Word: lae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...still clung, to hit at the Jap supply route which winds through the jungles and along the shore. They smacked faraway Wewak, where the route begins, sank three 7,000-ton freighters in the harbor there, set a fourth transport and a destroyer ablaze. They smashed Jap headquarters at Lae with 84 tons of bombs...
Sandy-haired, retiring Lieut. Richard R. Bong last week became the No. 1 American fighter pilot of the Southwest Pacific. Flying a twin-engined Lightning over Lae, he blasted down two Zeros and two Messerschmitts to boost his confirmed kills...
...corps two years ago, Dicks Bong helped his father with oat and potato crops at Poplar, Wis. (pop. 462). His first combat was in the Buna battle of Dec. 27, when he twice rang the bell with a Zero and a dive-bomber. During the smashing of the Lae convoy in early January he nailed three Zeros. He got another in the Bismarck Sea battle...
...offensive, but it had two parts. One part, directly under General Douglas MacArthur, was aimed at the Japanese positions in northern New Guinea (first Salamaua, then Lae) and at the island gateway between the Pacific proper and its southern satellite, the Coral Sea. The other part, though planned by General MacArthur, was under the immediate command of Admiral Halsey. His Naval, Marine and Army forces aimed at Munda, a Japanese air base and army station on New Georgia Island, some 200 miles northwest of Guadalcanal. On the approach to Munda, the Americans first took the outlying island of Rendova...
These were preliminaries. Salamaua, Lae and Munda also were intermediate objectives on the road to a larger objective-Rabaul, heart & center of the Japanese naval, air and land establishment on the southwestern periphery. North of Rabaul there is only open sea (775 miles of it) between the periphery and the great naval base at Truk in the Carolines. From Rabaul the Allies also could strike behind the Japs' long Indies line, across the inner shipping lanes to Japan itself...