Word: reefs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...everything in the line of Jap military suicides by the time the last charge of the Japs had been beaten off. But we hadn't. Here was something different. During mopping-up operations a detachment of marines on amphibious tractors saw seven Japanese off-shore on a coral reef and drove out to get them. As the amphtracks approached, six of the Japs knelt down on the reef. Then the seventh, apparently an officer, drew a sword and began methodically to hack at the necks of his men. Four heads had rolled into the sea before the marines closed...
...learned later what had happened to our northern landing forces. The first three waves got in all right with light artillery opposition. But the Japs-for some reason known only to them-waited for the fourth and fifth waves. On them they laid a murderous barrage, both on the reef and on the beaches. A young battalion operations officer who had come by my room and waved, "See you on the beach," had his head blown off just before he reached that beach. "He got it quick," said his best friend...
...Beach. It was shortly after noon when the brigadier general's four amphtracks started ashore from the control boat. The Japs did not start shooting at us until we hit a reef, about 1,000 yards offshore. To our portside a boat had just been hit; its occupants were swimming frantically in every direction, some trying to reach other boats farther out, others heading for shore. Artillery opened up on our four boats-probably 77-mm. guns. It was poor shooting-we made it to the beach...
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...
Japan's 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...