The British Pacific Fleet: The Royal Navy's Most Powerful Strike Force by David Hobbs

Author:David Hobbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Naval
ISBN: 9781783469222
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
Published: 2012-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

— 9 —

Operation ‘Inmate’

THE FLEET AIRCRAFT CARRIER Implacable had left the UK for the Pacific in February 1945 and arrived in Sydney on 8 May. During her brief stay some of her aircraft disembarked to RNAS Nowra for continuation flying before she sailed again on 24 May, as TF 37 was leaving the Sakishima Gunto area of operations for Australia. She arrived at the fleet anchorage in Seeadler Harbour, Manus, on 29 May and used RNAS Ponam as a ‘spare deck’ to work her squadrons and gunnery systems back up to operational standards. That night there was a Japanese air raid on the deep water anchorage but no damage was inflicted on the British ships present and on the following day TF 37 arrived to refuel on its way south. When the fleet sailed two days later Implacable sailed with it to take part in a major air defence exercise but fog prevented flying operations during the forenoon. At noon the exercise was cancelled but ten minutes later the fog lifted and, at the instigation of her dynamic Commander ‘Air’, Implacable launched twelve Seafires of 880 NAS to ‘strike’ the flagship Indomitable.1 They did so to good effect prompting a signal from 1 ACS which read: ‘Proud to have you with us’.

Admiral Rawlings had decided to use Implacable as part of a small task group, with other ships newly arrived in the theatre, to strike at the isolated Japanese base at Truk Lagoon in order to put the edge of recent combat experience on the ship’s efficiency before she joined TF 37 in July.2 The Group was designated TG 111.2 and comprised Implacable flying the flag of CS 4, Rear Admiral E J P Brind, the CVE Ruler, the cruisers Swiftsure, Uganda, Newfoundland and Achilles and the 24th Destroyer Flotilla comprising HM Ships Troubridge, Teazer, Tenacious, Termagant and Terpsichore. Like Implacable, Newfoundland and the five destroyers were new to the BPF but the other cruisers and Ruler had been involved in operations off the Sakishima Gunto. The latter joined the group at Manus and disembarked her 885 NAS to RNAS Ponam on 31 May.3 The aircraft were used to provide continuation flying for replacement pilots while their carrier was away and several Corsairs were added, temporarily, to the squadron during its time ashore to provide a wider range of types for practice.

Truk Atoll in the Western Caroline Islands had been strongly fortified by the Japanese before the war to serve as a major operational and replenishment base for a forward-deployed fleet and was at one stage the corner-stone of Japanese naval expansion into the South Pacific.4 But it had been outflanked and bypassed by the rapid American advances in the Central Pacific and the Allied campaign in New Guinea and had been attacked repeatedly by US carrier-borne aircraft from February 1944 onwards with the result that the lagoon was full of sunken ships and the garrison reduced to starving impotence. Few reinforcements arrived after the Americans captured the Marianas and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.