THE HAILSTONE MASSACRE 1944: 4,500 Japanese DEAD and The Mightiest Base ERASED in 48 Hours

Añadido: 2026-05-07

[00:00:03]Before daylight on February 17th, 1944, the Japanese radar operators at truck were watching a clear screen. 72 Hellcat fighters were already airborne, crossing the ocean at low altitude, below the detection threshold of the radar those operators trusted. They had been flying for nearly an hour. The screen stayed clear. No alert went out. No order reached the five airfields where Japan's carrier aviators were sleeping on shore.

[00:00:32]48 hours later, 4,500 of those sailors and airmen were dead. 50 ships sat on the lagoon floor. 250 aircraft had been destroyed. Five fleet tankers, the fuel supply on which every Japanese naval operation in the central Pacific depended, were gone. The United States lost 35 men and 25 aircraft. Admiral Chester Nimttz closed his assessment of the operation in one sentence. The Pacific Fleet had returned at truck the visit the Japanese fleet had made to Pearl Harbor. 1,250 sorties across 2 days. 200,000 tons of shipping destroyed. 75% of all supplies on the island obliterated. 17,000 tons of refined fuel burning on the surface of the lagoon. the first carrier launched night strike in the history of naval warfare. And 7,500 Japanese soldiers, still armed, still in their defensive positions, waiting for an amphibious landing that would never come, cut off from the war for 16 months until it ended without them. But the 48 hours that destroyed Truk had their origin not in February, but in the evening before, when the commander of Japan's fourth fleet made the decision that cost him his career and cost Japan its strongest position in the Pacific.

[00:01:53]The base the Hellcats found was not a fortress. It was a fleet at anchor and an air force on the ground exposed to an attack their radar was not built to detect.

[00:02:02]The specific failure was Kobayashi's. On the night of February 16th, his air crews had been on sustained alert for weeks after reconnaissance flights were spotted. He stood them down. They went to shore. At dawn, 72 Hellcats arrived under the radar ceiling and the air defense of the most powerful Japanese base in the Pacific was asleep. Truck Lagoon at sunrise on February 17th. The aircraft parked exactly where they had been left the night before. Mechanics beginning their morning work. pilots running from their barracks toward the airfields when the sound of engines made them understand what was coming. 30 aircraft burning on the ground before a single defending plane reached altitude.

[00:02:44]Those 48 hours did more than destroy a base. They opened the passage to the Maranas. Without troop functioning, the invasion of Saipan required no preliminary campaign to reduce its air threat. Saipan fell in June. The Turkey shoot happened in June. American heavy bombers had runways within range of the Japanese home islands by November. The sequence that ended the Pacific War in August of 1945 begins in a lagoon in the Caroline Islands in February of 1944.

[00:03:15]The fortress fell. I spent 8 hours writing, editing, and researching this story to verify every number and account for every decision because Operation Hailstone is the event that most directly unlocked the final year of the war in the Pacific. And the men who flew these missions and died defending this base deserve a precise accounting of what their actions produced. If this matters to you, subscribe to the channel. Just subscribe. That is all I ask. Thank you. Truck was a product of geography and 30 years of Japanese military planning. The atole sits in the Caroline Islands roughly equidistant between Enuetto to the northeast and Rabbal to the southeast. a position that made it the natural center of any naval operation in the central Pacific. The lagoon itself formed from a submerged volcanic caldera. 40 miles of enclosed water deep enough for the largest warships Japan possessed, ringed by a coral barrier that naval guns firing from outside the reef could never breach. The Japanese had recognized this geography before the war and had been converting it into military infrastructure since 1939. By February of 1944, the installation had five operational airfields capable of hosting 3 to 400 aircraft at a time, a sea plane facility, ship repair capacity sufficient for fleet level work, fuel storage running into the tens of thousands of tons, and ammunition and supply depots serving every Japanese operation in the central and south Pacific. The garrison numbered 7,500 army troops and several thousand additional Navy personnel. The anti-aircraft defenses included more than 40 heavy guns, though a crucial component was missing. The fire control radar intended to direct those guns had gone down with a transport sunk by an American submarine months before the raid and had never been replaced. The strategic function of TR went beyond what the inventory of guns and airfields suggests. Every Japanese naval operation that mattered in the first two years of the Pacific War had passed through this lagoon. Ships bound for Guadal Canal, for the Solomons, for the Gilbert Islands took on fuel and provisions here. The tankers that kept the combined fleet mobile were based here or transited regularly. When American submarines began cutting Japanese shipping routes in 1942 and 1943, TR became the point where convoys formed under air protection before dispersing into open ocean. Remove it from the map and thousands of miles of sealane became exposed with no sheltered harbor between Japan's home waters and the resource territories of the south. Japan understood this. American planners understood it too, which is why two years of Pacific strategy had treated the base as effectively offlimits. A direct amphibious assault against a defended garrison in mountainous terrain would have cost more than any realistic strategic gain justified. Tr was left alone, and its reputation for impregnability grew with every month it was not attacked. The instrument that changed this calculation was Vice Admiral Mark Mitchell's Task Force 58.

[00:06:28]Task Force 58 had been built by American shipyards over 2 years of sustained production and assembled into a formation the Pacific War had not previously seen. Three carrier task groups, Enterprise, Yorktown, and Bellow Wood in the first, Essex, Intrepid, and Kat in the second, Bunker Hill, Mterrey, and Cowpens in the third. Six fast battleships, 10 cruisers, more than 20 destroyers, 569 aircraft distributed across nine flight decks, the capacity to project that air power over any target within range and sustain operations indefinitely. The design of this force addressed the specific problem Truck had always posed. Truck could defend against land-based air attack because a land-based campaign would require weeks of preparation and would announce its intentions long in advance. It could defend against surface attack because the reef made it physically inaccessible to naval gunfire. It could not defend against nine carriers appearing within strike range without warning because the defensive theory had never included that possibility. One piece of intelligence shaped what Hailstone would encounter when it arrived. Admiral Minishi Koger, commanding the combined fleet, had recognized that troops vulnerability was increasing as American carrier capability grew. When American reconnaissance aircraft appeared over the lagoon in early February, Koga moved his heavy units out. The Yamato and the Mousashi, the largest warships in the world, left for Palao, 1,200 m to the west. So did the fleet carriers and the heavy cruisers. They would not return.

[00:08:05]What remained were the logistical vessels, tankers, transports, auxiliary cruisers, submarine support ships. The supply chain infrastructure without which the warships Koga evacuated could not have operated. From a military perspective, removing the battleships made TR look less dangerous. From a strategic perspective, the ships that stayed were the more valuable target.

[00:08:29]Warships can be replaced. The fuel they carry and the supply network that distributes it takes years to rebuild.

[00:08:37]Kobayashi knew that American aircraft had been watching. He responded by placing his air crews on elevated alert, a decision that was correct and that he maintained too long. By the time he stood them down on the night of February 16th, his pilots had been at heightened readiness for weeks, and the coming day had not yet shown itself as different from the preceding ones. They went to shore. The carriers of Task Force 58 were already at sea closing. What Kobayashi could not have known because the intelligence did not reach him in time was that the force approaching was not the kind of force Troo's defenses had been designed to stop. American strike planning had evolved through two years of Pacific operations into something qualitatively different from the land-based air campaign that Tr's defensive theory had always assumed would precede any attack. A land-based air campaign required weeks of buildup at forward bases, consumed enormous logistical resources, and announced its intentions through the simple fact of the preparations. It gave defenders time to disperse their aircraft and prepare their anti-aircraft batteries for sustained engagement. Nine fleet carriers appearing at range overnight gave no such warning. They required no forward base. They consumed no local logistics. They gave Kobayashi the specific minimum of notice that fast carrier operations were designed to give. None at all before the first aircraft crossed the radar horizon and whatever the radar system could provide after that, which in this case was nothing because the radar system could not see aircraft flying where the Hellcats flew. American strike doctrine against defended targets had been refined by two years of Pacific combat into a sequence that the Hellcat sweep at truck would follow precisely.

[00:10:23]Fighters went first before the bombers to eliminate defending aircraft before they could organize. The Hellcats departed in darkness, flew at low altitude to stay under the radar ceiling that troops defenders were relying on, and arrived over five airfields at dawn.

[00:10:39]The channel will carry the complete account of what those Hellcats found at first light, what happened to the ships trapped inside the lagoon over those two days, and why the five tankers that sank on the first day mattered more to the outcome of the Pacific War than any warship that went down anywhere in the operation. Subscribe so you do not miss it. At first light on February 17th, the Hellcat pilots found exactly what Kobayashi's decision the previous evening had produced. Five airfields with aircraft in their overnight positions. Ground personnel in the middle of morning routines. Defending pilots either running from their quarters or not yet moving. The few Japanese aircraft airborne were on routine patrol and had no warning of what was coming until the Hellcats were already among them. Within the first hour, 30 aircraft were destroyed on the ground or shot down in the air. Japanese pilots who reached their planes found themselves in turning engagements with American fighter pilots who had been in combat for 18 months, trained by men who had already survived the Zero and knew exactly what it could and could not do.

[00:11:44]The first hour was not a contested engagement. It was a clearing operation.

[00:11:48]The bombers followed into a sky where the organized air defense had ceased to function. Their targets were the ships.

[00:11:55]The lagoon that had protected those ships from naval gunfire became the enclosure that denied them escape. The narrow passage through the reef that let them enter was now controlled by American aircraft. Ships attempting to exit the lagoon under air attack had to pass through that passage, and Mitcher had positioned surface vessels outside the reef to intercept anything that made it through.

[00:12:18]Vice Admiral Raymon Spruent's task group 50.9 circumnavigated the atal ensuring the perimeter was closed. The light cruisers Corey and Naka were caught in open water and sunk. The destroyer Mikazi trying to escort the Naka toward the passage was destroyed by the same surface force waiting outside. Three additional destroyers went down before the day ended. The submarine support vessels that had been servicing Japan's undersea campaign from Tru were found at their moorings and destroyed. The auxiliary cruiser Aikoku Maru was struck by an Avenger torpedo at approximately midday. The weapon reached her forward magazine. The explosion that followed was the largest single detonation of the operation visible across the lagoon felt in ships miles away. The Aikoku Maru did not sink. She ceased to exist in her previous form. Most of her crew died with the explosion. The five fleet tankers went down before the day ended.

[00:13:18]Japan's capacity to conduct naval operations had been constrained since 1942 by a tanker shortage that American submarine operations were deepening each month. The southern oil fields produced the refined petroleum that kept the combined fleet moving. But the ships transporting it north were being eliminated at a rate Japan's construction industry could not reverse.

[00:13:41]Each tanker lost was a permanent reduction in the systems capacity because building replacements required time that operational demands did not allow. The five tankers anchored in Truck Lagoon on the morning of February 17th carried no weapons and posed no military threat. They carried fuel. That fuel was the reason the battleships and carriers and cruisers of the combined fleet could leave port at all. By the time the last of them sank, 17,000 tons of refined petroleum were burning on the surface of the water, the light from the fire visible to the American ships outside the reef. The column of smoke rising high enough to serve as a navigation marker for the following morning strikes. The ammunition stores in the shore facilities caught fire in secondary explosions and detonated through the night. The airfield runways cratered in the second phase of the day's attacks stayed cratered. By dawn on February 18th, the military function troop had served for 5 years was over.

[00:14:43]The garrison was still there. The anti-aircraft guns still fired at everything within range. Japanese aircraft that had been dispersed to outlying fields before the attack launched night sorties against the American carriers. Small formations feeling their way through the darkness toward Task Force 58. One found the USS Intrepid. A single torpedo struck the carrier at 9:00 in the evening, killing 11 sailors and damaging her steering gear. Intrepid withdrew and did not return to operations until August. The pilot who put that torpedo into an American fleet carrier at night against a defended formation after spending 12 hours watching his base burn represents a quality that made the Pacific War as costly as it was. Even when the strategic conclusion had been reached, even when the outcome beyond a specific engagement was no longer in doubt, the men on the losing side kept pressing their attacks. That is worth noting before moving to the numbers. The numbers from two days, 1,250 combat sorties, 400 tons of ordinance against shipping, 94 tons against shore targets, 250 to 275 Japanese aircraft destroyed, two light cruisers, four destroyers, two submarine support ships, three auxiliary cruisers, 16 naval transports, five tankers, and 32 additional merchant vessels sent to the bottom. 4,500 Japanese dead. When the second day strikes concluded and the last damaged ship inside the lagoon had been accounted for, task force 58 turned east toward open water. Aircraft that had been over troop within the hour were being respotted for the next operation.

[00:16:27]Air crew who had been over truck since dawn were below decks resting. The task force had been designed for exactly this kind of sustained offensive tempo, and it was continuing without pause. Already positioning for any wettok whose invasion had been underway simultaneously during the troop strikes.

[00:16:43]The smoke column from the burning fuel and ammunition was still visible from 40 mi out. The garrison of 7,500 soldiers was still in their fortified positions inside the reef. The reef was still 30 mi across. Everything that had made Truck look impregnable from the outside was still in place. The war had simply moved past it. 7,500 men, still armed, still in the tunnel networks and fortified positions the Japanese had spent years carving into the central island's volcanic rock, still manning the coastal artillery that had been built to stop an amphibious landing.

[00:17:21]None of that preparation would now be used for its intended purpose. The American decision not to assault troop directly had been made in advance of the operation confirmed by the operation's success. An attack against defenders of that number in mountainous terrain with established positions and functioning heavy artillery would have been costly beyond any strategic return. The Americans did not need the island. They needed it to stop working against them.

[00:17:48]Two days of carrier aviation had accomplished that. What remained was a problem in logistics and time. The garrison would need food, medicine, and ammunition continuously to remain effective. When those supplies stopped arriving, effectiveness would decline.

[00:18:04]It would decline further as tropical disease moved through a population weakened by inadequate nutrition. The garrison would not be destroyed. It would be starved of purpose and sustenance until it had no function left to serve, and then the war would be over before anyone needed to deal with it directly. That is what happened.

[00:18:24]16 months after Hailstone in September of 1945, an American ship arrived at Tru to accept the surrender of forces that had been growing food on the hillsides to survive. The garrison surrendered. The war had been over for weeks. Subscribe to this channel right now because what the rest of this story covers, including why the Japanese high command sent the man most responsible for Pearl Harbor to command what was left of Truck, what the five tankers on the lagoon floor caused 8 months later at Lady Gulf, and why the ships that sank in February of 1944 are now among the most visited underwater sites in the world is the part that closes the account of what the operation actually cost and produced. Do not miss it. 1939, Japan begins constructing the military infrastructure at Truck that will make it the hub of Central Pacific operations. December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor. Truck becomes the combined fleet's primary forward base for operations across the Central and South Pacific. October 1943, American submarines begin more aggressively targeting Japanese tanker routes. Fuel constraints on Japanese operations become a permanent factor.

[00:19:41]Early February 1944, Marine Corps reconnaissance aircraft are spotted over the lagoon. Admiral Koga orders the fleet heavy units, including the Yamato and Mousashi, transferred to Palao. The tankers and merchant ships remain. February 16th, evening, Kobayashi stands down his air crews from sustained alert. The 22nd and 26th Air Flatillas go to shore. February 17th before dawn. 72 Hellcats depart Task Force 58 carriers at low altitude below radar coverage. Dawn. February 17th.

[00:20:15]First wave over Trucks airfields. No alert has been issued. 30 aircraft destroyed on the ground in the opening minutes. February 17th through the day.

[00:20:25]Two light cruisers, four destroyers, two submarine support ships, the Aikoku Maru, and five fleet tankers sunk. 250 aircraft destroyed. 17,000 tons of fuel burning. 2100, February 17th.

[00:20:42]A single Japanese torpedo bomber reaches USS Intrepid in the darkness. 11 American sailors killed. Intrepid withdrawn for repairs. Midnight, February 18th. Lieutenant Commander William Martin leads 12 radar equipped Avengers in the first carrier night strike in the history of naval warfare.

[00:21:03]February 18th through the day. Second day strikes complete the destruction of shore facilities. 4,500 Japanese dead across both days. February 20th, Kobayashi is relieved of command. May 1944, Kobayashi is removed from active service. March 1944, Vice Admiral Chui Nagumo arrives at Troo command. June 1944, American landings on Saipan.

[00:21:33]Nagumo moves to Saipan to direct the defense. July 1944, Nagumo dies on Saipan.

[00:21:42]American forces have overrun the island's last defensive lines. September 1945, the Troo garrison surrenders. 16 months after Hailstone, the war already concluded. 1969, Jacqu Kustoau's film brings international attention to the wrecks inside the lagoon. 2024, Project Recover locates three American aircraft inside the lagoon for the first time. Each was crewed by personnel still listed as missing in action. Vice Admiral Masami Kobayashi was relieved of the fourth fleet's command 2 days after the last American aircraft turned east.

[00:22:20]The Imperial Japanese Navy's accounting of the disaster centered on the alert posture Kobayashi had maintained and then withdrawn. His failure to keep his air crews at readiness when the reconnaissance flights had indicated American interest. His failure to disperse his aircraft across multiple fields as a precaution. his failure to generate the kind of warning that would have given defending pilots time to reach their aircraft before the Hellcats arrived. Each of these was documented, assessed, and attributed to Kobayashi.

[00:22:52]By May, he was out of active service entirely. Military institutions account for failures by finding someone who made the decisions that preceded them.

[00:23:00]Kobayashi had made those decisions. His replacement was Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. The weight of that name in February of 1944 requires a moment of context. Nagumo had commanded the carrier strike force at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the six carrier formation that had launched the war's opening attack. He had commanded at Midway in June of 1942, where four of those carriers were destroyed by American dive bombers. He had commanded through the Solomon's campaign. He had watched Japan's carrier aviation contract from the dominant force in the Pacific to a diminished remnant through a sequence of engagements that he directed and could not reverse. Sending him to truck was the Japanese high command telling itself a story about the assignment's importance that the facts did not support. A man of Nagumo's seniority would not be sent somewhere strategically irrelevant. Troo therefore remain strategically relevant. Nagumo was available. Troo needed a commander.

[00:24:02]The appointment was made. What it actually communicated was the opposite of what it was intended to communicate.

[00:24:08]That the institution had run out of meaningful assignments for a senior officer and was parking him in a position with no function. Nagumo arrived in March. He stayed until the American landing on Saipan in June made the position untenable, then moved to Saipan to direct a defense that was already past the point where direction could change its outcome.

[00:24:30]He died there in July by his own hand as American forces closed on the island's final defensive area. The man who had commanded Japan's carrier aviation at the moment of its greatest reach died on an island that American forces had taken partly because the Turkey chute had eliminated what remained of that carrier aviation. He died there because Operation Hailstone, the raid on the base he had just been appointed to command, had opened the corridor that made the Saipan landing possible ahead of schedule. The specific technical explanation for how 72 Hellcats and the bombers that followed them destroyed a base of Trale in 2 days requires examining three simultaneous failures that converged on the morning of February 17th. The first was the radar gap. Truk's early warning system could not detect aircraft at low altitude.

[00:25:22]This was a known limitation of the technology at the time and was not unique to Tru's installation. The Japanese defensive planning had compensated for it by assuming that any attack serious enough to threaten the base would require a land-based preparatory campaign with enough warning time for defensive measures to be implemented regardless of the radar's limitations. The assumption was that the attack would be visible in its preparation even if the attacking aircraft were not visible to the radar.

[00:25:50]Carrier aviation operating at range made this assumption obsolete. The Hellcats were over the airfields before the first defensive response was possible. The second was the fire control radar that was not there. The 40 heavy anti-aircraft guns defending troo had been designed for use with a radar targeting system that would allow accurate engagement of high altitude aircraft. That system had been lost when the transport carrying it was sunk by an American submarine. Without it, the guns operated with visual fire control, accurate against lowaltitude, slower moving targets, substantially degraded against high altitude formations making coordinated attacks. The guns fired throughout both days of Hailstone. They accounted for some of the American losses, they could not replicate what they were designed to do. The third was Kobayashi's decision. Without it, the first two failures could have been partially compensated.

[00:26:46]Aircraft in the air when the Hellcats arrived would have contested the fighter sweep. A contested fighter sweep would have made the subsequent bombing runs more difficult and more costly. The bombers would have reached the lagoon eventually because Task Force 58 had more aircraft than trucks defenders could have stopped regardless. But the campaign would have been different in its cost, its duration, and its outcome regarding specific targets. All three failures had independent causes.

[00:27:15]Together they produced a situation in which the air defense cleared itself.

[00:27:20]The anti-aircraft fire was below design effectiveness and the ships inside the lagoon were attacked without meaningful fighter opposition from the moment the first wave arrived. The five tankers are the thread connecting February to everything that followed. Vice Admiral Jisuru Ozawa commanded Japanese forces at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944.

[00:27:42]When he was interrogated by American naval officers after Japan's surrender, he described the fuel situation as the primary constraint on every operational plan his staff had developed in the preceding months. The tankers that had been at Trrook in February were not available in June. The fuel they would have delivered was absent from Japanese planning calculations when the Turkey shoot began. Ozawa's carrier aviation entered the Philippine Sea with inadequate preparation time, partly because the resources that would have supported better preparation had been sunk 4 months earlier. 8 months after hailstone at Lady Gulf, the Japanese fleet was compelled to operate from two separate bases because fuel constraints prevented any single location from servicing a unified force.

[00:28:29]The combined fleet's attack plan required Karita's force to come from linger roads near Singapore and another force to depart from the home islands with no common assembly point where the fleet could concentrate before the operation. Troo had been that assembly point. The fuel stored there would have made concentration possible. The tankers that would have delivered it were on the lagoon floor. Admiral Nimitz's official reports on the Central Pacific campaign identified the TRO operation as the action most directly responsible for the speed at which the subsequent American advance proceeded. Without a functioning troop, the invasion of the Maranas could proceed without the weeks of preliminary operations that would otherwise have been required to neutralize TR's air threat. The schedule moved forward.

[00:29:18]Saipan fell in June. The Turkey shoot cleared the last major Japanese carrier aviation force. Construction on the Mariana's air bases began before the islands were fully secured. The B-29s flew their first strike against Japan from Saipan in November of 1944.

[00:29:35]The chain from the five tankers on the lagoon floor in February to the B29 on its approach to Hiroshima in August of 1945 is not a metaphor. It is a sequence of events, each of which was made possible by the one preceding it, traceable step by step through the operational history of the Pacific War.

[00:29:55]The floor of Chuk Lagoon, as the atal is now called in the Federated States of Micronesia, holds more than 60 vessels at depths between 15 and 65 m. The hulls have been colonizing organisms for more than 80 years. corals, sponges, the layered growth that the ocean applies to any hard surface given sufficient time.

[00:30:16]The holds of those ships still contain what was being transported when they sank. A cargo ship named Fujikawa Maru went down with zero fighters disassembled for transport in her hold, still there in their shipping configuration. The Nippom Maru carries armored vehicles and artillery in hers.

[00:30:34]The Yamagiri Maru holds 16-in naval ammunition in her forward hold, technically still alive, undisturbed.

[00:30:42]Personal items found in the crew quarters of various wrecks, footwear and cooking equipment, and photographs that survived decades of immersion before their containers failed are left in place under Micronesian law that classifies the wrecks as war graves. No removal is permitted. The documentation project that surveys the site regularly records what is there and does not disturb it. Jacqu Kustoau filmed the lagoon in 1969 and the resulting documentary established it as an international diving destination. Divers have been visiting since then, drawn partly by the quality of the water, partly by the specificity of the history visible in the wrecks. A ship that sank carrying a cargo tells a different story than a ship that sank carrying nothing.

[00:31:28]The holes of the truck wrecks tell the story of a supply chain that was supposed to sustain operations across the central Pacific and instead ended on a lagoon floor in February of 1944.

[00:31:40]35 American service personnel are still listed as missing in action from the February 17th and 18th raids. Additional Americans from later strikes on the atal bring the total to over 200. In 2024, a team from Project Recover completed a survey of more than 75 square kilmters of the lagoon floor using sidescan sonar and located three American aircraft for the first time. Each was linked through historical records to personnel who are still unaccounted for. The project continues. On the anniversary of the raid every February, divers descend to the wrecks. They are the regular witnesses to what the historical record reduces to a statistic. The ships are still inside the reef. The men who went down with them are still there. The reef itself is unchanged, 30 mi across, just as it was on the morning the Hellcats arrived, just as effective at preventing naval gunfire from reaching ships inside it. Just as irrelevant to the aircraft that came from above.

[00:32:42]Geography was Japan's theory of defense at Tru. The reef, the mountains, the distances, all of it was real. None of it stopped what came in February of 1944 because what came did not engage any of it. Subscribe to this channel right now and turn on notifications because every week we bring you the stories that the official histories compress into a paragraph about a base neutralized before a campaign without telling you that the man sent to command what was left was the same officer who had stood on a carrier bridge over Pearl Harbor 3 years before or that the tankers at the bottom of the lagoon are directly traceable to the fuel crisis that split the Japanese fleet at Lady Gulf 8 months later or that 35 Americans from those two days in February are still in the water and researchers are still looking for them. Hit subscribe now then like.

[00:33:33]So this reaches the people who should know that the Pacific War was decided not only in the famous engagements but in a lagoon most histories give a paragraph by 48 hours of aviation in February of 1944.

[00:33:46]Tell us in the comments where you are watching from. This is history that belongs to everyone. See you in the next one.