Page 159 - Micronesia

uring the night, Mitscher sent radar- or heavily damaged. Thousands of Japanese with a fighter sweep early in the morning
had been killed by American bullets or of 29 April. It went much like the sweep
D equipped Avengers to pound Truk. At bombs, or had been swallowed by the sea. on 17 February, but the Japanese were not
The air raid on Truk rendered the Gibraltar able to get near the number of their aircraft
the same time, eight of Mitscher’s warships of the Pacific impotent, allowing the United into the air this second time. Then came the
circled the atoll to intercept enemy ships States to safely bypass the once putatively Dauntless dive bombers. There were few
attempting to escape the carnage in the impregnable base on the way to Tokyo. ships in the lagoon to attack, but plenty of
lagoon. With daylight the next morning installations on land, including tank farms
came more American fighter and bomber H owever, the U.S. Navy wasn’t quite with their precious supplies of oil and gas.
sweeps. By noon there were few targets done with Truk. When reconnaissance The raids were renewed the next day and
left to hit. Sitting on the bottom of the flights during late April 1944 discovered continued until the early afternoon when
lagoon were 13 Japanese warships and that the Japanese were not only busy Mitscher decided that there were no longer
32 merchant ships. Another two Japanese rebuilding air and naval installations on the enough targets left to put pilots at risk in
warships, a cruiser and a destroyer, were on islands in the lagoon but had also moved another strike. All the objectives of the mis-
the ocean floor just outside the entrance to 100 planes from Rabaul to Truk, a second sion had been achieved.
the lagoon. Some 275 Japanese planes had strike was planned. The second strike began
been destroyed. Every Japanese facility on
every island in the atoll had been destroyed