Word: navale
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...first actual loss of U.S. territory was a small but symbolic one. Some 400 Japanese naval troops swarmed onto Guam at dawn on Dec. 10 and soon swept into the capital of Agana. After half an hour of gunfire, Guam's Governor, U.S. Navy Captain George McMillin, learned that an additional 5,000 Japanese were landing. He sounded three blasts on an auto horn to signal surrender. McMillin attempted negotiations in sign language, but he and his men finally had to strip to their undershorts and stand in embarrassed silence while the Rising Sun replaced the Stars and Stripes atop...
...Malaya. The target there was not only the peninsula's wealth of tin and rubber but also the strategic citadel of Singapore. Built in the 1920s and '30s among the mangrove swamps of Johore Strait, at the then enormous cost of $270 million, Singapore stood as the theoretically impregnable naval headquarters of the whole British empire east of Suez. One symbol of the island's true strength, however, was its array of 15-in. guns that could not turn and fire into the supposedly impenetrable jungle behind them. Another was the 2,000 tennis courts built for the British, along...
...Navy still had one great secret weapon, though: its code breakers could read Japanese naval messages. From those, Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz knew that the Japanese planned to seize the eastern approaches to Australia by attacking Port Moresby, on the tail of New Guinea, in the first week in May. Nimitz stripped bare Pearl Harbor's defenses to mount an all-out attack on the Japanese invaders as they entered the Coral...
...first naval battle in history in which the rival fleets never saw each other. The two carrier forces maneuvered between 100 and 200 miles apart while their planes attacked. The result included some absurd errors. Several Japanese planes tried unsuccessfully to land on the deck of the Yorktown; several American pilots tried unsuccessfully to bomb the cruiser Australia. In the first U.S. attack on a major Japanese warship, though, bombers from the Lexington and the Yorktown trapped and sank the 12,000-ton light carrier Shoho; nearly 700 of her 900 crewmen went down with her. Lieut. Commander Robert Dixon...
That Japanese blindness enabled the outnumbered Americans to plan an ambush as decisive as that of the Concord Minutemen of 1775, when they fired their "shot heard round the world." In the new style of naval warfare, which admirals around the world were just beginning to learn, aircraft carriers were supreme. They could destroy anything but were highly vulnerable, so the key was to find and attack the enemy's carriers...