Looking down through broken cloud cover, a crewman on a Yorktown TBM Avenger saw “a dainty island with crumpled hills, thickly wooded, sloping down to a neat crazy quilt of tan and green farmland.”16 The island’s economy was chiefly limited to fishing and agriculture; the important crops were sugarcane, rice, sweet potatoes, beets, barley, and cabbages. Cane fields, terraces, and sunken rice paddies took up almost all of the island’s central plains, and a fair portion of the hills.
