Seamen at Work

For their hope of relief, Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright's battle-grimed men on Bataan look to Australia and MacArthur. Yet if there is still hope that they can be saved, that hope is dawning, not in the south, but in the east. Bataan's relief is more likely to come from the broken lifeline between Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, where the Navy's task forces are at work. Last week a task force under Vice Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr. put back into Pearl Harbor and told a cheering story:

Admiral Halsey's force had taken no ground. But, as it had done in January in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands (TIME, Feb. 9), it had smashed the daylights out of two Jap bases. One of them was Wake Island, where 378 Marines had held out for 14 gallant days, second stop beyond Pearl Harbor in the reach to Jap-held Guam and Manila. The other was Marcus Island (Minama Tori Shima to the Japanese), only 1,150 miles from Tokyo.

Wake. The task force crept up before dawn on Feb. 24. Before the sun had burst up out of the sea behind low-hanging clouds, the planes were launched, the force advanced, deployed, put into action. The Jap was caught snoozing.

He got a few planes off, but they were ineffective. The task force pounded away, and from Wake's new oil stores, ammunition dumps and flying field buildings, smoke began to billow. Through the smoke ripped U.S. planes, bombing and gunning everything in sight. Before 9 o'clock the Japs were pretty well silenced, and the survivors sat among the smoking shambles of a promising advance base. The Japs had lost three four-motored seaplanes, two patrol boats, some dredges and fuel barges, a few prisoners picked up from sunken craft. U.S. loss: one plane.

Marcus. The task force sailed west and north. At dawn, eight days later, it stood off Marcus Island. Well down behind the horizon, the task force launched its planes and headed for home. The men on the ships had to follow the action by listening to the U.S. planes' radio. The Jap put up no fight, except from his antiaircraft, launched not a single plane. Marcus, important as a Jap supply base and link between Japan and the Mandates, got a pounding that should take weeks to repair.

Before the sun was high, the planes, flying wingtip to wingtip under tumbling Pacific clouds, were back over the carrier. Only one was missing. The pilot had radioed that he was crippled by anti-aircraft fire, but might make it. He never did.

It was a good show, the second the Navy had given west of Pearl Harbor. More important than that, it happened weeks ago. U.S. citizens waited hopefully for the next time Bill Halsey's task force turned up at its home port.

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