World War II Day by Day

Task Force 58 Off Truk (Chuuk), Central Pacific • February 17, 1944

Chuuk Lagoon, known up to 1990 as Truk Lagoon, is a sheltered body of water in the Cen­tral Paci­fic north of New Guinea. Con­sisting of 11 major islands, Chuuk is part of the larger Caro­line Islands group. Truk was part of the Spanish East Indies until the Spanish-Amer­i­can War (1898), after which con­trol shifted to Germany. Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, Truk became a pos­ses­sion of the Japanese Empire under a League of Nations mandate.

Between the war years the Japa­nese made Truk their prin­ci­pal supply and repair base in the Cen­tral Paci­fic, a sort of “Japa­nese Pearl Harbor,” stationing close to 28,000 naval per­son­nel and 18,000 army per­son­nel there. Truk was the base for Japa­nese opera­tions against Allied forces in New Guinea and the Solo­mon Islands. Due to its heavy for­ti­fi­ca­tions, both man­made and natural, Truk was known to the Allies as “the Gibraltar of the Pacific.”

On this date, February 17, 1944, U.S. Naval Task Force 58, con­sisting of 12 carriers, 7 battle­ships, 45 other ships, and 10 sub­marines under the com­mand of Vice Adm. Marc “Pete” Mitscher, began a 2‑day pounding of Truk. Opera­tion Hail­stone destroyed most of the Japa­nese air­strips, 270 air­craft (56 in air combat), the torpe­do boat station, sub­marine repair shops, a com­muni­ca­tions center, a radar station, 3 cruisers, 4 destroyers, 17 trans­ports, 4 fleet tankers, and 32 mer­chant ships, making Truk la­goon the biggest grave­yard of ships in the world. The Japa­nese Navy saved its larger war­ships from de­struc­tion by moving them the week before to their base at Palau at the extreme west­ern end of the Caro­line Is­lands. Owing to the damage and the inability of the Japa­nese to con­tinue using Truk as a for­ward base in the Cen­tral Pacific, the Allies were able to bypass the island and isolate it, practically starving its garrison along with the Trukese.

The attacks on Truk and later Palau during Febru­ary and March 1944 had a crucial effect on the war: a third or so of all tankers assigned to the Japa­nese Com­bined Fleet was sunk, which was to impair future fleet opera­tions of the ship-poor Im­perial Navy during the cli­matic cam­paign of the Pacific War, Oper­a­tion Forager—the Mari­ana and Palau Islands campaign (June–November 1944).

Operation Hailstone, the February 1944 Destruction of the Japanese Central Pacific Base at Truk (Chuuk) Atoll

Above: Truk (known today as Chuuk) was the key logis­ti­cal and opera­tional hub sup­porting Japan’s peri­meter defenses in the Cen­tral and South Pacific. It lay between 625 and 675 miles/­1,005 and 1086 kilo­meters to the east of the Mariana Islands (Sai­pan, Tinian, and Guam), which the U.S. wrestled from Japa­nese control in mid-1944 and where the U.S. built bases for their B‑29 Super­fortress long-range bombers that assaulted Japan’s major population and manufacturing centers in 1945.

Left: Navy aviators surprised Japanese war­ships at anchor during Opera­tion Hail­stone, the U.S. raid on Truk, Febru­ary 17–18, 1944. Adm. Mitscher’s self-effacing com­ment on the air-sea raid was, “All I knew about Truk was what I’d read in the National Geo­graphic.” In June Mitscher’s avia­tors devas­tated more Japa­nese assets in the Battle of the Philippine Sea—also known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

Right: Navy Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bombers from a USS Lexing­ton bombing squadron fly low over Japa­nese instal­la­tions on Param Island, Truk Atoll. Note the smoke rising from damaged buildings.

Left: Aerial photo showing the destruction resulting from the surprise U.S. raid on Truk. In addi­tion to U.S. Navy carrier strikes, land-based Army Air Forces B‑24 and B‑29 bombers carried out their own extensive bombing campaign on Truk Atoll.

Right: A Japanese freighter in Truk Atoll is hit by a tor­pedo dropped from a VT‑10 (Torpedo Squad­ron 10) Grum­man Avenger, Febru­ary 17, 1944. Including the ground-breaking night attack of Febru­ary 16/17, tor­pedo bombers from the USS Enter­prise accounted for one‑third of the total shipping destroyed by Task Force 58’s attack on Truk Atoll.

Left: Japanese ships being bombed during Opera­tion Hail­stone. The sur­prise raid managed to sink a great num­ber of auxiliary vessels and warships in the Truk lagoon.

Right: Japanese ammunition ships in the Truk lagoon explode following a dive-bombing attack by a U.S. carrier-based plane, Febru­ary 17, 1944. The air­crew that dropped the bomb on the ammu­ni­tion ship Aikoku Maru went missing and was believed to have been caught in the terrific explosion.

Newsreel Showing the February 17–18, 1944, Destruction of the Japanese Base on Truk