Word: ryukyu
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...more steps were taken last week to unravel the Pacific command situation. Army air forces on Okinawa and other Ryukyu bases were transferred from the command of Admiral Nimitz to General MacArthur...
...Wreckers. Little known to the U.S. public, but greatly feared by Jap shipmasters, are the fleet air wings, which the Navy calls "Fairwings" for short. Fairwing 1 and Fairwing 18 have been based in the Ryukyu Islands since early April. Fairwing 1, under veteran seaplaner Rear Admiral John Dale Price, has sunk or damaged more than 200,000 tons of shipping in Korean waters. Fairwing 18, skippered by Rear Admiral Marshall Raymond Greer (onetime shipmate of Price in the old battleship North Dakota), has operated farther east, where the hunting was not so good, but sometimes it has flown over...
...kind the burrowing Japs like. Among the ridges, spurs, knobs and gullies were innumerable caves and underground passages, to which the Japs added their own dugouts and pillboxes. In one tunnel they had laid narrow-gauge rails to move artillery. They moved into the stone tombs in which Ryukyu Islanders bury their dead, and reinforced them with concrete...
...bolt position in the center of their line, the Japs had the ancient citadel of Shuri, visited by Commodore Perry in 1853. In Shuri castle, biggest and stoutest structure on the island, the Ryukyu kings had lived before the Japs took over, a quarter-century after Perry's visit. Last week a U.S. battleship scored 25 direct hits on the castle, but the shells bounced off, said an observer, like "rubber balls...
Initial Gains. Buckner's first target turned out to be Okinawa, central and largest island in the Ryukyu chain stretching from Japan to Formosa. There Admiral Nimitz mounted an amphibious operation, surpassed only by those of Sicily and Normandy, to hurl the troops ashore. And by week's end Buckner knew that his Tenth had caught the Japanese by surprise and had scored a smashing initial success...