The second raid on Truk

On 29 and 30 April 1944 aircraft from the twelve carriers of Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s American Task Force 58 attacked Truk for the second time in ten weeks. The atoll had once been the main base of the Japanese fleet in the Caroline Islands. The task force was on its way back from New Guinea, where for several days it had covered the landings at Hollandia and Aitape. On the way to its bases in the Marshall Islands it smashed what was left of the Japanese air strength on Truk, and on 30 April and 1 May its cruisers and battleships also shelled two other Japanese islands in the Carolines: Satawan atoll and the island of Ponape (today Pohnpei).

War chronologies record under 30 April that the US Navy was continuing its raids on the Carolines, including Truk. This is accurate, with one qualification: it was not a series of continuous raids but a single two-day carrier operation (29–30 April), supplemented by the shelling of Satawan (30 April) and Ponape (1 May). Between the great carrier strikes, however, land-based aircraft bombed Truk and the other Caroline islands almost without pause, and in that sense the raids really did “continue”.

Truk after Operation Hailstone

The first great raid, Operation Hailstone of 17–18 February 1944, had destroyed several dozen merchant ships and warships in the Truk lagoon and more than 250 aircraft. The Combined Fleet never returned to the base: its main forces moved to Palau and then further west, to Singapore and the waters off Borneo. Truk was not empty, though. Vice Admiral Chūichi Hara, commander of the Fourth Fleet, ran the atoll as a land base – without ships, but with several airfields, dozens of anti-aircraft batteries and a growing army garrison. The Japanese also brought in new aircraft – some from Rabaul, which they were just abandoning as an air base, some from the home islands – and tried to rebuild Truk as a bomber stronghold that could threaten the American conquests in the Marshall and Admiralty Islands.

The Americans, meanwhile, had decided not to capture Truk at all. A directive of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of 12 March 1944 laid down two parallel lines of advance: General Douglas MacArthur’s forces were to push along the northern coast of New Guinea, starting with Hollandia, while Admiral Chester Nimitz’s fleet was to strike at the Marianas in mid-June and at Palau in September. Truk, like Rabaul, was to be bypassed and “neutralised” – permanently deprived of the ability to do harm. Neutralisation was entrusted chiefly to land-based aircraft, but in April the opportunity arose for a carrier force to do the job once more.

From Hollandia to the Carolines

Task Force 58 sailed from Majuro atoll on 13 April 1944 in three groups. It was the only time in the entire war that the Pacific Fleet’s fast carriers operated in direct support of MacArthur’s troops in New Guinea: Hollandia lay far beyond the range of land-based fighters from Allied bases, so air cover in the first days of the landing had to come from the navy. Between 21 and 24 April Mitscher’s aircraft attacked airfields around Hollandia, Wakde and Sarmi and supported the troops going ashore. Nimitz, however, had agreed to lend the carriers for only a few days. After refuelling at sea the task force turned back north-east towards the Marshall Islands, and since its route passed close to the Carolines, Mitscher was ordered to smash Truk once more on the way.

The forces in this theatre as a whole – the Fifth Fleet, which included Task Force 58 – were commanded by Admiral Raymond Spruance, but tactical direction of the April operation lay with Mitscher. The task force comprised five large carriers (among them USS Lexington, Yorktown, Bunker Hill, Hornet and Enterprise) and seven light carriers, screened by fast battleships, cruisers and several dozen destroyers.

Two days over the lagoon

On the morning of 29 April the first waves of F6F Hellcat fighters arrived over Truk. This time Japanese fighters were waiting for them in the air: after the February disaster the Japanese had reinforced the atoll’s air strength and, by American estimates, once again had more than a hundred aircraft there. Fierce combats broke out above the cloud cover. The official American history of naval aviation describes how two flights of eight Hellcats from the light carrier USS Langley ran into some thirty Japanese fighters and, according to their reports, shot down 21 of them without loss, while eleven Hellcats from the Lexington downed 9 of a dozen or so opponents for the loss of one aircraft. According to Admiral Ernest King’s report to the Secretary of the Navy, Japanese air opposition had been broken by ten o’clock on the morning of 29 April. An attempt by Japanese aircraft to attack the carriers themselves that same day ended with the attackers shot down before they could do any damage.

From then on the raids followed a well-established pattern: successive waves of dive bombers and TBF Avenger torpedo bombers attacked airfields, hangars, fuel and ammunition dumps, workshops, barracks and anti-aircraft positions on the islands of the lagoon. In the lagoon, which in February had teemed with ships, the pilots found only a few small vessels; the Japanese no longer dared to keep a fleet there. According to King’s report, over the two days the carriers flew more than 2,200 combat sorties and dropped some 740 tons of bombs. Truk’s anti-aircraft artillery nevertheless remained strong and accurate, and American losses turned out to be similar to those of February.

The toll, and the rescue of the airmen

King’s report states that the Americans lost 27 aircraft in combat and destroyed 63 Japanese aircraft in the air and at least 60 on the ground. These figures come from American reports, and pilots on both sides exaggerated their successes throughout the war; there is no doubt, however, that the air strength on Truk was broken once again and could not threaten American operations for months to come. On top of the combat losses came aircraft lost in accidents during take-off and landing on the flight decks.

The second raid on Truk is remembered in US Navy history above all for the rescue of downed airmen. Near the atoll the submarine USS Tang under Lieutenant Commander Richard O’Kane stood by on “lifeguard duty”. Throughout the raid and for a day afterwards, often within range of Japanese coastal batteries, she plucked from the sea the crews of downed aircraft who had managed to ditch or bail out. She was helped by OS2U Kingfisher floatplanes from the battleships. One of them, from USS North Carolina, flown by Lieutenant John Burns, landed near the reef and picked up several men from their life rafts; when the overloaded aircraft could no longer take off, he taxied to the submarine with the men sitting on the wings. In all, Tang rescued 22 airmen and took them to Pearl Harbor. Submarines had stood lifeguard duty before, but so successful a rescue entrenched the practice: in later great raids in the Pacific, rescue submarines and floatplanes were almost always waiting near the target, and the knowledge that a downed airman had a chance of being saved raised aircrews’ morale.

Not everyone was so lucky. Some of the airmen shot down over Truk in 1944 were taken prisoner, and some of them did not survive captivity. After the war an American military tribunal on Guam convicted Vice Admiral Hara and other officers from Truk for allowing the execution of prisoners – US Navy airmen.

Satawan and Ponape

The raid on Truk did not end the operation. On 30 April a group of heavy cruisers with a destroyer escort, covered by aircraft from Rear Admiral Joseph Clark’s carrier group (the same group covered the shelling of Ponape the next day), bombarded Satawan for more than two hours. Satawan is an atoll in the Mortlock Islands, about 250 kilometres south-east of Truk, where the Japanese were building an airfield. King’s report admits that the installations there were of little importance and that the bombardment was intended mainly to hamper the development of the base and to give the ships’ crews practice ahead of the great landings to come. On 1 May Vice Admiral Willis Lee’s fast battleships and their destroyers, on their way back from Truk, shelled Ponape – the largest island of the eastern Carolines, with an airfield and a seaplane base – for 80 minutes. The only reply was anti-aircraft fire. This was the last act of the April expedition; the task force then put into its bases in the Marshall Islands to prepare for the operation against the Marianas.

Between the great carrier strikes, Truk, Ponape and Satawan were bombed regularly by four-engined Liberators – army aircraft of the Thirteenth Air Force operating from bases to the south, and navy and Seventh Air Force aircraft from the newly captured Marshall Islands, including Kwajalein and Eniwetok. After the capture of the Admiralty Islands in March 1944, bombers from the airfields there could also reach the Carolines. Their frequent raids prevented the Japanese from repairing the damage.

Place in the war

The second raid on Truk was – in the words of the official American history of naval aviation – an “anticlimactic” strike: the fortress that only six months earlier had been regarded as Japan’s “Gibraltar of the Pacific” was no longer able to pose a serious threat to the American fleet. The operation vindicated the decision to bypass Truk. Instead of a costly landing on the heavily defended islands of the lagoon, it was enough to smash the rebuilt air strength from time to time and leave the rest to land-based bombers and the blockade. For Mitscher and his crews it was also the last great rehearsal before the decisive campaign: the April expedition was the last raid by the whole of Task Force 58 before the invasion of the Marianas.

In the west, MacArthur’s offensive, which thanks to Hollandia had leapt several hundred kilometres along the New Guinea coast, could press on without fear of a blow from the Carolines. In the central Pacific the road to the Marianas – which American carriers had reconnoitred and attacked for the first time in February – lay open. In May 1944 one carrier group also attacked Marcus and Wake islands, and on 15 June the Marines landed on Saipan, provoking the Japanese fleet into the Battle of the Philippine Sea (19–20 June), which ended in the defeat of Japanese carrier aviation. In those same weeks, on the other side of the world, the Allies were completing their preparations for the invasion of Normandy.

Truk remained in Japanese hands until the end of the war, but only as an isolated garrison. After the loss of the Marianas and Palau, supplies almost ceased; soldiers and sailors grew vegetables on the islands of the lagoon, suffered from malnutrition and disease, and from time to time endured further raids – by American bombers, including the first B-29s, and in June 1945 also by British carriers and cruisers practising before planned operations off the coast of Japan. The garrison, by then some 24,000 strong, surrendered on 2 September 1945 aboard the American cruiser USS Portland, on the same day that the Japanese instrument of surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay.