Wednesday, March 4, 1942. Counterstrikes

Today in World War II History—March 4, 1942: Two Japanese H8K flying boats bomb Pearl Harbor—no damage. Aircraft from USS Enterprise strike Marcus Island in South Pacific.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

If you were fighting the war, of course, it was a horrible day. . . if fighting was going on, which it was all over the world. But in terms of huge events, well, it was just another day in the war in some ways.

Operation K, the flying boat raid, had significant aspirations but was a flop.  It didn't do much, other than to remind everyone that Hawaii was still within Japanese air range.

H8K.  This one was in its last moments later in the war, just before the U.S. Navy, which took this photo, shot it down.

The round trip flight engaged in by the two Japanese aircraft from the Marshall Islands was nearly 5,000 miles in extent.

Marcus Island is the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago and is extremely isolated.   The US bombed it repeatedly during 1942 and 1943, but never occupied it.

The remote island was first discovered by the Portuguese in 1694.  They didn't make a specific recordation of the location of the island, however, and it was not sighted again until British/Australian mariner Bourn Russell spotted it in 1830, noting that it was not on his charts, which of course it was not.  It was next sighted by an American evangelical mission to the Hawaiian islands in 1864. The first effort to occupy it commenced by a private Japanese expedition in 1886.

The United States and Japan both claimed the island early on, and in 1902 the US dispatched a warship to enforce its claims, but withdrew when it found the island occupied by the Japanese and a Japanese warship patrolling nearby.  The Japanese withdrew the civilian population in 1933 and made the island a military installation with a weather station and an airstrip.

The island was transferred to the United States in 1952, but in 1968 the US gave it back but continued to occupy it, having a substantial radio station there, whose antenna can be seen in the photo posted above from 1987.  The Coast Guard occupied the island until 1993, and then it was transferred to the Japanese Self Defense Force.