Operation Hailstone
Truk Lagoon, often considered by some as the Japanese equivalent of Pearl Harbor, was attacked by US carrier aircraft in Operation Hailstone in 1944. Beforehand the Combined Fleet evacuated their major units - carriers, battleships, and heavy cruisers - so the only warships lost were two light cruisers and four destroyers. Nonetheless the Japanese shipping losses totalled almost 200,000 tons including auxiliaries and cargo ships which hampered logistics, particularly serious was the loss of valuable fleet oilers. The US strikes damaged Truk's dockyards, communications centers, the submarine base, and supply dumps including destroying 17,000 tons of stored fuel, while Pearl Harbor's equivalents were largely untouched in the 1941 attack. Afterward Operation Hailstone, the US went on to isolate the whole area of operations with submarine and air attacks, severing Japanese shipping lanes between empire waters and critical fuel supplies to the south.