8 July 1942
Marines at Palmyra struggling, probable enemy carrier response
Hawaii and Line Islands
My heavy task force shelled Lahaina again, then left the area to the east. Heavy bombers hit the airbase and port again during the day. The base looks like it's in really bad shape. We destroyed 6 more aircraft on the ground and everything else looks disabled. In the port, we hit a tender 3 times, should be more than enough to sink it.
A PBY reported successfully bombing an enemy submarine near Oahu.
The Marines on Oahu made another push, but ended up taking greater losses despite the poor supply situation of the Japanese invaders--officially 917 to 722 favoring us but we had more squads destroyed.
We tried to overrun Palmyra too, but the enemy turned our marines back, 176 troop casualties on our side with just one enemy tank destroyed. A lot of their defense are tanks, and a lot of our Wolverine tank destroyers were disabled during the landing. I'm resting our boys tomorrow to try to get those back online, we should get a bombardment from Warspite and Colorado to keep the enemy's heads down while we do that. B-26 raids continue daily.
We got another report of aircraft from our picket subs in the Marshalls, this time they reported the contact as a Kate. So, we probably do have at least one enemy carrier on the way. My amphibious task force is offloading at Pearl, hopefully we'll have them empty and gone in time. Wasp (Pearl) and Lexington (Palmyra) are bugging out.
China
Not a great day in the Chenghow area; the Zeroes shot down 3 P-40s, 3 P-43s and a Wellington (that flew unescorted despite the available/assigned P-40s). We only got 3 Zeroes.
Reinforcements
SS S-30 arrives at San Diego
