An eyewitness’ story –
Casey describes blasting of Japs by 'sunken ships’
U.S. Fleet attacks mandated islands and leaves columns of smoke to mark their resting places
By Robert J. Casey
With the Pacific Fleet at sea, Feb. 13 –
On the horizon behind us, the Wotje Island Naval Base is still afire as it probably will be for days, a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.
The tally of the Fleet’s catastrophic blitz against the Japanese sea forts in the Southwest Pacific is just about complete and by now the home folks are finding out something of what happened to the impregnable Gilberts and Marshalls.
It is not a pretty mess that some Jap naval observer is having to total up among the blasted coral reefs of the mandated islands. The Son of Heaven’s first line of bases in this part of the world has disintegrated under one swift smash by a lot of boats that his stooges told him were on the bottom.
His advance guards, submarines and airplanes, have been pushed back 1,000 miles to shelters, depots and repair stations in the Carolines with no guarantee that the same lightning may not strike there tomorrow.
The Fleet, virtually unscathed, once more is loose beyond the range of Japanese scout planes in an area where it would be suicide for an enemy submarine to lift its periscope. It has come far enough to permit the release of some details of what is the war’s most perfectly timed and possibly most far-reaching – if not the most spectacular – naval operation. It remains close enough to be the menace that Japan, before Pearl Harbor, always expected it would be.
At daybreak on the morning of Feb. 1, one of the largest and fastest striking forces assembled for an active job in this war, came abreast of the Japanese bases in that mysterious bourn where no foreign naval vessels and few ships of any other sort had been permitted to travel since Tokyo took over the mandate.