Word: saipan
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...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 the Hump from India; airfields had to be handmade by half a million coolie laborers; it was over 1,600 miles to Japanese soil...
Second Stage. Saipan was ready by Nov. 24, when 100 B-29s took off on the first 1,500-mile raid on Tokyo. (A coordinated carrier strike had been called off because of 1) the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea and 2) the alarm inspired by increasing Kamikaze attacks.) By January 1945, when Trouble-Shooter LeMay came out of China to take over the Marianas operations, three wings composed of about 300 B-29s were operating or being organized, and 14 missions had been flown. The China-based force was later transferred to the Marianas...
LeMay found more planes and plenty of gasoline on Guam, Saipan and Tinian. He also found plenty of trouble...
...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...
...last week B-29s to the number of 2,000 had pulled up at Iwo. Some of them could have made it back to Saipan, but their pilots took no chances. Many more would have been lost on the way home. B-29 crews blessed the Marines, named some of their planes for Marine divisions...