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The Blow. At Palau it looked as if the Jap Navy would choose to retire from another segment of the Pacific rather than give battle. Japanese scout planes had sighted the U.S. battle force as it approached, and long before the U.S. fleet hove in sight, Japanese vessels fled from the harbor.
From the islands of Palau the Japanese had launched their first air attacks on the Philippines. From Palau they had staged their advance into New Guinea. It was Palau that they called the "spigot" of their oil supply—i.e., The Netherlands East Indies. And Palau was one of Japan's finest naval bases.
What U.S. pilots saw as they glided in over Palau was a huge, reef-encircled lagoon, splotched with hilly green islands near the eastern rim. Sprawling over a round island near the main entrance to the lagoon was the sizable town of Koror, mostly composed of laborers' barracks. The U.S. airmen saw the results of Jap labor—two or three islands razed level for fighter and bomber strips, cement jetties from which roads curled back into the jungle to camouflaged fuel and ammunition dumps.
Bombs splattered over this Gauguin landscape, and presumably naval gunfire added its voice to the destruction, but the U.S. battle fleet wrapped itself in a cloak of radio silence—which left the damage done, and the fleet's further operation, an incompleted tale.
¶ This week the Navy department announced that Admiral Nimitz' Central Pacific forces had "established U.S. sovereignty" on ten more atolls strewn throughout the Marshall Islands. This gave the U.S. 14 Marshall atolls, including Kwajalein and Eniwetok, left the puzzled Japs only four: Jaluit, Mili, Wotje and Maloelap—the strongly-defended spots the Japs expected to be invaded in the first place.