War II. The focus is on the men of the unit, their experiences, and the campaigns they endured. Their journey begins in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Click here to begin reading their story.