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Victory at sea pacific ship list8/31/2023 While ground forces continued to clean up enemy stragglers, General Kenney’s air units began to carry out almost daily attacks on enemy concentrations farther up the New Guinea coast. It cost the enemy about 300,000 tons of shipping sunk or damaged and scores of planes destroyed by Fifth Air Force bombers and fighters. Enemy convoys from there had tried to relieve Buna, but it finally fell to Allied ground forces in January 1943. However, the Japanese wanted the base back in operation and staged their main forces from Rabaul on the Bismarck Sea coast off New Britain, 500 air miles from Port Moresby. It had cost him around seventy-five planes, and he decided that it was too expensive.” Before long, he tired of the game and didn’t bother to fill in the holes on the runway. He replaced his airplanes, and we promptly shot them out of the air or burned them on the ground. The kept filling up the bomb craters, and we kept making new ones. In between times, heavies, mediums, and light bombers dug holes in his runways, battered down his revetments, burned up his stores, and strafed his personnel. If he did not come up, we strafed him on the ground. Kenney, commanding general of Allied Air Forces in the southwest Pacific, explained what happened there. Buna, across the Owen Stanley Range, about 100 miles northeast of Port Moresby, was a worrisome enemy base and had to be neutralized first. In late February 1943, when Japanese ships attempted to reinforce and resupply their New Guinea garrisons, they had to be attacked and stopped if the Allies were to have a chance to carry out MacArthur’s bypass strategy. Allied forces operated from Port Moresby on the south side of the giant island to prevent Japanese forces from moving closer to Australia. No Allied naval presence existed, and Allied airpower was to weak to halt Japan’s warships. First, however, the Allies had to deal with Japanese forces on New Guinea.įrom March 1942 to January 1943, the Japanese had been able to send convoys from Rabaul, on New Britain, across the Bismarck Sea to New Guinea with few losses. Douglas MacArthur’s “island-hopping” strategy. The three-day battle had its origins in the US plan to take the initiative from Japan and push the network of Allied air bases away from Australia toward Japanese-dominated areas–Gen. However, it was to be the scene of a major victory for landbased aircraft over warships–one that would have made Billy Mitchell, the old champion of airpower, very proud. Few Americans had ever heard of it or knew where it was.
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