Download Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944 AudioBook Free
On 27 Oct 1942, four "Long Lance" torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aeroplanes carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid half a year earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea 100 kilometers northeast of the island of Guadalcanal and north of the Santa Cruz Islands, taking with her 140 of her sailors. With the increased loss of Hornet, the United States Navy now had one aeroplanes carrier kept in the South Pacific, USS Business (CV-6), herself badly damaged in both previous days and nights of the Battle of Santa Cruz. For the American naval aviators, it would be difficult to assume that within two years of this event, Zuikaku, the previous survivor of the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft providers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, would lie in the bottom of the Philippine Sea north of Cape Engano on the island of Luzon, alongside the other making it through Japanese providers, sacrificed as lures in a failed try to block the American invasion of the Philippines, and this the United States Navy's Task Pressure 38, made up of 16 fleet providers, would reign supreme on the world's most significant ocean.
