Word: toeholds
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...with 35 bombers and 30 fighters. Twelve were shot down at a cost of only two U.S. fighters. The Marines managed to enlarge their three-by-six-mile territory on 25-by-80-mile Guadalcanal. At night the Jap landed more reinforcements on either side of the Marines' toehold. The Navy brought up a task force in an attempt to stop these landings; it sank a Jap cruiser, four destroyers and a transport, lost only one destroyer...
Closer & Closer. Early in the morning of Oct. 15 the Jap swept past little Savo Island, was able to make daylight landings for the first time on the northwest tip of Guadalcanal, only 15 miles from the Marines' toehold. He paid heavily. Haggard American flyers hit a battleship, fired three transports that still burned late that afternoon. But the Jap still came. He lost 17 more planes in one attack on Henderson Field. At week's end the Jap landed artillery and brought it close enough to shell U.S. positions, now under attack from land...
North from Tulagi lie Jap bases which the U.S. and Australian forces will need soon to clean out: all the airdromes, troop centers and anchorages in the upper Solomons, within easy range of the Marines' southern toehold. The job even then would not be finished. For the Japs' great concentration point at Rabaul in New Britain would still be dangerously close-660 miles from Tulagi, 200 from Bougainville. The Japs would even then still be in upper New Guinea, a scant 350 miles from Rabaul. Above Port Moresby last week, an Australian force (with some U.S. troops...
...United Nations command hung grimly to its toehold on the near side of the vast island of New Guinea (one-tenth the area of the U.S.) and strove to shake loose the hold of the Jap on the other side. The Jap bounced right back, raided the Allies' New Guinea base at Port Moresby almost daily...
...enemy banged hardest at MacArthur's right flank, apparently to grab a toehold on the highway leading south on Bataan's east shore. He was hurled back with heavy losses. Meanwhile he stabbed tentatively through the mountains on the west shore, and near week's end he reported landing seaborne forces on Subic Bay. If he was telling the truth nothing immediately came of it. Douglas MacArthur was able to report that "enemy pressure ... in the Bataan peninsula has lessened...