Word: convoying
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Date Line when the last phase of Walter Krueger's plan was sprung: a new amphibious attack. It was sprung just in time. General Tomoyuki Yamashita had a plan too : to break the U.S hold on Leyte by aerial landings on U.S. airfields and to run in a convoy of reinforcements to Ormoc. Yamashita's convoy did not make it! Krueger...
Meanwhile, the Japs' convoy of four troop transports, two freighters, four destroyers and three destroyer escorts was lurking in San Isidro Bay, 30 miles short of its destination at Ormoc. U.S. Army and Navy planes spent all day attacking them. By 5:30 p.m. every one had been sunk. The water was covered with oil, dotted with the bobbing heads of enemy soldiers...
Over the Sea. Victory of the week-even greater in immediate results than the pulling of the Limon plug-came when U.S. fighter bombers, P-40s and 47s, jumped a reinforcement convoy of three Japanese transports and a destroyer off Masbate Island, in the Visayan Sea northwest of Leyte. The Yankee fighters barreled straight in, let the bombs go at close range, then strafed the crowded transport decks while screaming soldiers leaped overboard to get away from the spreading fires and the strafing...
...destroyer and two transports burned and sank; the third transport was beached. General MacArthur's headquarters estimated that 3,500 of 6,000 troops headed for the Leyte battle lines had been killed or drowned. Two days later another convoy was smashed, with 2,000 men killed. That brought to 17,000 the total of Japanese lost at sea in disastrous efforts to reinforce the Leyte garrison. But other reinforcements have slipped through. And even the 17,000 lost showed the determination of the enemy to continue forcing every possible delay into Douglas MacArthur's Philippine timetable...
Next day MacArthur called for extra help from Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet flyers. Carrier-based planes caught the Japs further offshore, sank all ten ships of a convoy which included 8,000 men by MacArthur's estimate. Army and Navy flyers and antiaircraft gunners also shot down 81 Jap planes last week, bringing the total Jap losses over and near Leyte to 1,700 planes since Oct. 20. Whatever the price of holding the Philippines as long as possible, the Jap apparently was willing to fork it up. But it would not be the first time...