Word: jap
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...commanders might have been less confident. At Munda in the Solomons U.S. troops had learned about the toughness of concentrated Jap defenses...
...Skillful Jap engineers had used stone-hard coconut logs, steel rails, concrete and sand to make incredibly stout fortifications. They had staggered 500 pillboxes in such fashion that marines who captured one found themselves under fire from two others. Covered with three or four feet of sand, the redoubts defied aerial reconnaissance, survived everything but direct hits with heavy shells or bombs. Often a 2,000-lb. bomb, striking within a few feet of a pillbox and digging a 15-ft. hole, merely threw more sand on top of the Jap fortifications. Surveying Betio's defenses after the battle...
...believe the Marshalls, Carolines, Marianas, Philippines and Jap islands will be easier because of Tarawa. Our period of blind refusal to learn, so exasperating early in the war, has all but passed. We have learned to learn faster...
...Guinea, jungle-wise Australians mopped up the Huon Peninsula. Along rugged, malaria-ridden trails, with the help of Matilda tanks, they pushed converging columns toward Jap outposts. Their immediate objective: to clear the enemy from the hinterland of Finschhaven, the port captured almost two months ago by a bold amphibious stroke (TIME, Oct. 4). From Finschhaven some 70 miles of blue water lead to Jap-held New Britain: across that island's curving 300 miles lies Rabaul...
...Aussies, moving slowly over a peninsula as big as Connecticut, had support from Allied air and sea arms. The New Britain shore nearest New Guinea took a sustained bombing. Madang, the feeder base for the Jap Huon line and 200 miles up the coast from Finschhaven, took a night shelling from U.S. warships. Gasmata, a New Britain stronghold, got a similar dose of gunfire. In both actions, U.S. vessels penetrated waters that had been Jap preserves since early 1942, had seldom smelled the powder of the U.S. Navy...