Word: kyushu
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...Beginning. The first B-29 mission against Japan was flown June 15, 1944, when 68 planes from Chengtu, deep in China, bombed the Yawata Steel Works on Kyushu. The communiqué said hopefully that results were "effective." Four planes were lost on this pioneering mission. A total of 49 missions was flown from China, India and Burma bases, but B-29 men knew from the start that the invasion of the Marianas (begun at Saipan, also June 15) was far more important for their purposes. For in China every bomb, every gallon of gasoline had to be flown over...
Current Operations. For the moment, at any rate, air power was working grimly on Japan. Planes from General George C. Kenney's Far Eastern Air Force moved up to Okinawa,* and joined in operations against Kyushu. Iwo-based P-51 Mustangs strafed Tokyo's "protective" airfields, against no airborne opposition. Blockading aircraft from Fleet Air Wing 1 sank six Jap ships off China and Korea...
...Superforts sent fingers of flame and explosive probing deep into the sources of enemy war power. Two small attacks searched out key Japanese oil plants. Two big raids hit airplane factories and ports on Kyushu and Honshu. It was the middle cities, the Patersons, Wichitas and Tacomas of Japan, that now heard the crump of bombs, the crackle of fire...
Then, as the new week began, Major General Curtis LeMay wound up and pitched the biggest Superfort strike yet. Nearly 600 planes dropped 4,000 tons of fire bombs on four new targets in Kyushu and the toe of Honshu. The Japs could begin counting off Kure, greatest naval base on the Inland Sea; Ube, coal and magnesium center; Shimonoseki, seaport; Kumamoto, military and industrial city...
Less than two months after the aircraft carrier Franklin had been hit off Kyushu by two Japanese bombs and turned into a floating inferno (TIME, May 28), the same fate befell her elder, more experienced sister, the Bunker Hill. The circumstances were astonishingly similar: the ship was at flight quarters (launching planes). The enemy aircraft dived through the Bunker Hill's own combat air patrol so suddenly that they could not be splashed by U.S. fighters...