Word: mili
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Marshalls themselves Army and Navy bombers continued to pound, as they had for two months-bombing and strafing Wotje, Maleolap, Jaluit, Mili and Kwajalein, attacking shipping, airfields, fuel and ammunition dumps in the same pattern of strategic bombing which had preceded the assault on the Gilberts...
After a year's end lull, U.S. airmen in the Central Pacific resumed their daily bombardment of the Japs' Marshall Islands. The Army's Seventh Air Force sent heavy, medium and dive bombers over the runways and harbors of Mili. Jaluit, Wotje, Maloelap, Kwajalein (see cut). Navy Secretary Frank Knox all but forecast imminent invasion of the Marshalls: he said the bombings were "softening up" the islands, "putting the enemy on the defensive throughout that region...
...Mili, 23 miles long, a nest of 100 islets, has a strongly garrisoned airfield, a lagoon that provides good anchorage for surface vessels...
...Englishmen came Russian explorers, Yankee whalers and missionaries, German traders. In 1885 German warships dropped anchor off Jaluit, claimed possession of the Marshalls for the Kaiser. Later Germany agreed that Britain should have the Gilberts. The German Navy dreamed of basing a fleet on Majuro atoll (north of Mili), and in World War I Admiral Graf von Spee stopped there on his way to the Falklands. Then in 1914 the Japs seized the Marshalls, along with the neighboring Marianas and Carolines, now site of the Truk powerhouse; they remained in possession with League blessing. From then on the Japs knew...
...Major General Willis Kale's Seventh Air Force struck from runways somewhere in the Central Pacific; they may have used Tarawa's air strip. The bomb doses were small (15 to 40 tons in two of four Army raids). Resistance was light: 20 Zeros appeared over Mili atoll, tried (and failed) to slap the raiders with anti-bomber bombs dropped from above in the German manner. In smaller force, Navy patrol bombers snooped the islands. But the blow that really caught the Japs in the Marshalls with their kimonos off, was a pile-driving carrier raid...