As a pretty solid European war buff I have recently felt the obligation to learn my fair share about the Pacific war. I always understood the gist of the war but it has been very enlightening and very fun to read about all of the lesser known stories!
Anyways one old assumption I had has not been challenged by any of these books: that most of the land combat consisted of amphibious operations and jungle fighting. You don't really see much street fighting like in the cities of France or Germany.
Was that really the case or is it just a bias in what I'm reading? If it is true that there was not much urban combat, why is this true? Was it just lack of major cities or is there another reason.
You sort of have it in part. There really weren't that many major cities to fight over that the war touched in the early 40's.
However there are a few notable exceptions we can talk about. Those being first the Falls of Singapore and Hong Kong in 1941-42 where the cities British garrisons fell to the initial wave of Japanese conquest in the Pacific.
But most notably in February of 1945 we have the Battle of Manila as the US-Filipino forces retook Luzon and the Capital from its IJA/IJN garrison. In the initial Japanese invasion MacArthur had declared it an Open City and removed most of his forces back to Bataan thus the city got off relatively light. This was not to be the case in 1945. While General Yamashita, the overall Japanese commander did not have intentions of making the city a focal point of his plans, infighting with other commanders including the Navy, and rapid American advances meant the battle developed anyway.
A month later 7k Allied troops were casualties, 2 or 3 times that many Japanese, and 100k or more Filipino civilians had been killed either in Japanese reprisal massacres, indiscriminate shelling and bombing, or simply caught in the crossfire. The city itself would be heavily devastated as well and was the largest urban battle in the PTO.