For many months during World War II, U.S. Navy and Army strategists wrestled with the thorny problems of Rabaul and Truk Atoll, two of Japan’s most formidable bases in the Pacific. Should American forces seize the bastions or neutralize them? While last August’s issue of Naval History tackled how the Allies dealt with Rabaul, this issue’s cover story addresses Truk, the Japanese “Gibraltar of the Pacific.”
In “Two Birds with One Hailstone,” Alan Rems details U.S. forces’ relentless hammering of the atoll, which began with Operation Hailstone—a massive fast-carrier raid that crippled airpower at Truk and hastened the downfall of Rabaul. Hundreds of Navy planes, flying off five heavy and four light carriers, attacked targets or flew combat air patrol during the 17–18 February 1944 operation.
After reading about Hailstone, why not watch the attack? Released in 1944, The Fighting Lady uses footage mainly filmed on board the Yorktown (CV-10) to recount life in an “anonymous” carrier during her first operations after commissioning. Sharp-eyed viewers can spy cameos by Vice Admirals Marc Mitscher and John McCain.
About 26 minutes into the hour-long film, the action turns to Truk, and soon gun-camera images of air, land, and sea attacks fill the screen. As the viewer’s plane swoops down, guns blazing, on a seaplane base crowded with enemy aircraft, the narrator (Naval Reserve Lieutenant/actor Robert Taylor) comments, “There’s something really grand, something historic about diving in here on this place, which Japan has been building and guarding jealously from all but Japanese eyes for 20 years.”
Rems notes that one of the up-close, on-the-ground witnesses to the attack was captured Marine aviator Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. In his memoir, Baa, Baa Black Sheep (Putnam’s, 1958), Boyington claimed that when he watches The Fighting Lady “there is just enough ham in me to want to point out ‘where I am.’ But the pit in which I am trying to seek cover shows up much better than I do.” Produced by the Navy, the film received the Academy Award for best documentary feature of 1944, the same year With the Marines at Tarawa earned the Oscar for best documentary short. The Fighting Lady is public domain and can be downloaded at https://archive.org/details/FightingLady or viewed at YouTube.
While 17 February marks the 70th anniversary of Operation Hailstone, it’s also the sesquicentennial of history’s first successful submarine attack. In “One-Way Mission of the H. L. Hunley,” Brian Hicks recounts the career of the innovative but ill-fated Confederate submarine Hunley. As he explains in his sidebar, an answer to the $64,000 Hunley question—why she sank after torpedoing the Union sloop Housatonic—may be in the offing in 2014.