Word: formosae
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Last week the cover was ripped off. Big, fast carriers of Admiral William F. Halsey's Third Fleet, which had been sending air groups to hammer Formosa and Luzon, swung southwest through Luzon Strait from the Philippine Sea to the South China...
While intelligence officers were still compiling the results of these assaults, the Halsey force swung back to the north. A combat air patrol (200 planes, by enemy count) went to work on Formosa. But there were enough planes left to make carrier-aviation history, by swooping down on the China coast to attack Amoy, Swatow and the captive British colony of Hong Kong...
...route between Saipan and Tokyo were hornets' nests of Jap fighters and bombers: a surface task force of the U.S. Pacific Fleet steamed in and battered these airfields and harbor facilities in the Bonin Islands with big guns. The Third Fleet's carrier planes hammered Okinawa and Formosa...
...that was not the immediate purpose of "Jock" McCain's strikes. He was beating down enemy air power on a line from Japan through the Ryukyu Islands to the Formosa Strait - bottleneck in enemy communications to points south, notably the Philippines. His planes harried air fields on either side of the 95-mile passage, on Formosa and in China, to prevent reinforcement of the battered Jap air fleets on Luzon, and to keep Formosa-based aircraft from attacking U.S. ships off Luzon...
...weather closed in, soupy thick, as the southern attack group neared Formosa. (Western Pacific weather is far different from that of the sunny Gilberts and Marshalls.) But the 245-mile island was packed with targets; in the waters to the west were two enemy convoys; still farther west was Foochow, captured by the Japs only three months ago. At only one point was the enemy able to offer notable opposition: over Shinchiku airdrome, on Formosa, where 15 interceptors rose to give battle, and 12 were shot down...