Reaching Out

The long arm of the U.S. Air Forces reached out last week and struck the Japanese twice.

> Surabaya, on the island of Java, was not sleeping. Lights glittered along the waterfront, indicating that the Jap was making full use of this great shipping and naval base he had torn from the Dutch. Out of the dawn swept a formation of Liberator bombers, their exhausts glowing red. For 70 minutes they "buzzed" the city, bombing warehouses, railroads, docks. Most important target was the big oil refinery. As the bombers winged homeward to their Australian base, flames from the refinery could be seen for 140 miles. It was the longest raid of the Pacific war--2,400 miles round trip.

> Three days earlier, U.S. bombers, skirting the Aleutian fogs, smashed at the strong Japanese home base of Paramoshiri, in the Kurile Islands. As the planes circled the rocky island, they saw an antique fortress, a square mile of modern military installations, a ship-filled harbor. The bomb bays opened. Fires flared up throughout the area, near hits were scored on harbor shipping. The raiders took nearly 200 photographs.

Commenting on the Paramoshiri raid, the commander of the U.S. bomber groups in China, Colonel Eugene Beebe, said "They ain't seen nothing yet."

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