On February 17, 1944 hundreds of US planes avenged in the Atolón de Chuuk or Truk, on the Caroline Islands, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that forced the declaration of war of war of Roosevelt. In a few minutes, 60 ships and 250 … Japanese fighters were destroyed from the air thanks to an overwhelming aerial superiority. The devices took off from four American aircraft carriers and some auxiliary units to bombard what was the largest naval base in the Empire of the Rising Sun in the Pacific.
Today the great bay of Chuuk Atolon, part of Micronesiait is a naval cemetery that evokes the debacle of the former powerful Japanese float and the change of a war that Japan could no longer win. At a depth between 30 and 40 meters, any diver can observe the oxidized remains, covered with algae, cruises, destroyers, submarines and aircraft destroyed in that day. Nothing remained The naval base built by Japan In that Atolón, where there was a hospital and a field of prisoners.
The images captured by the divers show unusual objects such as the interior of the ships, where the dishes of their crew, a car is preserved, whose structure remains intact, several combat cars and airplanes in whose wings you can still see the Symbol of the rising sun. A debacle in which 4,500 Japanese soldiers diedmost, buried in the sea. It is not difficult to find human skulls in the Atolón, where some plates remember the massacre.
«It was hell. American airplanes appeared in the sky and in a few moments the flames amounted to 50 meters high. Everything burned. The rumble was horrible. Although we could knock down some planes of the enemy, the fleet was swallowed by the waters, ”said Shinzo Okamoto, a Japanese lieutenant, after the end of World War II. Although The initial impact was bruteL, although the Japanese were prepared after being notified by Naval Intelligence, the US fighters continued to punish the base for more than 24 hours to reduce all their facilities and their airfield to ashes. There is no lack of historian who wrote that Chuuk not only intended to eliminate a military threat but also warn the Japanese of the future who expected them if they did not depose their weapons.
Six cruises, four destroyers and supply ships, in total, about 200,000 tonsthat day went to the day, which could have been worse because a few days before the Japanese admiralty had given the order to leave for an aircraft carrier. All the ships and submarines that tried to flee were killed with torpedoes in some waters where it was not possible to hide.
That attack has gone into military history as the ‘Operation Hailstone’, After the defeat of Guadalcanal in which the Japanese fleet had suffered a very hard blow. A Gruman Avender, from an aircraft carrier, launched a 250 kilos bomb that penetrated the hull of a converted transatlantic. It fell next to the compartment where high -impact explosives were kept, which caused a deflagration that caused the death of the entire crew.
A Spanish navigator called Álvaro de Saavedra He stepped on the Pacific atol in 1528. The Caroline Islands were Spanish possession until Germany annexed them in 1885. In 1914, they were ceded to the Japanese Empire, which turned the enclave into a place of supply and, two decades later, on a base Naval that was growing from 1940.
Today tourists can visit this naval cemetery and amateur divers take pictures of the remains of that debacle, from which the bosses of the Navy took the lesson that the war was definitely lost.
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