February 17, 1944.

The lagoon at Truk burns under a tropical sky turned black with smoke. On the bridge of USS Iowa, slicing through azure water at thirty-two knots through what had, only hours earlier, been Japan’s untouchable fortress, Captain John McCrae stands before the plotting table. The numbers coming in are staggering: carriers have already sunk dozens of merchant ships; two hundred and fifty Japanese aircraft have been destroyed on the ground or in the air.

But now something different appears on the board—warships fleeing north through the passes.

Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, has made a decision that surprises even his own staff. He wants a surface action.

A light cruiser, Katori; the destroyers Maikaze and Nowaki; the auxiliary cruiser Akagi Maru. Already battered by carrier aircraft, they’re running for their lives. And Iowa, along with her sister New Jersey, is being unleashed to finish them.

What happens in the next two hours will set an engagement record that stands to this day: the longest-range surface gunnery engagement between battleships and warships in naval history. But more than that, it will demonstrate something the Japanese high command had never fully grasped. American battleships didn’t just have bigger guns or thicker armor. They had something far more dangerous—the ability to hit what they aimed at from distances previously thought impossible.

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To understand why the engagement at Truk represented such a shock to Japanese naval thinking, you have to go back to how both navies understood battleship combat.

For decades—perhaps since the Battle of Tsushima in 1905—the Imperial Japanese Navy had built its entire strategic doctrine around a concept called Kantai Kessen: the decisive battle. One enormous fleet action where Japanese battleships, manned by superbly trained crews and imbued with fighting spirit, would close to medium range and destroy the American battle line through courage, skill, and the weight of their shells.

Range wasn’t just a technical specification. It was wrapped up in an entire philosophy of warfare.

Japanese naval theorists believed that battles would be decided at ranges of perhaps ten to fifteen miles—close enough for optical rangefinders to be effective, close enough for the human element—crew training, discipline, and fighting spirit—to matter decisively. The idea that shells could be accurately placed on target from beyond the horizon, from distances where enemy ships couldn’t even be seen with the naked eye, seemed more theoretical than practical.

This wasn’t ignorance. Japanese naval intelligence was extensive and professional. They knew, in general terms, what American battleships could do on paper. They knew the specifications: range, shell weight, armor thickness. What they didn’t fully appreciate—what they couldn’t quite believe until they saw it with their own eyes—was the fire control.

American radar-directed fire control systems, particularly the Mark 8 fire-control radar mounted on the Iowa-class battleships, represented a revolution in naval gunnery. While Japanese warships still relied primarily on optical rangefinders—impressive devices in their own right, but fundamentally limited by visibility, weather, and distance—American battleships could calculate firing solutions in conditions where the target was barely visible, or not visible at all.

The system worked like this.

Radar detected the target and provided continuous range and bearing data. This information fed directly into an analog computer, a mechanical marvel called a rangekeeper. The rangekeeper factored in not just the target’s position, but its speed and course; the speed and course of the firing ship; wind direction and velocity; air temperature and density— even the rotation of the Earth. It calculated where the target would be by the time a shell, traveling for perhaps a minute and a half through a parabolic arc reaching heights of over seven miles, finally arrived.

This wasn’t guesswork. It wasn’t a salvo fired in hope. It was mathematics made lethal.

And the Japanese— for all their intelligence gathering— had never quite internalized what this meant in practice.

They had built Yamato and Musashi, the largest battleships ever constructed, mounting eighteen-inch guns that could theoretically outrange anything afloat. But theoretical range and effective range are very different things. Without comparable fire control, those mighty guns were limited to distances where optical sighting might work. Meanwhile, American battleships with smaller but better-controlled sixteen-inch guns could engage effectively at ranges the Japanese had never seriously practiced.

The morning of February 17 began with carrier strikes. Task Force 58, under Admiral Marc Mitscher, unleashed wave after wave of aircraft against Truk. The base had been, for two years, considered Japan’s Gibraltar of the Pacific—a vast natural harbor protected by reefs and defended by hundreds of aircraft. American submarines had lurked outside, sinking ships that ventured out, but no one had dared a direct assault.

Until now.

By midmorning, the lagoon was a graveyard. Merchant ships burned at anchor. Destroyers and cruisers caught unprepared were bombed and torpedoed. The air reeked of burning oil and cordite. Japanese pilots scrambling desperately to defend their base were shot down by American fighters in numbers that presaged what would later be called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

The light cruiser Katori, serving as a training vessel, had been moored inside the lagoon. Her captain, Takao Saiki, recognized immediately that staying meant certain death. At 0430 hours—before the American strike even began—Katori slipped out through the North Pass, accompanied by the auxiliary cruiser Akagi Maru, the destroyers Maikaze and Nowaki, and the small minesweeping trawler Shonan Maru No. 15.

They were running—hoping to reach Saipan, hoping the Americans would be too focused on targets inside the lagoon to notice a few ships making for open water.

They almost made it.

American reconnaissance planes spotted them. Reports reached Admiral Spruance, commanding from the heavy cruiser Indianapolis. His carriers had wrought devastation inside the lagoon. Aircraft were returning—some damaged, all low on fuel and ammunition. Standard procedure would have been to let the fleeing ships go. Japanese warships running from Truk could be hunted by submarines, by aircraft from other bases.

Spruance, however, wanted something else.

He wanted a surface action. He wanted his battleships and cruisers to close with the enemy and engage ship-to-ship.

Some of his staff thought it reckless. Carriers could finish the job safely. Why risk capital ships?

But Spruance understood something they didn’t. This war was proving, again and again, that carriers had replaced battleships as the decisive arm of naval warfare. But that didn’t mean battleships were useless. Not yet. And he wanted to demonstrate—both to his own navy and to the Japanese—that American surface ships could still fight and win decisively.

He formed Task Group 50.9: battleships Iowa and New Jersey; heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans; four destroyers; the light carrier Cowpens providing air cover—and he put himself in tactical command.

The chase was on.

The Japanese ships had perhaps a two-hour head start. They were running at close to their maximum speed—around twenty-six knots for Katori, thirty-five for the destroyers. But Iowa and New Jersey, the newest and fastest battleships in the American fleet, could make thirty-three knots.

And they had radar.

They didn’t need to see their quarry to track them.

Shortly after 1300 hours, American scout planes from Cowpens confirmed the Japanese position. Katori and her escorts were thirty miles northwest of Truk, heading roughly north, still running.

On Iowa’s bridge, Captain McCrae received updates from the fire-control center.

Range to target: thirty-two thousand yards—eighteen statute miles.

The Japanese ships were still invisible to the naked eye, hull-down beyond the horizon, but on the radar scope they were clear as day: four distinct contacts moving steadily northeast.

Admiral Willis Lee, commanding the battleship division, gave the order.

Prepare for surface action.

All ahead flank. Increase speed to intercept.

Below decks, in the massive turrets, gun crews went to work. Each turret—designated One, Two, and Three—contained three sixteen-inch guns, nine guns total. Each barrel was sixty-six feet long from breech to muzzle. Each armor-piercing shell weighed 2,700 pounds—nearly a ton and a half of steel and explosive—capable of punching through two feet of armor plate at fifteen miles.

The armor-piercing shells, designated Mark 8, were engineering marvels: a hardened steel cap at the tip to bite into armor, a ballistic cap to maintain velocity through the air. Inside, a relatively small bursting charge. These weren’t designed to explode on contact like bombs. They were designed to penetrate deep into a ship’s vitals, then detonate—destroying magazines, engineering spaces, command centers—killing the ship from the inside.

For this engagement, though, the high-capacity shells—Mark 13—would be more suitable: 1,900 pounds with a much larger bursting charge, designed to create devastating fragmentation against lightly armored ships like destroyers and the thin-skinned Katori. These were the rounds of choice.

In the plotting room, the rangekeeper hummed—inputs from radar; inputs from the ship’s gyroscopic compass and speed indicators; the target’s course and speed estimated and continuously updated. The system calculated the firing solution: barrel elevation; lead angle to account for the target; even the wear on the gun barrels, which slightly reduced muzzle velocity after repeated firings.

At 14,500 yards—seven and a quarter statute miles—Iowa opened fire.

Turret Two spoke first: three guns, three shells, each weighing nearly a ton, launched at a muzzle velocity of 2,600 feet per second.

The recoil was enormous. The entire ship shuddered. The overpressure wave from the guns could injure unprotected personnel on deck. Blast deflectors—massive armored plates designed to protect the decks from the guns’ fury—glowed briefly from the heat.

Forty-five seconds later, the first salvo arrived.

Katori, already crippled by earlier air attacks, attempted to maneuver. Her captain knew what was coming. Three shells arrived in a tight pattern. One fell short; one fell long. The third struck the water alongside, showering the ship with fragments and spray.

A straddle.

The next salvo would adjust.

Katori’s crew fought back. Her five-inch guns—designed for anti-aircraft work and defense against destroyers—opened fire. She even got off a torpedo salvo: a desperate, defiant gesture.

But the range was too great. Her optical rangefinders couldn’t get an accurate fix on ships hull-down on the horizon. The torpedoes ran wild, missing New Jersey by hundreds of yards.

Iowa fired again, and again.

Each salvo was three shells. Each salvo adjusted based on where the previous one had fallen. The rangekeeper updated continuously. The radar showed Katori’s course changes—slight alterations as she tried to evade—but there was no evading. At these ranges, shells took almost a full minute to arrive, but the fire-control system predicted where the ship would be, not where it was.

The fourth salvo hit.

Multiple shells struck Katori’s superstructure and midships. The 1,900-pound shells detonated with immense force. Fragmentation scythed through anything not protected by heavy armor—and Katori, a light cruiser, had very little heavy armor. Her bridge took a direct hit. Her engineering spaces were torn open. Fires erupted.

The destroyer Maikaze, her consort, tried to stand by—tried to lay smoke, tried, gallantly and uselessly, to draw fire from the dying cruiser. She launched torpedoes of her own at Iowa and New Jersey.

Lookouts on New Jersey spotted the torpedo wakes. The battleship altered course slightly. The torpedoes passed just ahead of the bow. One officer later remarked that it would have been embarrassing to be hit.

But Maikaze’s sacrifice bought nothing.

American heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans had closed the range. Their eight-inch guns added their weight to the barrage, and carrier aircraft from Cowpens, circling overhead, warned the surface ships of any submarine threat and confirmed hits.

Katori, her guns still firing even as she listed heavily, rolled over at 1343 hours—eleven minutes under fire. Captain Saiki went down with his ship.

Large groups of survivors were seen in the water. The destroyer Burns attempted to rescue some of them, but the Japanese sailors, trained to fight to the death, refused rescue. Some attacked the American sailors.

In the end, none were pulled from the water.

None survived.

Every man aboard Katori—approximately three hundred officers and crew—perished.

Maikaze, still fighting, became the next target. Outgunned twenty to one, she nonetheless closed to launch another torpedo attack. Minneapolis and New Orleans concentrated their fire. Shell after shell slammed into the two-thousand-ton destroyer. She absorbed punishment that would have sunk three ships her size.

Her crew fought until the magazine exploded and she broke in half.

All hands lost.

The destroyer Nowaki, seeing what had happened to her sister ships, made a run for it. She was faster than the battleships—capable of over thirty-five knots—and she had a head start.

Iowa and New Jersey turned to pursue.

Range opened to thirty-four thousand yards, then thirty-six thousand—nineteen miles, twenty statute miles—beyond the range where any battleship had ever scored a hit in combat.

But the chase wasn’t about hitting.

It was about demonstrating capability.

Iowa fired.

New Jersey fired.

Salvos arced out across the Pacific, shells climbing miles into the sky before plunging back down. At maximum elevation—forty-five degrees—the trajectory was almost like an artillery piece firing over a mountain.

The shells fell around Nowaki. One salvo straddled her—shells landing to port and starboard. Splinters from near misses caused casualties and minor damage, but she was too fast, too far, pulling away.

At 35,700 yards—20.3 statute miles—New Jersey fired what would be the final salvo of the engagement.

It was a straddle.

One shell splashed into the ocean to Nowaki’s port side, another to starboard. The destroyer disappeared into rain squalls and opened the range.

She would escape.

But the point had been made.

Twenty-three miles had been listed as the theoretical maximum range of the Iowa-class guns. 20.3 miles was the confirmed combat firing—the longest-range gunnery engagement between surface vessels ever recorded. A record that stands today and will likely stand forever, as no navy builds battleships anymore.

The auxiliary cruiser Akagi Maru never even made it to the surface engagement. Carrier aircraft had caught her hours earlier—three direct bomb hits and massive internal explosions. She was abandoned and sinking by the time Iowa opened fire on Katori.

The small minesweeping trawler Shonan Maru No. 15 tried to run, then tried to fight. The destroyer Burns dispatched her with five-inch gunfire.

Like Katori and Maikaze, there were no survivors.

Four ships: one escaped, three destroyed.

In the span of ninety minutes, American surface vessels had demonstrated something Japanese naval planners had never quite believed possible—accurate, devastating fire from ranges that exceeded anything in their doctrine, their training, or their experience.

But here’s where the story deepens.

Because this wasn’t just about range. It wasn’t just about hitting ships from twenty miles away. Though that was remarkable enough, what made the engagement at Truk truly significant—what made it a watershed moment in naval warfare—was what it revealed about the fundamental assumptions underlying Japanese naval strategy, and how catastrophically wrong those assumptions had been.

The Imperial Japanese Navy had not been complacent. They had not been ignorant. They had studied their potential enemy extensively. Japanese naval attachés in Washington before the war had filed detailed reports. They knew the specifications of American battleships. They knew about radar. They knew, in technical terms, what the systems could do.

What they didn’t grasp—what they couldn’t quite internalize until it was demonstrated in combat—was the magnitude of the advantage these systems conferred.

Consider the math.

In a traditional gunnery engagement using optical rangefinders, a battleship might need to fire twenty, thirty, even forty salvos to score hits on a maneuvering target at extreme range. The first salvos were for ranging—finding the distance—then corrections for wind, for the target’s speed and course. The process was iterative, slow, and consumed enormous amounts of ammunition, and it only worked if you could see the target clearly.

The Mark 8 fire-control radar, combined with the rangekeeper analog computer, collapsed this process. The first salvo might miss, but the second or third would straddle and the fourth would hit.

Iowa had fired forty-six sixteen-inch shells at Katori. In a fifteen-minute engagement, this was an extraordinarily efficient expenditure. Prewar estimates suggested that scoring decisive hits on a cruiser-sized target at maximum range might require two hundred shells or more.

The Japanese had built their battleships differently. The Yamato-class—the pride of the fleet—mounted eighteen-inch guns, the largest naval rifles ever put to sea. Each shell weighed 3,200 pounds, heavier than anything the Americans could fire, and the theoretical maximum range was slightly greater than even the Iowa class.

On paper, the Yamato class outgunned anything afloat.

But range without accuracy is just wasted ammunition.

And the fire-control systems on Yamato and Musashi, while sophisticated by the standards of optical rangefinding, were a generation behind American radar-directed systems.

The Japanese had radar, but it wasn’t integrated into fire control the way American systems were. Radar data had to be manually entered into the fire-control calculations. This took time—precious seconds—that, at maximum range, could mean the difference between a hit and a miss.

More critically, Japanese naval doctrine had never emphasized long-range gunnery. The decisive battle—the Kantai Kessen they had trained for—was expected to occur at closer ranges: ten miles, twelve miles, distances where optical rangefinders worked well and where crew training and fighting spirit could tip the balance. Engaging at twenty miles wasn’t just difficult; it was considered wasteful.

Better to close the range, they believed, and fight where Japanese superiority in night fighting and torpedo tactics could be brought to bear.

Truk shattered this illusion.

But by February 1944, illusions were all Japan had left.

The strategic situation in the Pacific had already turned decisively against them. Guadalcanal had been evacuated a year earlier. The Central Pacific drive was underway. The Marshall Islands had just fallen. Truk itself—once considered impregnable—had been bypassed and neutralized in a single devastating strike.

And now, even in surface combat—the one arena where Japanese naval officers still believed their battleships might prevail through superior training and fighting spirit—American technological superiority had proven overwhelming: ships firing from beyond visual range, hitting targets with a precision that seemed almost supernatural.

To officers who had spent their careers training for close-range gunnery duels, it was a bitter revelation.

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After the engagement, Task Group 50.9 returned to the fleet.

The butcher’s bill was tallied.

American losses: zero. Not a single hit sustained. Not even a near miss that caused damage.

Japanese losses: three warships sunk, one damaged and barely escaped. Over eight hundred Japanese sailors dead.

The material victory was significant, but the psychological impact would prove even more important.

News of the engagement filtered back to Tokyo through surviving crew members of Nowaki and through Japanese coastwatchers who had observed parts of the action. The reports were confused, fragmentary, but one fact stood out: American battleships had engaged at ranges Japanese doctrine considered impractical, and they had scored hits quickly—efficiently—devastatingly.

For Japanese naval planners, this was deeply troubling.

They had known, theoretically, that American technology was advanced. They had known their industrial capacity dwarfed Japan’s.

But the assumption had always been that in actual combat, factors would even out. Japanese crews were more experienced. Japanese fighting spirit was superior. Japanese tactics, developed through years of rigorous training, would compensate for any material disadvantage.

Truk demonstrated that this was wishful thinking.

Superior fighting spirit couldn’t compensate for being hit by shells fired from beyond visual range. Excellent crew training didn’t matter if the enemy could calculate firing solutions faster and more accurately than any human crew could manage with optical sights alone, and superior tactics were meaningless if the enemy could engage at ranges where those tactics couldn’t even be employed.

The engagement also highlighted another, even more fundamental problem.

By February 1944, Japan had already lost the naval war—not in the sense of a single decisive battle, but through attrition: through the steady, grinding destruction of their merchant fleet by American submarines; through the loss of carriers at Midway, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippine Sea; through the loss of trained pilots, who couldn’t be replaced at anything approaching the rate the Americans were producing new aviators.

The battle of Truk—if it can even be called a battle—was a footnote: three Japanese ships sunk. Strategically insignificant.

But symbolically, it was devastating, because it proved that even in surface combat— even in the arena where battleships were supposed to reign supreme—American technology had rendered Japanese numerical and qualitative advantages meaningless.

Let’s talk about those Iowa-class battleships, because understanding what they were—and, more importantly, what they represented—is crucial to understanding why Truk mattered.

USS Iowa (BB-61) was commissioned in February 1943. She was the lead ship of her class. Six ships were planned. Four were completed: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Two were canceled before construction finished.

They were the last battleships the United States Navy would ever build.

They were fast—thirty-three knots, faster than most cruisers. That speed came at a cost. To achieve it, the hull had to be long and relatively narrow: 887 feet long, but only 108 feet at the beam. This gave them a sleek profile, but it also meant they were less heavily armored than the preceding South Dakota class.

The armor was carefully designed, concentrated on vital areas. The main belt was twelve and one-quarter inches thick. The turret faces were seventeen inches—enough to protect against sixteen-inch shells at most combat ranges, but not invulnerable.

The main battery was nine sixteen-inch, fifty-caliber Mark 7 guns. The designation fifty-caliber means the barrel was fifty times the diameter of the bore: fifty times sixteen inches equals eight hundred inches—sixty-six point seven feet. Nearly seventy feet of rifled steel barrel.

Each gun weighed 267,900 pounds, with the breech mechanism over 120 tons.

They fired two types of shells: the armor-piercing Mark 8 at 2,700 pounds, and the high-capacity Mark 13 at 1,900.

A full broadside—all nine guns firing simultaneously—threw nearly twelve tons of steel and explosive.

The rate of fire was approximately two rounds per gun per minute, though in practice sustained fire was slightly slower due to the time needed to reload the massive shells and powder charges.

The powder charges themselves were remarkable: six silk bags per gun, each containing 110 pounds of smokeless powder. The bags were handled with extreme care. Any spark, any static electricity, could cause a catastrophic explosion.

The powder was sensitive enough that temperature variations had to be accounted for in the firing calculations. Warmer powder burned slightly faster, altering muzzle velocity and thus range and trajectory.

The secondary battery was twenty five-inch/38-caliber dual-purpose guns. These could engage both surface targets and aircraft. At nearly nine statute miles range, they could hit destroyers or shore targets, and with proximity-fused shells, they could create air bursts deadly to incoming aircraft.

Rounding out the armament were dozens of 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns.

But the real weapon—the system that made everything else possible—was the fire control.

Two Mark 38 directors controlled the main battery. Each director contained a Mark 8 fire-control radar and a complex optical rangefinder as backup. The directors fed data into the Mark 1A fire-control computer—a mechanical analog marvel weighing several tons and containing thousands of precisely machined gears, cams, and linkages.

The computer solved differential equations in real time. It calculated the ballistic trajectory of shells in three dimensions. It accounted for the curvature of the Earth, the Coriolis effect caused by the planet’s rotation, air density variations at different altitudes, the drift of the ship caused by wind and current, and, critically, it predicted where the target would be by the time the shells arrived.

This was revolutionary.

Previous fire-control systems required manual calculation and constant adjustment. The Mark 1A did it automatically, continuously, updating the firing solution several times per second.

The result was that Iowa could fire accurately at targets she couldn’t even see with optical rangefinders—in fog, at night, beyond the horizon. As long as radar could detect the target, the guns could engage it.

The engagement at Truk demonstrated this capability in combat for the first time.

And it terrified the Japanese.

They realized that their most powerful battleships—Yamato and Musashi—despite their heavier armor and bigger guns, couldn’t match it.

The biggest guns in the world were useless if they couldn’t hit what they aimed at. The thickest armor was meaningless if the enemy could fire accurately from ranges where return fire was ineffective.

But here’s the deepest irony—the one that makes this story not just a tale of technological superiority, but a parable about the nature of warfare itself.

By the time Iowa demonstrated the supremacy of radar-directed gunnery, battleships were already obsolete.

The engagement at Truk was the only time Iowa or New Jersey ever fired their main guns at enemy surface vessels in anger during World War II—the only time.

Aircraft carriers had already proven themselves the decisive weapon. At the Coral Sea, at Midway, at the Philippine Sea, at Leyte Gulf—the largest naval battle in history—battleships fired their guns, but the battle was decided by aircraft.

By 1944, the battleship’s role had been reduced to shore bombardment, anti-aircraft escort for carriers, and, occasionally, hunting down damaged or inferior enemy vessels.

The Iowa-class ships were, in a sense, the ultimate expression of a dying weapon system: faster, more accurate, more sophisticated than any battleships that had come before, but still battleships—still tied to a mode of warfare aircraft had rendered obsolete.

They were magnificent anachronisms, built to fight a war that no longer existed.

This is what the Japanese admirals never fully understood. It wasn’t just that Iowa’s guns could hit from twenty-three miles. It was that hitting from twenty-three miles didn’t matter anymore—not when carrier aircraft could strike from two hundred miles; not when a single carrier could project more destructive power than an entire battleship squadron.

The question wasn’t whether Japanese battleships could match American battleships in a gunnery duel.

The question was whether battleships mattered at all.

And the answer, by mid-1944, was increasingly no.

Yamato and Musashi would both be sunk by aircraft—Yamato in April 1945 on a one-way suicide mission to Okinawa; Musashi at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Neither ship ever engaged an enemy battleship. Their massive eighteen-inch guns—the most powerful naval artillery ever mounted on a warship—fired at aircraft, at destroyers, but never at the American battleships they were designed to destroy.

The Iowa-class ships had longer careers.

They were reactivated for Korea, where they provided shore bombardment. New Jersey saw service in Vietnam. All four were brought back into service in the 1980s, modernized with cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles.

They fired their guns in combat for the last time during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when Missouri and Wisconsin bombarded Iraqi positions in Kuwait.

But even then they were relics—impressive relics—floating museums of a bygone era. The cruise missiles they carried had longer range and greater accuracy than their sixteen-inch guns. Aircraft flying from carriers hundreds of miles away delivered more ordnance, more precisely. The battleships were kept in service partly for shore bombardment, partly for intimidation value, and partly because no one quite knew what else to do with them.

Now all four are museum ships: Iowa in Los Angeles; New Jersey in Camden; Missouri in Pearl Harbor—appropriately moored near where the war began; Wisconsin in Norfolk.

Visitors can walk their decks, stand in the turrets, marvel at the machinery.

But the era they represent is gone.

The age of the battleship ended not with a dramatic last stand, but with a quiet acknowledgment that other weapons were simply more effective.

The engagement at Truk stands as a peculiar moment in this transition: a demonstration of technological superiority in a weapon system that was already being superseded.

Japanese admirals were shocked that Iowa could hit from twenty-three miles, but they should have been more concerned about the carriers that had destroyed 250 aircraft and dozens of ships earlier that same day.

Still, for the men who served on Iowa—for the crew who loaded the shells and fired the guns and maintained the machinery—Truk was proof that their ship, their weapons mattered; that they weren’t just along for the ride while aircraft did the real fighting.

For ninety minutes on February 17, 1944, battleships were relevant again. Guns mattered, and the skills and systems they had trained on—the massive technological apparatus of radar and computers and precision engineering—had proven themselves in combat.

Captain McCrae wrote in his action report that the engagement demonstrated the effectiveness of radar-directed fire control at extended ranges. He noted that Katori had been quickly destroyed despite her attempts at evasion and that the Japanese return fire had been ineffective.

He recommended that future surface engagements employ maximum-range radar-directed fire as standard doctrine.

His recommendations were noted, and then quietly filed away.

Because by the time the report reached Washington, planners were already focusing on the invasion of the Marianas, on carrier operations, on submarine warfare—on everything except battleship-versus-battleship combat, which seemed increasingly unlikely to ever occur again.

For the Japanese, the lessons of Truk were learned too late to matter.

Reports reached the Naval General Staff in Tokyo. Engineers studied what little information could be gleaned from survivors. They finally understood how far behind they had fallen in fire-control technology. Plans were drawn up to retrofit Japanese battleships with improved systems.

But by early 1944, Japan lacked the industrial capacity, the resources, and, most critically, the time to implement such upgrades.

The war was already lost.

Truk had demonstrated it—not because of the four ships sunk, but because of what those sinkings represented: American technology, American industry, American systems—superior across every dimension of naval warfare: fire control, radar, damage control, logistics, industrial production, pilot training, codebreaking.

The Japanese could still fight. Their sailors were still brave. Their ships were still dangerous.

But bravery and danger couldn’t compensate for an overwhelming superiority in every measurable category.

One Japanese naval officer interviewed after the war described the feeling when news of Truk reached fleet headquarters:

“We knew then,” he said, “that we were fighting a war we had already lost. Not just the battle, but the war. They could do things we couldn’t do, build things we couldn’t build, and they could do it faster and better. We had hoped that fighting spirit would compensate. After Truk, we knew it wouldn’t.”

This realization spread through the Combined Fleet—not all at once, not uniformly. Some officers still believed in the possibility of a decisive battle. Some still thought that one great victory—one crushing blow—could force the Americans to negotiate.

But increasingly, the prevailing mood was fatalistic.

The question wasn’t whether Japan would lose. It was when, and at what cost.

The final tally from Operation Hailstone makes for grim reading.

From the Japanese perspective: over two hundred aircraft destroyed; three light cruisers sunk; six destroyers sunk; numerous smaller warships and auxiliary vessels destroyed; thirty-two merchant ships and transports totaling over 200,000 tons sent to the bottom.

All accomplished in two days, with American losses of twenty-one aircraft and approximately one hundred casualties.

Truk—once considered the Gibraltar of the Pacific—was rendered useless. The garrison remained cut off, starving, until the end of the war.

But as a functioning base, it ceased to exist on February 18, 1944.

And the surface engagement—the ninety-minute gun battle that sank Katori and Maikaze and demonstrated the Iowa-class battleship’s capabilities—was almost forgotten in the larger destruction.

Almost, but not quite.

Because for the men who served on Iowa and New Jersey—for the officers and crews who loaded those shells and fired those guns and watched through binoculars as enemy ships burned and sank—it mattered.

It proved that their ship, their weapons, their training had value.

That even in a war dominated by aircraft carriers and submarines, there was still a place for the big guns.

They were wrong.

Of course, history would prove them wrong.

But in that moment—northwest of Truk, with smoke rising from the lagoon behind them, the record for longest-range naval gunfire engagement set, and likely never to be broken—they had every right to believe they mattered.

Thank you for watching. For more detailed historical breakdowns, check out the other videos on your screen now.

“This content is documentary and historical in nature, focusing on war for educational purposes; it does not glorify or encourage violence.”