Japan Called Truk Its Gibraltar of the Pacific — America Turned It Into a Graveyard

Truk was Japan's Gibraltar of the Pacific — the fortified anchorage at the centre of its entire ocean strategy, and the base the West spent a decade unable to see inside. Japan thought the Pacific was too big to cross, and for 20 years its whole war plan rested on that: 3,000 miles of open water and 2,000 mandate islands lying across every route. On 17 February 1944 American carriers arrived over the lagoon, and in 2 days they erased roughly 40 ships and 250 aircraft. The Combined Fleet never anchored there again.

This documentary reconstructs Operation Hailstone from the record: the 1920 South Seas Mandate that handed Japan the central Pacific, the secret fortification of Truk, the Japanese doctrine of interceptive attrition, the commissioning of Service Squadron Ten in November 1943 — a complete naval base made of ships, including floating dry docks towed across an ocean in sections — the lessons of Tarawa, Koga's withdrawal of the heavy units to Palau, the 72-aircraft fighter sweep at 04:50, the first radar-directed night carrier attack in history, and the 38,000-man garrison left to starve for 18 months.

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