Hancock (CV 19) - Naval Cruise Book

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Hannah Reels Under Air' Attack ' The record set by Air Group Eighty for the day's operations surpassed the old :one set by the Lexington in l9-43 at the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Six strikes from the Hannah's decks knocked seventy-one confirmed enemy planes out of the sky plus eighteen probables and twenty-seven damaged. On the l7th a total of twelve more confirmed enemy planes were turned in as American planes literally took over Japanese sky lanes. Planes that fell to the flaming guns of Air Group Eighty were not easy kills. They rep- resented everything the Japs could find t-o fight off the carrier's crippling air strikes. Of the seventy-one planes that fell there were seventeen Zekes, four Vals, sixteen Oscars, six Tojos, two Bettys, two Dinohs and five Tonys. Leaving the oirfields impotent on the big home islands, the Hannah swung south once more to hit lwo Jima, 700 miles south of Tokyo. Iwo had provided the Japanese with a vital staging point for raids on the 'huge B-29 fields at Saipan, Guam and Tinian. The small flat island provided the enemy with two airstrips and important air-search radar stations beamed from .Mount Suribachi's 54l foot summit. Superforts raiding the home islands from the Marianas were forced to digress from direct air routes to prevent the prema- ture alerting of Jap air defenses. At 0900 on February l9th, the Fourth and Fifth Divisions of the Fifth Am- phibious Corps, United States Marines, landed :on the east coast of lwo Jima.