Battle of the Pips

The Battle of the Pips is the name given to an incident on 27 July 1943, part of the Aleutian campaign of World War II. In preparation for the amphibious assault on the island of Kiska planned for August 1943, the U.S. Navy formed Task Group 16.22 (TG 16.22) under command of Rear Admiral Robert M. Griffin, centered on the battleships USS Mississippi (BB-41) and USS Idaho (BB-42).

Radar contact
On 27 July, 80 mi west of Kiska, TG 16.22 began to pick up a series of unknown radar contacts. The order was given to open fire, and 518 14 in shells were fired from both battleships, but there were no hits.

Radar was still a new and unreliable technology at that time, and weather conditions around the Aleutians were characteristically bad, with the very poor visibility normal for the area. No Japanese surface warships were actually within 200 mi. Author Brian Garfield surmises, based on analysis by modern Aleutian fishing-boat captains, that the pips were rafts of sooty or short-tailed shearwaters, species of migratory petrel that pass through the Aleutians in July every year.