World Battlefronts: Mighty Atoll

To most news readers Ulithi means no more than Ailinglapalap, another Pacific atoll. But to U.S. Navy men Ulithi for nearly a year has been a home, a grocery store and an arsenal. Until last week it was also a military secret.

Ulithi is a series of flat, palm-dotted islands (strung onto a necklace-shaped atoll). It is 110 miles east of Jap-held Yap, 400 miles southwest of Guam—and 4,000 miles nearer the war than Pearl Harbor. Ulithi was captured without opposition last September by the 321st Regiment of the 81st Infantry Division.* The Japs had just left. Ulithi’s great, 112-sq.-mi. anchorage could hold nearly 1,000 ships of the U.S. Fleet—something neither Guam nor Pearl Harbor can do.

Natives Out, Beer In. When the Americans turned up at Ulithi, the 300 primitive natives and their paralytic King Ueg (pronounced Weg) agreed to move from Mogmog to mile-long Fassarai, one of the atoll’s southern islands. (The Japs had taken the able-bodied natives with them.) Leaving a doctor and a chief pharmacist’s mate to administer to the people on Fassarai, the Navy put the Seabees to work. The result was something new in naval history: a vast service station enabling entire fleets to operate indefinitely at unprecedented distances from their main, landmass bases. Many a ship stayed out a year or more without returning to Pearl Harbor.

For Navy purposes, Ulithi was three principal islands:

¶ Falalop was small, even for a sandspit, but a 3,300-ft. airstrip was carved out of it. Marine fighter planes moved in to protect the $20 billion worth of ships against Jap raiders. Navy planes were landed there as carrier battle replacements, and a transport-plane shuttle service to Guam and Peleliu was started.

¶ Asor Island became the headquarters of the ATCOM (atoll commander), short, jovial Commodore Oliver Owen (“Scrappy”) Kessing.

¶ The recreation island, Mogmog, was in a class by itself: as many as 15,000 sea-wobbly sailors, going ashore for the first time in weeks or months, could swim, play basketball there, curse the sand and everything else in the tropics, and drink (beer for enlisted men, blended whiskey for officers). There was thatched 100-ft. bar for junior officers, a 50-ft. bar for lieutenant commanders and up; a third, and better, lounge with chairs for admirals (as many as 20 at a time could be found there).

The Three Bs. But Ulithi’s chief function was to supply the fleet with “bomb, beans and bullets.” In the anchorage floated the “crockery fleet” — concrete barges storing the million items needed by a thousand ships. Fast supply ships and slow tankers shuttled from the U.S. to Ulithi, bringing oil, meat, screws, tires and flour to these warehouse barges which in turn unloaded their supplies into carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers and up to 700 amphibious vessels.

Commodore Worrall R. Carter, the bald, bony-faced commander of Service Suadron 10, had six types of naval repair ships at Ulithi (one for radio and radar alone). His flotilla included a drydock for destroyers, tenders to make emergency repairs on big ships like bomb-blasted Franklin, Ticonderoga and Intrpid. He claimed that Ulithi’s water-taxi service, which ran between ships and shore was the world’s largest — more than 400 small boats manned by more than 1,000 coxswains.

Just why the Japs paid so little attention to Ulithi is a mystery. In November some midget submarines fired torpedoes through an opening in the net guarding the Ulithi anchorage, narrowly missed some big carriers and sank a tanker. Not until March did the suicide planes come. Then there was only two. One damaged a big ship. In the twilight the other mistook one of the small islands for a ship, found it unsinkable. After that the enemy left the mighty atoll to its new proprietors.

*Nearby Fais Island, a Jap radio station captured in January 1945, cost three killed, six wounded.