The U.S. Air Force plans to reactivate the Pacific island airfield from which it launched atomic bombings of Japan in World War II as it seeks to expand basing options in the event of hostilities with China.
According to US Air Force plans, the North Airport on the island of Tinian will become an “extended” facility once the work to restore it is completed. The last units of the US Army Air Force left the base in 1946.
The Air Force is also adding facilities at Tinian International Airport in the center of the island.
The importance of Tinian
Tinian is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific, about 6,000 kilometers (3,700 mi) west of Hawaii. Only about 3,000 people live on the 39 square mile island.
Tinian, along with the nearby islands of Saipan and Guam, has a rich history of US air operations. During World War II, all three islands, after being captured by the Japanese, were home to fleets of B-29 Superfortress bombers that wreaked havoc on Japanese soil.
The deadliest bombing raid in history, the March 10, 1945 bombing of Tokyo that killed up to 100,000 people and injured a million, was carried out by B-29s launched from the three islands. During the relentless bombing of Japan in 1945, North Field at Tinian, with its four 8,000-foot runways and 40,000 personnel, became the largest and busiest airport in the world.
North Field sealed its place in history on August 6, 1945, when, at dawn, a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay began its Runway Able carrying the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima later that morning, killing 70,000 people .
This mission ushered in the nuclear age. Three days later, another B-29, named Bockscar, would take off from Tinian to drop an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing 46,000 people in the initial blast.
A historical past, modern uses
The US Air Force budget request for fiscal year 2024 shows that $78 million has been sought for construction projects on the island of Tinian. The restoration project is part of the U.S. Army’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy (https://www.doctrine.af.mil/Portals/61/documents/AFDN_1-21/AFDN%201-21%20ACE.pdf) , which according to an Air Force doctrine document “shifts operations from centralized physical infrastructure to a network of smaller, dispersed sites that can complicate the planning of adversary and provide more options for joint force commanders’.
Much of US air power in the Pacific is concentrated at a few large air bases, such as Andersen Air Force Base in Guam or Kadena Air Force Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. A strike on these bases could cripple the US military’s ability to strike back at an adversary if too much US air power was concentrated there.
And as China, the country the Pentagon identifies as its “accelerating threat,” increases its missile forces, the Air Force is looking for places to disperse its fleet to make targeting more difficult.
