TIME Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.

Current subscribers for full access. Not a TIME subscriber? .

World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF JAPAN: Bull's-Eye

(See Cover)

For the first time, Japan's home islands saw a U.S. fleet and felt the lightning strokes of its big guns. While a thousand carrier planes swirled over the homeland, battleships, cruisers and destroyers stood in toward shore.

There was nothing to stop them. Three miles from the beaches they squared off to subject Japan to an indignity without precedent. A great steel plant, only 275 miles from Tokyo, was hammered by the warships' guns. And that was only a be ginning; a day later the Americans struck again. Battleships sailed into...

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.