Word: jima
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Fire Bombs. This made for safer as well as for more powerful operation. The morale of the air crews rose. Then the Marines (after 22,500 casualties) captured Iwo Jima, halfway between Saipan and Tokyo. Iwo had been intended primarily as a base for P-51 fighters which would accompany the B-29s over Japan. But Iwo turned out to be even more valuable as a rescue station where crippled or gas-shy B-29s could settle down on the way back from Japan...
...shot down in enemy waters can be rescued. One P-51 pilot was caught by Jap PT boats after they had damaged a Dumbo and driven off a submarine. Shore guns killed another fighter pilot only 100 yards off Chichi Jima in a Higgins boat after it had been dropped to him. But, between June 1944 and June 1945, the Navy alone saved 2,100 of its pilots and crewmen...
...capture of Iwo Jima last March provided an ideal Dumbo base. Nowadays the rescue planes leave for their assigned areas as regularly as the bombers and fighters take off. The first boat, containing a "Gibson Girl" hand-cranked radio, was dropped May 30 to the crew of a plane shot up over Yokohama. Four crewmen drowned but seven were saved. With Okinawa also in U.S. hands a downed airman has an excellent chance of survival, even on the shores of Japan-unless Jap soldiers or fanatical civilians catch him first...
This partially solved jigsaw puzzle still left out some stray pieces: the Army's Seventh Fighter Command, a part of the Seventh Air Force, is based mostly on Iwo Jima and under Navy command. It escorts not MacArthur's nor Nimitz' planes over Japan, but Spaatz...
...marines who took Iwo Jima last March called the eight-square-mile volcanic island a beachhead in hell. Sulfur fumes belched from fissures in the steaming rocks. Rumbling noises echoed from the bowels of the harsh, scarred earth. Ugly Iwo cost 22,000 casualties, including 5,445 killed...