Word: rabaul
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Probabilities. Logically, Truk must be captured. This would mean a gradual pruning-cutting off the Marshalls and Gilberts, cutting off Rabaul, then striking at Truk. On the other flank the same kind of process will probably be in order-a pruning not only in Burma but down the line as well, at the Andamans, perhaps, or Malaya or the Dutch islands. The Japanese arteries will be meaningless when they have no flesh into which to feed military lifeblood...
...through the slot of the Solomons. New Allied invasions-of the tiny Treasury Islands, of Choiseul across the way, and eventually of Bougainville between them-were beginning. This triple play was to be an important operation, for heavily defended Bougainville was the last stop on the long road to Rabaul, Japan's main South Pacific base. TIME Correspondent William Chickering was aboard a ship bound for Treasuries, and he cabled...
Then came the Fifth's blow at Rabaul. At least for the moment, Jap air power in the Southwest Pacific seemed to have been destroyed. But the Jap was still able and willing to send planes into combat. Over the weekend he lost 104 aircraft in the Solomons-New Guinea area...
...Test. Wake was a test of seaborne air power in island assault with ample forces. Wewak and Rabaul were tests of land-based air power with concentrated but still insufficient forces. Wryly and eloquently, a correspondent with MacArthur remarked that General Kenney's only reserves were "the planes that came back...
...correspondent cabled: "[MacArthur] may have decided to risk his military future to bring home to London and Washington strategists what can be achieved by imaginative methods. . . . Success [at Rabaul] was calculated to make sponsors of alternative strategies reconsider the claims of the Southwest Pacific for a prominent role in the offensive against Japan...