Word: tinian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tinian, a 39-sq-mi. island in the Marianas some 1,500 miles south of Japan, U.S. forces had constructed the largest airport in the world, including four parallel, 8,500-ft.-long runways designed for B-29 Superfortresses. Several of the incendiary-bomb raids on Japanese cities staged by Major General Curtis LeMay's XXI Bomber Command began and ended in the Marianas. Members of the 509th unit started arriving at Tinian in June. On July 26, components of Little Boy, the uranium-based bomb that was scheduled to be dropped first, reached Tinian aboard the U.S. warship Indianapolis...
...bulbous bomb, nearly 12 ft. long and 5 ft. in diameter, weighing 10,000 lbs.--was loaded into another of the 509th Group's B-29s at Tinian. The plane and its complement of escorts took off the next morning at 3:47 and headed for Kokura, a city that contained a major weapons arsenal, on the north coast of the island of Kyushu. Finding the target obscured by clouds and facing a fuel shortage on the strike plane, Major Charles W. Sweeney decided to fly over the alternate target on his way to an emergency landing on Okinawa...