Island hopping refers to crossing an ocean by a series of shorter journeys between islands, as opposed to a single journey directly across the ocean to the destination.

In biology, island hopping is the method by which plant and animal species colonise islands.

In anthropology, island hopping is the method by which the Polynesian people settled the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

In air travel, planes that did not have the range to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a single flight took the island hopping route from the United States of America to Europe via the Caribbean and the Canary Islands or even further south via Brazil, Ascension Island, and Africa. A northerly route via Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland was also possible.

The Spanish discovery and conquest of the Caribbean proceeded by island hopping. Christopher Columbus discovered San Salvador in 1492, Hispaniola and Dominica in 1493, and so on.

In the Pacific Theater of World War II, Island hopping, also called leap frogging, describes the strategy employed by the U.S. military of bypassing heavily fortified Japanese positions and instead concentrating the limited Allied resources on strategically important islands that were less well defended but capable of supporting the drive to the main islands of Japan. This strategy was possible because the United States had submarine forces, which provided an effective blockade preventing the Japanese from moving troops from island to island. Thus troops on islands which had been bypassed were useless to the Japanese war effort and left to "wither on the vine." This caused some Japanese troops, cut off with communications, to become unaware that the war had ended after the Japanese surrender. This occurred most often in small islands of the Philippines and Guam. In a few cases, these isolated troops continued to hold out for years after the end of the war.

External Links

Pacific Theater sense: Japanese Holdouts after World War II