A crew member of a U.S. Navy PT boat, just off the New Guinea coast in July 1943, mans a Mark 17 manually operated scarf-ring turret armed with a pair of AN/M2 .50-cal. machine guns.
“Some United States soldiers in the Pacific theater in World War II used the word lollapalooza as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people would often pronounce both letters L and R as rolled Rs. In Oliver Gramling’s Free Men are Fighting: The Story of World War II (1942) the author notes that, in the war, Japanese spies would often approach checkpoints posing as American or Filipino military personnel. A shibboleth such as “lollapalooza” would be used by the sentry, who, if the first two syllables come back as rorra, would “open fire without waiting to hear the remainder”.
