The Brooklyn Eagle (June 25, 1944)
NAVY TASK FORCE BAGS 82 JAP PLANES
Airmen rip 19 enemy cargo ships
Bonin Isle attacked 753 miles from Tokyo; U.S. gains on Saipan
By William F. Tyree
USPACFLT HQ, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (UP) – (June 24)
A powerful U.S. carrier task force, striking within 753 miles of Tokyo, destroyed at least 82 Japanese planes and sank or damaged 19 small cargo vessels and sampans in assaults Thursday and Friday, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz announced today.
The deadly carrier-based aerial fleets attacked Iwo Jima Island in the Bonins, 753 miles south of Tokyo, on Friday in the war’s second raid on that stronghold in Japan’s inner defense arc. They shot down 60 planes in air combat and destroyed 12 which tried to attack the carrier force. We lost four planes.
On Thursday, the Americans attacked Pagan Island, 712 miles below Iwo Jima, sinking four small cargo ships and a sampan and damaging two cargo ships and 12 sampans. Four Japanese planes were destroyed on the ground and six were shot down while trying to attack the surface ships.
Believed to be Mitscher’s force
The force was believed to have been VAdm. Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 which on Sunday and Monday shot down 375 Japanese planes and sank or damaged 15 ships in a one-sided battle against units of the Japanese Fleet between the Marianas and the Philippines.
The latest U.S. triumphs in the battle of the Central Pacific raised to 447 the number of Japanese planes destroyed in six days and to 34 the number of enemy ships sunk, probably sunk or damaged in the same period.
Nimitz also announced that veteran U.S. Marines and soldiers who invaded Saipan Island on the Marianas on June 14 had made new but unspecified gains along the northern shore of Magicienne Bay on the southwestern side of that island, 1,465 miles from Tokyo.
Patrols enter Garapan
A dispatch from Richard W. Johnston, United Press war correspondent aboard a flagship off Saipan, reported that U.S. patrols had entered the suburbs of Garapan, capital city of the Marianas on the west-central coast. He said the entry was made almost unopposed while other U.S. forces fought their way up the jungle-covered slope guarding Mount Tapochau in the center of the island.
On Friday, U.S. bombers hammered airfields in Tinian and American artillery on Saipan joined what Nimitz called “a heavy attack.”
The communiqué revealed that with hardly a pause after its triumph earlier in the week over the Japanese Navy, the U.S. naval battle line had returned to action on the broad western front and also attacked Rota Island in the southern Marianas, while land-based bombers, presumably based in the Aleutians, lashed Shumushu in the Kuril Islands north of Japan.
Still other warplanes – Army, Navy and Marine – continued neutralization raids Friday on enemy positions in the Marshall and Caroline Islands below the Marianas.