Word: buna
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...wing of an old De Havilland. Kenney is the inventor of the parachute bomb, which enables bombing planes to fly lower, bomb more accurately. He invented this bomb in 1928, but it was never used until last September, when he dropped 240 of them on the Japanese at Buna. Twenty-two Jap planes were standing on the strip; 17 of them were destroyed and all the ack-ack in the area was silenced...
...devise stuff like that," Kenney says. "I'd studied all the books on these different goddam campaigns, and Buna was not in any of them...
Though it apparently marks the beginning of an Allied offensive in the Southwest Pacific, the Battle for Buna, in perspective, was only a local action 3,500 miles south of Tokyo. But it probably will go down in history as the first campaign ever supplied entirely...
Having arrived two weeks after the Japs landed at Buna (July 20), Kenney spent two months organizing his air force, pepping up laggard flyers, briefing new ones, getting his fresh supply of planes ready for action. By Sept. 28 the Jap was at Ioribaiwa, only 32 miles from Port Moresby. MacArthur, his chief of staff Major General Richard K. Sutherland (a pilot himself), Australian General Blamey and Kenney fixed on a plan: to wrest control of the air, despite hell and high mountains, by blasting the Japs out of Buna and far-off Lae and Salamaua, the bases from which...
While the retreating Aussies made a stand at Ioribaiwa, Kenney's planes swarmed north. They struck the supply line crawling from Buna. They struck airdromes again & again. Presently the stunned Jap no longer bothered to repair the craters in his strips. During the height of the Guadalcanal action came a six-week period in which no Jap plane dared to take the air. Since Nov. 1 no Jap reinforcements for New Guinea have landed intact. Most of them never landed...