Some Fighters Stayed With the Carrier
But Scoot searched in vain through the skies as the afternoon turned to evening. The Bunker Hill’s own planes came back for the last time but still no Japs appeared. Scoot was raging—all day long without a crack at a Jap! And they were right in the heart of what the Nips considered their private ocean!
“Is there anything left of Truk for us to get?” he asked that night. “Didn’t everything get blasted off the map?”
“There’ll be plenty left for everybody,” the squadron commander replied. “We’ve got half the ships in the harbor and we’ll get most of the rest tomorrow. Some of them scattered and ran but the boys from the carriers to the north are catching them. There are emergency airfields around that will be in use tomorrow, and you can be sure that there’ll be planes from other Jap garrisons in this area. You boys will have a fight on your hands tomorrow all right.”
“We’d better have!” Scoot exclaimed. “Imagine! Not a lousy Jap showed up today!”
It was with grim anger that Scoot took off the next morning, reveling in the almost unlimited power of his Hellcat as it roared up into the blue skies and circled, heading for Truk. Scoot was in the squadron leader’s group, and their objective was the big airfield south of the city. The Japs would have been working on it all night, despite constant attacks by the bombers, and they’d have at least one landing strip in shape for their planes to get off. The fighters were to strafe the field, then go up as protective cover for the dive bombers. These would be coming into the harbor right after them, to get the rest of the ships that still lay there.
Roaring low over the choppy waters of the Pacific, the speedy planes raced toward the tiny group of islands that the Japs had made into a great naval fortress, a fortress that was being knocked to pieces by American planes.
As they approached the island, Scoot saw ahead several American ships—two cruisers and half a dozen destroyers.
“They’re doing it, boys,” his squadron leader’s voice came over the radio. “The surface ships are moving in close to shell the island!”
Scoot almost laughed in happiness. It was daring enough for American carriers to penetrate supposedly Japanese waters and give a pasting to their impregnable fort. Carriers could stay a couple of hundred miles out while their planes flew in to the attack. And they were fast ships which could get away in a hurry if they needed to. But here were the big-gun ships moving to within fifteen or twenty miles to shell the island. And the Jap Navy was either hiding or running away—in its own back yard!