Year of Attack

Year of Attack (See Cover)

The little half-naked man on Wotje would not be surprised at the sight of the birds sweeping up from the horizon. For 22 successive days the birds had come, scattering destruction around his coral fortress. But these were new birds, smaller, wheeling towards him in greater swarms, coming down on him in screaming dives. Before the Emperor's little man burrowed frantically into his coconut and concrete pillbox he would comprehend that the enemy was moving into his Marshall Islands domain for the kill.

The new birds had arrived in the morning. On nearby Kwajalein, Jaluit, Maloelap, little bandy-legged men squinted at the Pacific sky and ran for cover. Even over the island of Eniwetok, furthest west of all the Marshalls, the carrier-based planes arrived (see map, p. 19). The atolls shuddered under the impact of bomb upon bursting bomb and presently the screech and clump of shells added to the din and terror. Out of sight, over the horizon, surface ships had joined the carriers and were bringing the little men's islands under naval gunfire. Long awaited, long expected, the U.S. attack on the Marshalls was developing (Tokyo hinted that U.S. forces had landed at some points).

Two months ago a U.S. force of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, tranports had pounced on the Gilberts, some 500 miles to the south. Then, 2,500 tons of steel had been poured on to the pillboxes and revetments to soften beaches for an amphibious invasion. Even when troops arrived, the defenses were still very hard: Jap resistance to the landings was ferocious, the cost in U.S. lives high. The Marshalls, held by the Japs for a quarter of a century, for years jealously guarded from alien visitors, were an unknown quantity. Involved this week was probably the greatest sea and air force the U.S. has yet concentrated on any Pacific objectives.

Paramushiro to the Solomons. Eyes fixed hardest on the Marshalls, Tokyo looked nervously around her whole Pacific frontier. Simultaneously with the Marshalls attack bombers struck at Wake 750 miles to the north and on the edge of the Jap's mid-Pacific system. Navy bombers had struck twice at Paramushiro in the Kuril Islands. In New Guinea, U.S. and Australian troops were closing a trap around one Jap force while bombers at tacked the coastal base of Madang. U.S. troops on New Britain had widened their beachhead and Douglas MacArthur's planes steadily attacked the Admiralty Islands, through which Japan fed the axial base at Rabaul. From new bases in the northern Solomons U.S. planes battered that once-great Jap outpost, destroyed more than 400 Jap planes. Announced U.S. losses: 60 planes.

Submarines, operating in the China Sea, hacked at the lifelines which carried coking coal from Indo-China, oil from the East Indies, materials which the Emperor's war machine must have or stall. Washington announced this week that 14 more Jap ships, including three transports, had fallen victim to the raiders, bringing the submarine score against Jap ships to 422 definitely destroyed.

The Commanders. Directing this spreading, rising effort was Admiral Chester William Nimitz at Pearl Harbor. Key men in Nimitz' command are men like him -- hardheaded and cool:

Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance, chief of the recently created Central Pacific Command; Vice Admiral J. H. Hoover and his opposite number, Major General Willis Henry Hale, chiefs respectively of landbased Navy and Army aircraft; Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who directs Spruance's amphibious operations; Marine Major General Holland Smith, boss of the Marine and Army troops that Turner puts ashore.

Raymond Ames Spruance, a taciturn, 57-year-old Hoosier, commands the great fleet which began blasting its way last week into the Marshalls. In the estimate of one of his superiors Spruance is a "coldblooded, fighting fool." It is his carriers, capital ships, cruisers, destroyers which pour the steel into Jap installations, kindling the hot little islands, softening them up for the crawling crocodile fleet of landing boats.

Commanding the crocodiles is the man sometimes known as "Terrible" Turner.

Mahan to Pearl Harbor. Early in 1942, when it became evident to the U.S. Navy that it was going to have to fight an island-to-island war in the Pacific (TIME, Jan. 31), Richmond Kelly Turner was picked to go to the Solomons and boss amphibious operations. He was chosen, among other reasons, because of his versatility.

His career was typical of most of the Navy's two-star admirals, the middle-aged veterans of 30-odd years in the Navy who boss the task forces and hold down air force and base commands.

Oregon-born, California-bred, Turner graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908, fifth in his class. He took a post graduate course in ordnance engineering and served during World War I aboard battleships which never saw action.

After the war he turned again to learning and won his wings at Pensacola. After a tour as commander of aircraft squadrons in the Asiatic Fleet, he became technical adviser on naval aviation to the U.S. delegation at the abortive Geneva Conference.

He saw Japan go home to arm for war. In 1939, as skipper of the Astoria, he carried the ashes of Ambassador Hirosi Saito back to the land of his ancestors. At the time the Japanese said that they deeply appreciated the gesture.

Mean Man. Turner's gaunt face and his high dome give him the look of a parson. On leave before the war, he used to live with his wife and his Lhasa terriers at their comfortable Carmel, Calif, home, playing golf, fishing, talking incessantly, growing roses, reading Conrad through gold-rimmed spectacles and dreaming of the day when he would retire and take a round-the-world cruise aboard a freighter. To his colleagues (who know how to use monosyllables respectfully) he is known as "a mean son-of-a-bitch."

Like his top superior, the U.S. Fleet's Commander in Chief Admiral Ernest J. King, he is impatient of failure, abrasive as a file. Men remember that the ships he ran were "taut" rather than "happy." His self-confidence approaches arrogance.

The Amphibians. He needed all his self-confidence for the Solomons job. As many another middle-aged veteran was doing in the middle of a revolution in naval warfare, Turner had to write the rules as he went along. He drew his black, sardonic eyebrows down over his harsh blue eyes and went to work.

He landed the Marines who seized Guadalcanal. Despite disastrous naval losses for which Turner must be held partly to blame, he was awarded the D.S.M. and the Navy Cross. He collapsed with malaria and dengue fever. Still grey with sickness, he set up headquarters on Guadalcanal preparatory to the New Georgia invasion. "Terrible" Turner's bridge was a jungle clearing marked by a wooden sign: "U.S.S. Crocodile--Flagship-- Amphibious Forces South Pacific." Under the scorching tropic sun, amidst the quack of bena birds and the coo of kura kura pigeons, dressed in khaki pants and shirt, he taught the new amphibious doctrine, which he was learning himself, to the officers under his heterogeneous command: air officers, marine colonels, brigadier generals, destroyer captains, PT commanders, crusty transport skippers.

Preached this old-line Navy man: "The fellow we are working for is the fellow that walks on the ground. Whatever we are doing we are doing solely to get that boy on the beach." Cooperation was his passionate credo. More than any other man in the Pacific he was charged with combining all operations into one fast, striking force.

He directed the landing on Rendova from his flagship the McCawley (nicknamed the "Wacky Mack" on account of previous unorthodox exploits). Turner was not the man to run an operation by remote control. In crowded Rendova Harbor the Wacky Mack was hit and knocked out by Jap aircraft. Turner and his staff abandoned the slowly foundering ship, crawled over landing nets into a destroyer, dangling their uniforms on clothes hangers. But he got "that boy" on the beach without the loss of a single life. When it was over he commented sarcastically: "If you go in and can't handle the situation you move too fast. If you go in and encounter no opposition you move too late." The vociferous Turner was transferred to the Central Pacific for bigger jobs.

The first of those jobs was the Gilberts. The next, as the world was learning this week, was the Marshalls. When the story is all in, the U.S. can judge how much Terrible Turner has learned himself, how well he has put over his preachments. On the success of the Marshalls onslaught will depend the future of Kelly Turner and the Pacific.

Said Turner's boss, Ernest King: "1944, our year of attack, has just begun."

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