Leapfrogging

Although many of us know it as a childhood game, this was a much more advanced tactic that was used in World War II.  Leapfrogging was a miliatry strategy employed by the Allied powers in the Pacific theater agasint the Japanese and Axis powers of World War II.  The idea behind this strategy was to intellegently manuver around islands that contained no military threat to the Allies or showed a heavily armed and protected area that would only suffer in mass losses for the Allies.  The beginning to this tactic was to deploy submarine and air attacks to the Japanese controlled islands to isolate or strand them.  Once their garrisons were depleted, American and Australlian armies could safely bypass these islands and move to more important areas(such as the Phillipines).  Because of the isolation on the island, it made reinforcing and resupplying Japanese forces extremely difficult, so thus troops on certain islands such as Rabaul, were left to die out from starvation or cease to make any impact against the Allies.