I was recently visiting with an old Marine Corps buddy, Ralph Willis, at his home on California’s central coast.  At 86, he is one of the fortunate few who are still alive to describe their experiences fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II.  Ralph put down some of his memories in My Life as a Jarhead, which caused a local newspaper to send a young reporter to interview him.  She told Ralph that she was eager to hear about his experiences.  Not knowing how much background material the young reporter might need, Ralph asked her if she was well versed in the various Pacific campaigns.  Well, no, she answered, but she had seen Clint Eastwood’s two movies about Iwo Jima.

The realization that those two deeply flawed films were the extent of the reporter’s knowledge of the war in the Pacific made Ralph shudder.  Names such as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Okinawa meant nothing to her.  How different it was a couple of generations ago, when those battles were household names in America.  Now, they are not even recognized by college graduates.

Although most college students today know something about the Japanese sneak attack that got us into the war, few can identify the battle that was “payback” for Pearl Harbor.  It took place at Truk Atoll, whose beautiful, deep-water lagoon provided Japan with her greatest fleet anchorage in the Pacific.  Along with the rest of the Caroline Islands, Truk had been mandated by the Treaty of Versailles to Japan following World War I.  In violation of the treaty, Japan soon closed the Carolines to the outside world and began fortifying key islands, especially the six principal islands of Truk Atoll.  By the time Japan was finished, Truk had become the “Gibraltar of the Pacific.”  The heart of Truk’s lagoon lay 30 miles inside a great barrier reef; any attacking force would have to come by air.  To protect against such an assault, the Japanese had four airstrips operational and some 365 planes at the ready.

Task Force 58, commanded by Adm. Marc Mitscher, included five fleet carriers—Enterprise, Yorktown, Essex, Intrepid, and Bunker Hill—and four light carriers.  There were also enough battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines to push the total of ships involved to more than 60.  Aptly code-named Operation Hailstone, the attack on Truk was launched before dawn on February 17, 1944.  As the first rays of the rising sun reached Truk, 72 Hellcats, led by Lt. Cmdr. William “Killer” Kane, swept down on the islands.  Japanese planes that got off the ground were blown out of the sky by the twos and threes.  Kane and his wingman shot down five Zeros in five minutes before turning their attention to strafing planes on the ground.

“Jap airplanes were burning and falling from every quarter,” said Lt. Cmdr. Ed Owen, “and many were crashing on takeoff as a result of strafing them on the ground.  Ground installations were exploding and burning, and all this in the early golden glow of dawn.  At times it might have been staged for the movies.”

Watching the raid from the ground was Maj. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington.  The leading Marine ace had been shot down and captured six weeks earlier while raiding Rabaul.  Since he was a special prize, he was being transported to Honshu for interrogation and torture.  At the exact moment that the plane carrying Boyington touched down to refuel, Kane and his Hellcat pilots began their attack.  Boyington was hustled off the plane.  The first thing he saw was a Hellcat, only a few dozen feet above the ground, screaming over the airfield, and “spraying .50-calibers all through the Nip aircraft standing there in front of us.”

Wave after wave of American planes continued to strike Truk throughout the day.  The new Hellcats, which had replaced the older and slower Wildcats, and the American pilots proved more than a match for the vaunted Zeros and the Japanese pilots.  Lt.(jg) Alex Vraciu, who had been Butch O’Hare’s wingman, shot down four Japanese planes.  Lt. Robert Duncan, who had a baby back home in Illinois he had not yet seen, also got four.  Lt. Hamilton McWhorter, the first Hellcat ace, Lt.(jg) Tom McCelland, Lt.(jg) Eugene Valencia, and Lt. Armistead Smith got three each.  By the end of the day, U.S. Navy pilots had shot 124 enemy planes out of the sky and destroyed that many again on the ground.

During the night, Mitscher sent specially equipped Avengers to pound Truk.  At the same time, eight of Mitscher’s warships circled the atoll to intercept Japanese ships attempting to escape the carnage in the lagoon.  With the next morning came more American fighter and bomber sweeps.  By noon, there were few targets left to hit.  Sitting on the bottom of the lagoon were 13 Japanese warships and 32 merchant ships.  Another two warships were on the ocean floor just outside the entrance to the lagoon.  Some 275 Japanese planes had been destroyed.  Thousands of Japanese had been killed.  The United States suffered the loss of only 40 men and 25 planes.

The raid rendered the Gibraltar of the Pacific impotent, allowing U.S. forces to bypass the once putatively impregnable base on the way to Tokyo.  As Hellcat pilot Ed Owen later said, “Up ’til that time the Truk raid was ‘the greatest show in town,’ and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”