Return Visit

Few white men had ever seen Truk, one of the world's great naval outposts. The Japs clamped a lid on it years ago when they began developing it as the key to their South Pacific empire-to-be. Last week, in a swift and massive surprise attack by a great U.S. task force, the veil was rent. For two days, swarms of Naval aviators saw Truk, again & again. And Truk took a savage, historic pounding.

A few days after Pearl Harbor, Hudson bombers manned by Australian crews had lumbered through the cottony skies to take photographs of the Truk Islands. But not until three weeks ago did Allied cameramen call again. U.S. Marines, flying two Liberators over 2,000 miles of enemy ocean, swooped in, snapped pictures.

They had seen sections that looked like a Florida country club, winding gravel roads, fine homes. They had encountered terrific ack-ack. One "layout" was covered with "strips, taxiways, and ships." But most important, they had counted 25 ships, among them two carriers. They had pictures to prove all of it.

The Navy, grown nimble-footed, tactically flexible and powerful, wasted no time.

Japan's lush and formidable South Seas base was suddenly fixed in hundreds of U.S. airmen's bombsights. Carrier planes --Avengers and Dauntless dive-bombers --hurtled across the green islands which lie within Truk's barrier coral reef, screamed down onto the shipping moored inside the 40-mile-wide lagoon. Snub-nosed Hellcats swirled into fights with Jap defenders, shot them from the air, caught plenty more ignominiously on the ground. After the first few hours there was no longer any doubt: the enemy had been caught napping.

The fleet (commanded by Admiral Spruance) boldly stood off Truk while planes from Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher's carriers worked away. By the end of the first day enemy air opposition had been beaten out of existence^

U.S. planes destroyed 127 enemy aircraft in combat and 74 on the ground, shot, up 50 more so badly they never took the air. It was a classic job of air attack.

U.S. bombers made the most of it. They sank 19 Jap ships: two light cruisers, three destroyers, one ammunition ship, one seaplane tender, two oilers, two gunboats, eight cargo ships. Apparently the two carriers had pulled out. Only losses reported by the Navy: 17 planes. One ship was "moderately damaged."

Said the Navy communique: "The Pacific fleet has returned in Truk the visit made by the Japanese fleet on Dec. 7, 1941, and effected the partial settlement of the debt."

Other details of the Navy's slam-bang operation would have to wait. But one other fact was clear at week's end: the Navy had shown Japan that no longer is any island base beyond the striking range of Spruance's Central Pacific fleet. The overfeared power of land-based air power had been set aside by greater air power from the sea.

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