Word: peninsula
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Target: a Peninsula. As the General's ships took on the cargo of invasion, the General's planes droned over the sea. For a fortnight they had pounded the southwest end of the long (300 miles), thin (60 miles at the widest), scimitar-shaped, jungle-covered, volcano-studded island that was once a German colony, then an Australian mandate until captured by the Japs...
...they headed for the Arawe peninsula, an isle-screened knob on New Britain's coast between Cape Gloucester and Gasmata. There they dropped 356 tons of explosive-a Southwest Pacific record. That night the invasion fleet moved...
...first landing was made. But the Japs were not prepared for so strong an attack at a spot so lightly defended and so difficult to reinforce. General Cunningham's plan called for a diversionary landing by Sixth Army units on "Blue Beach" at the top of the peninsula, then the main landing on "Orange Beach" at the foot...
Nowhere, save at Blue Beach, did the Sixth Army encounter the defenses or the bloody kind of resistance found at Munda and Tarawa. Its casualties were light. It quickly dispersed a numerically weak Jap garrison. Within five hours it had made good the landing. The Arawe peninsula and its key coastal isles were taken. The mopping up was not completed when U.S. troops began to enlarge their beachhead...
...Aussies, moving slowly over a peninsula as big as Connecticut, had support from Allied air and sea arms. The New Britain shore nearest New Guinea took a sustained bombing. Madang, the feeder base for the Jap Huon line and 200 miles up the coast from Finschhaven, took a night shelling from U.S. warships. Gasmata, a New Britain stronghold, got a similar dose of gunfire. In both actions, U.S. vessels penetrated waters that had been Jap preserves since early 1942, had seldom smelled the powder of the U.S. Navy...