Word: jap
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Then the enemy came by sea. Rabaul sighted three carriers, five transports near its harbor, saw planes overhead. Aussie militiamen radioed that they would blow up the town's wharf and power station and retreat fighting. Then no more was heard from Rabaul by radio. The Jap landed in the Solomons, in New Ireland, at a few tentative points in ill-defended New Guinea...
Southward from the Celebes Sea, toward Java and the rich oil wells of Balikpapan, the Jap drove last week. All had gone his way up to then in the Dutch Indies; nowhere had he been defeated in his Pacific battleground. Before him now was the final conquest of the Indies, perhaps a final grip on the Pacific world...
Then, for the first time in fair combat, he met the U.S. Navy. Into narrow Macassar Strait, where the warships, transports and screening planes of the Jap's convoy coursed south, steamed destroyers from Admiral Thomas C. Hart's Asiatic Fleet, U.S. cruisers and at least one U.S. submarine followed. Overhead and probably in advance of Admiral Hart's warships, the U.S. Army's Flying Fortresses and Dutch airmen in U.S.-made bombers harried the Jap's protecting planes, destroyers, cruisers...
...Jap took the worst beating given any convoy in World War II. The destroyers first shelled and torpedoed three Jap transports. One blew up. Another sank. A third listed, apparently was sinking when the destroyers withdrew. They returned, with U.S. cruisers. Shell and torpedo fire sank five more transports. A U.S. submarine torpedoed, probably sank a Jap aircraft carrier. U.S. bombers sank two transports, shot down five of twelve Jap fighters. Dutch bombers hit two Jap cruisers, five transports, a destroyer, a Jap warship which looked like a battleship. A Dutch submarine sank a Jap destroyer...
Three days after the Jap nosed into Macassar Strait, at least eleven of his ships had gone down, 22 more had been damaged. The U.S. at this stage of the action had lost not a single ship, not a single plane...