Word: jap
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Night after night, Jap planes came down from Luzon to pock the airfields around San Jose; night after night U.S. ack-ack and Black Widow night fighters took a heavy toll. Day after day U.S. bombers roared over enemy-occupied bases on Luzon, destroying 144 planes in three days. It was an aerial war of attrition, before the next push could begin...
Last week, a big U.S. convoy (the Jap said 30 transports and 20 escorting cruisers and destroyers) ploughed through three days of enemy air attacks in the Mindanao and Sulu Seas. At first the jittery Japs feared it might be headed for Luzon, but the convoy put in at Mindoro. The buildup was proceeding along with the attrition. Soon enough Luzon would be the target for other convoys...
Starved of gasoline and everything else that an air force needs, because it all had to be flown over the Hump, the 20th Bomber Command in China and India had run up, by year's end, a tally of 23 assaults on Japan and Jap arsenals in Asia. The bombs dropped totaled about 5,000 tons-no more than a single major R.A.F. strike over Europe's shorter hauls. But in those tentative stabs, the Superfort flyers had learned to know their planes-and the Japs' defenses...
...deputy commander of the worldwide Twentieth Air Force and as commander, Strategic Air Forces, Pacific Ocean Areas. For the present, he had to use his 6-243 (and occasionally some of his precious 6-295) to keep hammering at Sulphur Island (Iwo Jima) in the Volcano group, whence Jap fighters took off to harry 6-295 bombing Honshu, and whence Jap bombers took off to bomb the Superfort base at Saipan.* Later, when bases nearer to Japan had been won, Harmon could use 8-24 Liberators alongside their bigger cousins against the enemy homeland...
Harmon had no illusions about the task ahead. Said he at his Western Pacific headquarters: "This is no Gilbert-&-Sullivan war out here. . . . No one gives the Jap credit for being a resourceful enemy except those who have to fight him. . . . We expect that Japan will be on her feet and fighting...