Word: rabaul
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Their 6-26 medium bomber, eight men aboard, set out last May to bomb Jap-held Rabaul. "We dropped our bombs on the runway and machine-gunned two bombers on the ground," said 2nd Lieut. Eugene D. Wallace of Los Angeles, the plane's copilot. "Antiaircraft fire was awfully heavy and ... we were hit. . . . The pilot said we would have to make a crash landing...
...best proof of Ken Walker's labors came on his 17th raid. That time his bombardiers and gunners sent nine Jap ships to the bottom of Rabaul Harbor. But the aircraft that failed to return from his most successful raid was the one the airmen's general was riding...
They were Japanese ships, headed toward New Guinea. The news was an answer to Lieut. General George C. Kenney's prayers. Taking cover under the gathering storm, a Japanese convoy had slipped out of Rabaul and was edging down the dark New Britain coast with reinforcements for Lae, main Jap base in New Guinea. The Japs, driven out of Guadalcanal and Papua, were obviously pouring men and supplies into the chinks of their outposts north of Australia...
Since January 1942 the Japanese had held Rabaul on Blanche Bay, the flooded crater of an extinct volcano which gives deep water almost to the shore. In peacetime Rabaul's tiny wharf was used chiefly by island trading ships of two companies, W. R. Carpenter & Co. and Burns Philp & Co. Now the harbor is a great Japanese naval and troop-transport center. From it, short and efficient supply lines radiate to forward bases above both shoulders of Australia-a score of spots such as Kupang on Timor and Gizo in the Solomons. From those forward bases, which like Rabaul...
General MacArthur's raiders, flying through sulfur fumes and corrosive dust from Rabaul's volcanoes, were bent on disorganizing this concentration. Their record: in Blanche Bay were the hulks of 58 ships; 26 others had been bombed out of service...