Word: lagoons
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...favorite hunting ground was the Truk lagoon, where he habitually flew through a storm of flak at 50 ft. in order to bomb and strafe Jap ships...
...Blue Lagoon. With air bases for the Army's heavy bombers already being readied for use, the U.S. command's greatest need was a fleet anchorage in the western Pacific, fronting on the Philippine Sea. Saipan and Guam could serve only as staging points for a fleet; what was wanted was a landlocked basin such as Pearl Harbor, a blue lagoon like Kwajalein, Eniwetok or Majuro. A fine harbor could be had at Palau, a poorer one at Yap; a lagoon could be secured at one of several atolls in the western Carolines-far beyond the bypassed enemy...
...effect. Distance was still an enemy, but no longer as insuperable as it had once seemed. The fleet had repair and refueling craft now in such numbers that carrier task forces and even amphibious forces could range farther than they ever did before. Newly seized harbors like the vast lagoon at Kwajalein can be used to some extent as advanced bases long before shore installations are built...
What U.S. pilots saw as they glided in over Palau was a huge, reef-encircled lagoon, splotched with hilly green islands near the eastern rim. Sprawling over a round island near the main entrance to the lagoon was the sizable town of Koror, mostly composed of laborers' barracks. The U.S. airmen saw the results of Jap labor-two or three islands razed level for fighter and bomber strips, cement jetties from which roads curled back into the jungle to camouflaged fuel and ammunition dumps...
...lush and formidable South Seas base was suddenly fixed in hundreds of U.S. airmen's bombsights. Carrier planes -Avengers and Dauntless dive-bombers -hurtled across the green islands which lie within Truk's barrier coral reef, screamed down onto the shipping moored inside the 40-mile-wide lagoon. Snub-nosed Hellcats swirled into fights with Jap defenders, shot them from the air, caught plenty more ignominiously on the ground. After the first few hours there was no longer any doubt: the enemy had been caught napping...