The Day America Returned the Pearl Harbor Visit to Japan
What makes a place feared is rarely its true strength. It is the gap between what others believe and what is actually there. For 2 years, Truk had lived in that gap. Operation Hailstone is the story of what happens when that gap closes and who is standing in it when it does. The lagoon itself is one of the great natural harbors on Earth.
A barrier reef stretches 225 km around it, enclosing more than 2,000 sq km of deep, sheltered water. 11 major volcanic islands rise from the blue. Dublon, Eten, Moen, Param, their peaks thick with jungle. Five airfields and a seaplane base, the only major Japanese air installation within range of the Marshall Islands.
In the morning light, the water inside the reef is a color that has no business existing [music] in a war. Deep blue shading to turquoise in the shallows, white surf on the outer reef, beautiful in a way that demands acknowledgement before the burning begins. Japan had been building here since 1939. Coastal guns covered every channel entrance.
The reef passages were rigged with electrically controlled mines. [music] At its wartime peak, the lagoon held what almost no other anchorage in the Pacific could contain, battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and tankers all at anchor simultaneously. The super battleships Yamato and Musashi had both ridden at anchor here.
The fuel reserves alone, 77,000 tons of oil, made Truk the largest Japanese depot outside the home islands. This was where Japanese power in the Pacific breathed, where it rested between operations. Except the fortress had a hollow core. The Gibraltar of the Pacific rested less on fortification than on fear.
Japan’s economic constraints had forced a choice between a great navy and extensive fixed defenses. It had chosen the navy. The fixed defenses were theater. The reputation was the real wall. Then there was the matter of the radar. What detection capability Truk possessed could not track low-flying aircraft, and the fire control radar intended for the more than 40 heavy anti-aircraft guns, the equipment that would have allowed those guns to lead and track fast-moving dive bombers in their terminal runs, had shipped aboard a transport vessel some
months prior. An American submarine sent that transport to the bottom. The submariners almost certainly had no idea what they had taken from Truk. They would never know. Without that radar, the guns at Truk would spend the coming battle aiming by eye, estimating, firing into the sky, and trusting to chance.
The Japanese understood the weakness of their own position well enough to act on it. The Imperial Japanese Navy had begun withdrawing major units, battleships, heavy cruisers, carriers, from the anchorage as early as October 1943. By February 1944, the great fleet was gone, filtered to Palau and other anchorages as American pressure in the Central Pacific intensified.
What remained at Truk was still substantial. Cargo ships, tankers, light warships, hundreds of aircraft, and those 77,000 tons of fuel. The decision to move the fleet had looked in the short term like wisdom. What it had actually done was leave Truk’s entire support infrastructure fully exposed with nothing heavy enough to fight back.
The force that came to destroy it was something the Pacific had not yet seen. Task Force 58 assembled from three of its four carrier task groups, five fleet carriers, Enterprise, Yorktown, Essex, Intrepid, Bunker Hill, and four light carriers, nine carriers in total with more than 500 warplanes, 276 fighters, 167 bombers, 126 torpedo planes, seven battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines in the screen.
It was not a raiding party. It was the full industrial weight of a nation that had turned itself, without compromise, toward war. The man responsible for the strategic architecture of the operation was Vice Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. Commanding the Fifth Fleet, he commanded the carriers at Midway, a non-aviator thrust into the greatest air-sea battle of the war, and it won decisively.
Samuel Eliot Morison, the official Navy historian, called him the electric brain. He worked at a stand-up desk with no chairs, which discouraged visitors from staying long. Quiet, analytical, not a man of instinct. Before TF 58 had come within sight of Truk, he had already positioned a surface interception force, battleships and heavy cruisers, in an arc around the reef passages.
If Japanese ships tried to run, they would run into something. The man responsible for the aircraft was Rear Admiral Marc A. “Pete” Mitscher. He did not look like what he was, small, knobbish, with a face so weathered by decades of sun and sea that it seemed to belong to a different species of officer than the men around him.
He wore a long-billed cap in the style of a baseball pitcher, nothing like a flag officer’s cover, and sat at the rear of the bridge facing aft in a posture that suggested he was thinking [music] about something else entirely. He used few words. When he described his command philosophy, he did it in seven. “I tell them what I want done, not how.
” Halsey had called him a fighting fool and meant it as the highest compliment in his vocabulary. Mitscher had commanded the Hornet during the Doolittle Raid in April 1942, then ran all Allied air assets in the Solomons, Army, Navy, Marine, and New Zealand aircraft, through the grinding air war over Guadalcanal.
He had been in command of Task Force 58 for a matter of weeks when Hailstone launched, having replaced an admiral considered insufficiently aggressive by Nimitz’s headquarters. He was being watched. This assault on the most feared address in the Pacific was his first major operation in command of the fast carriers, his audition.
American crews knew before they launched that the heavy Japanese warships were gone. The intelligence [music] was clear. The great Pearl Harbor symmetry they’d imagined, fleet against fleet, battleships burning for battleships burned, was not going to happen. What remained was not the fleet. What remained was everything the fleet needed to stay alive.
That disappointment would not last. February 4th, 1944, two United States Marine Corps PB4Y-1 Liberator bombers climb out of Bougainville and fly north toward the Caroline Islands, the first photo reconnaissance mission ever flown over Truk. They reach the lagoon at high altitude, cameras running, and they are spotted.
Japanese commanders respond correctly. The base goes on high alert. The 22nd and 26th air flotillas man their aircraft. Coastal batteries are manned. Lookouts scan the reef passages and the sky beyond. The garrison waits. Nothing comes. A day passes, then a week. The alert holds. The air crews sit in their aircraft on Eten and Moen and Param, ready to scramble, watching a sky that contains nothing threatening.
The tropical heat is relentless. Two weeks of readiness for a threat that never materializes. And then, because the human body has limits, and because vigilance without confirmation eventually consumes itself, the alert is stood down. The pilots of the 22nd and 26th air flotillas are given shore leave.
The air crews rest. Some go ashore. The aircraft sit on the hard stands, and the men who fly them are, for the first time in 2 weeks, not waiting. On the night of February 16th, 1944, the night Task Force 58 moves into position 100 miles northeast of the lagoon. The Japanese air crews, who should be watching the approaches, are sleeping.
The lagoon is quiet. Anchor lights of cargo ships reflect in still water. The volcanic peaks are dark shapes against a sky full of stars. The warning that was supposed to save Truk has not saved it. It has done something far more precise. It delivered the base into a specific state of exhausted false confidence, timed almost perfectly to coincide with the actual attack.
The 2-week alert has become the mechanism of destruction rather than the defense against it. Somewhere in the darkness, 100 miles to the northeast, ordnance crews are arming Hellcats by flashlight. The three carrier task groups begin launching 90 minutes before daybreak. The Hellcats go first, coming in low, below the threshold of a radar that cannot detect aircraft at that altitude, and is not adequately manned.
The sound builds over the reef like distant thunder before the men on Dublon Island can identify what they’re hearing. The Japanese scramble, minutes too late. At the moment the Hellcats arrive, roughly 161 aircraft are operational across Truk’s airfields. 68 on Moen, 27 on Dublon, 20 on Eten, 46 on Param, with another 180 on the ground awaiting pilots or repairs.
The few that get airborne are already behind. The runways on Eten Island take bombs. Hangars collapse. The aircraft burn on the hard stands they were meant to defend from. The air defense that was supposed to make Truk untouchable is being destroyed before the shipping attacks have even begun. Within half a day, 2/3 of Japan’s aircraft at Truk are gone.
Then the dive bombers and torpedo planes arrive, and the planning reveals its precision. Ships first, shore facilities second. If the fuel depots and warehouses burned before the vessels were attacked, the smoke would obscure the lagoon from above. So, the Avengers and Dauntlesses arrive over ships still clearly visible in brilliant blue water, still silhouetted against the lagoon floor, and the water begins filling with columns of black smoke from burning tankers.
Dave Colley is somewhere in that sky. The man who [music] thought approaching Truk seemed fatal, now in his dive. Below him, the Gibraltar. Some Japanese ships break for the reef passages. Spruance had anticipated this. Battleships Iowa and New Jersey, with the heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans, circle the reef outside every exit.
The light cruiser Katori, already crippled by air attack, is caught by Iowa’s 16-in guns and sent to the bottom. The light cruiser Naka is destroyed. Japanese destroyers attempting to reach open ocean are run down before they clear the reef. No escape route holds. By the time darkness falls on February 17th, the lagoon is burning.
Multiple columns of black smoke rise from tankers and cargo ships and the ruins of hangars on Dublon and Eten and Moen. The Japanese air defense is finished. And then Task Force 58 does something it has never done before. 12 Avengers, each equipped with radar, lift off the carriers and fly south toward the burning lagoon.
The first carrier night strike in history. The crews navigate in complete tropical darkness, guided by the pulse of their instruments and by something below them that has become its own kind of beacon, the orange glow of ships already burning, their light rising through the water and spreading into the sky above the reef.
The Avenger crews locate their targets by radar alone, then press in. 25 runs at masthead level. 13 direct hits. The Japanese on the ground cannot see them to shoot at them accurately. The base that was supposed to be the most fearsome in the Pacific is being destroyed in the dark by instruments and firelight.
Day two, February 18th. With the air defense broken, it becomes systematic demolition. Airstrips, fuel storage, ammunition dumps. The runways are cratered into uselessness. The smoke haze over the lagoon thickens until the volcanic islands behind it are ghost shapes. The few Japanese fighters that scramble find a sky full of Hellcats.
Every primary objective has been met. And then, in the middle of near [music] total collapse, in the last hours of a battle lost in every meaningful dimension, one aircraft gets through. A single twin-engine bomber from the 755th Kokutai found the Intrepid in the dark and put a torpedo into a starboard quarter.
11 sailors dead. The carrier retired from combat and did not return until August 1944. 11 men in a battle that killed approximately 4,500 Japanese. The one real blow Japan lands at Truk. Not a reversal, but a reminder. The cost of this operation was not zero. The dead do not adjust for asymmetry.
Mitscher and Spruance, concerned that another night might produce another torpedo, withdraw at noon on the 18th. The mission is complete. Before the carriers turn for open water, a Kingfisher floatplane from the heavy cruiser Baltimore flies into the lagoon itself, into the smoke and wreckage and remaining anti-aircraft fire, to pull a downed Hellcat pilot from the water.
Nine Hellcats hold a Japanese destroyer at bay while the floatplane lands and the pilot is hauled aboard. The entire three-man crew of a downed Yorktown Avenger, drifting in a rubber raft, are recovered by the submarine USS Sea Raven. These men come back. Not all of them did. The accounting begins with numbers and does not stay there long.
Approximately 250 Japanese aircraft destroyed. 32 merchant ships sunk, plus Katori, Naka, four destroyers, and numerous auxiliaries. Shipping losses totaled nearly 200,000 tons, almost 1/10 of all Japanese shipping losses over the 8 months spanning November 1943 to June 1944. Approximately 4,500 Japanese killed.
American losses, 25 aircraft, 40 dead, one carrier damaged. The asymmetry is stark enough on its own, but the numbers describe what happened. They don’t explain what it meant. The cargo ships on the lagoon floor were not empty. Their holds carried aircraft parts, tanks, torpedo shells, trucks. The physical inventory of an empire’s forward reach, the material that moved the war southward and westward, that sustained Japanese garrisons across the central Pacific, now resting in 130 ft of blue water, where it would stay.
And then there was the fuel. The 77,000 tons of reserves at Truk had a consequence that stretched 8 months into the future. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy was compelled to sortie separately, battle groups departing from Japan and from Lingga Roads, thousands of miles apart, because fuel constraints made concentration impossible.
The combined fleet could not mass, could not coordinate, could not fight as a fleet. Nobody watching those tankers burn in February 1944 knew they were also watching the conditions for Leyte Gulf being set. The fire in the lagoon translated, 8 months later, into battle groups that could not support one another when the moment came.
Then the deepest asymmetry of all, Japan’s industrial capacity, by this stage of the war, could not replenish such losses in ships, in aircraft, in the stockpiled fuel of a forward base. America had rebuilt from Pearl Harbor in 2 years to field the force that executed Hailstone. Japan could not rebuild from Hailstone at all.
Pearl Harbor’s oil storage and repair yards had been left untouched on December 7th, 1941. Truks were gutted. Pearl Harbor was painful. Truk was permanent. It was Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz who found the words to contain all of this. The symmetry and the consequence and the completion in a single sentence.
His post-operation summary, “The Pacific Fleet has returned at Truk the visit made by the Japanese Fleet at Pearl Harbor.” Two days after the raid, Tokyo relieved Masami Kobayashi of command and appointed his replacement. His replacement was Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. Nagumo had commanded the Kido Butai, Japan’s main carrier strike force, on the morning of December 7th, 1941.
His aircraft sank the battleships moored along Battleship Row. His pilots killed 2,403 Americans before the morning was over. His decision to call off a third strike, to leave Pearl Harbor’s fuel storage and repair yards untouched, was debated then and remains debated now. The infrastructure he spared was the infrastructure America used to rebuild.
Critics then and since have noted that a third strike might have rendered the greatest American naval base in the Pacific useless for months. That man, the architect of the attack that started all of this, was now sent to govern the ruins of Japan’s own Pearl Harbor. He would inherit a garrison already becoming irrelevant.
The scale of Hailstone convinced the Joint Chiefs that Truk could be bypassed rather than invaded. The garrison was marooned. By late 1944, the troops on Truk spent most of their time growing food in a losing fight against starvation and tropical disease. What historian David Hobbs described as reduced to starving impotence.
In the autumn of 1944, B-29 Superfortresses came at altitudes beyond the reach [music] of the anti-aircraft guns that had, in any case, spent the February raid aiming at planes they could not properly track. The B-29s flew 32 missions over Truk and suffered no losses. The most feared base in the Pacific had become a practice target.
The ghost allied planners had feared for two years was now teaching student bombardiers where to aim. Nagumo did not see them arrive. He was gone by then. Transferred to the Mariana Islands, where the war had followed him. On July 6th, 1944, with the Battle of Saipan collapsing around him, refusing to be taken captive, he killed himself.
He had never commanded a fleet in battle after Truk. He had governed a marooned garrison in the wreckage of a base his own attack had ultimately called into being. The symmetry Nimitz described had a human embodiment. That embodiment ended in a cave on Saipan, still waiting for a fleet that never came.
On September 2nd, 1945, the Japanese garrison commander surrendered aboard the heavy cruiser Portland in the same waters where the lagoon had burned. The same blue water, the same reef, the same volcanic peaks, green and unchanged above the waterline. The circle closed in the place it had opened.
Time moves differently below the surface of a lagoon. Jacques Cousteau brought his cameras here in 1969, and what his divers found had not moved. The wrecks sat where they had landed. The cargo holds still carried what they had been carrying on the morning of February 17th, 1944. In 1976, the Truk Lagoon underwater fleet was added to the United States National Register of Historic Places.
A recognition that what lies down there is not merely wreckage, but memorial. Coral grows over whole plates. Tropical fish drift through the cockpits of aircraft whose [music] noses are buried in the sand at the same angle they struck the bottom. In the cargo holds, undisturbed, aircraft parts, tanks, torpedo shells, trucks, gas masks, depth charges, motorcycles.
The material record of an empire’s reach preserved in salt water and silence, exactly where the dive bombers put it. 35 American servicemen from the February 1944 raids remain listed as missing in action. As many as 225 if the full campaign of later strikes is counted. No American aircraft [music] from the February battle had been located in the lagoon until 2024, when Project Recover began surveys of the site.
The researchers found three. Each carried servicemen still listed as missing. Their families have been waiting longer than most people alive today have been alive. The lagoon holds everyone. The empire’s inventory, the men who built it, the Japanese sailors who went down with their ships in the blue water of a February morning.
The American aviators who did not make it back to their carriers. The man who commanded the Pearl Harbor strike force and ended his career governing the American mirror that day. All of them together in 130 ft of water in a place so beautiful it has been drawing divers for half a century just to witness what is there.
The water above the ghost fleet is clear and warm. The light comes through in long shafts. Below, everything stays exactly where it landed.