Word: saipan
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...Saipan had already become the bastion for attack on Japan (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). From Guam, 128 miles south, New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Bert Andrews cabled: "It would be helpful if the home-held picture of Guam as a tiny Pacific 'pin point' were dispelled." Through heaviest censorship he slipped a general's quote: "This will be another Pearl Harbor...
Leading his battalion of the 8th Marines into another beachhead landing-at Saipan last June - 6-ft, 200-lb. Lieut. Colonel Henry Pierson Crowe came about as near to getting killed as a man could, and still live. First a Jap bullet pierced his left lung, not far from his heart. Then he was almost killed by one of his own men who mistook him for a Jap. Just as the man was aiming, Jim Crowe raised his head feebly, identified himself by twirling his famed red mustache. Finally dragged back to a shell hole in the sand near...
Under these ace-race handicaps, 34-year-old David McCampbell, an elderly airman as fighter pilots go, failed to bag a single Jap until he reached Saipan last June. Then he had still another handicap: he was promoted to group commander. i.e., battle boss of all the planes of one carrier, and had to direct dive bombers and torpedo planes as well as his fighters. But the Pacific war was moving west and the carriers were closing on the enemy. McCampbell's fighter squadron, which had not yet downed a single Jap, was getting set to start scoring...
...Japs' home air forces, staging in the Bonins, turned on a flurry of attack, bombed new U.S. airfields on Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas. But this preventive did not prevent another scare: three days later the U.S. reconnaissance planes were back over Tokyo. The Japs, who had been panicked by Jimmy Doolittle's token raid in 1942, were in a dither again, even before the first B-29 raid on Tokyo had been staged...
Pale, intent men lay on white cots in the San Diego Naval Hospital last week listening with radio headsets to the news from the Pacific. They were casualties of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Palau, and they understood the cost of victory. They were armless, legless, diseased, blind. They knew that more would join them...