The U.S. Air Force plans to reopen the Pacific island airfield that launched the atomic bomb against Japan** to expand base options in the event of hostilities with China, the U.S. Air Force Pacific Senior** said.
On March 31, 1945, the Northern Mariana Islands, a view of the North Airport on Tinian Islands, when it was the world's busiest airfield, General Kenneth Wells**, commander of Pacific Air Forces, told Nikkei Asia in an interview published this week that Tinian's North Airport would become a "large airport" once it was recovered from the jungle. The base has been abandoned since 1946, when the last U.S. Army Air Force unit abandoned it.
"If you pay attention in the coming months, you're going to see significant progress, especially in northern Tinian," Wells said. The Air Force has also set up additional facilities at Tinian International Airport in the center of the island.
Pacific Air Force confirmed Wells**'s comments to CNN, but said it had not released official information on the matter.
In January 2020, at Tinian North Airport, the last runway used during World War II was still clearly visible. Tinian, part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, is a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean, located about 6000 kilometers west of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The 39-square-mile island is inhabited by only about 3,000 people.
According to Nikkei, Wells did not give a timeline for when the airport will be operational.
Tinian, along with the nearby islands of Saipan and **, has a rich history of U.S. air operations.
After the three islands were seized from the Japanese occupiers during World War II, they became the base for a fleet of B-29 Superfortress bombers, causing great damage to the Japanese mainland.
On March 10, 1945, the deadliest bombing raid in history was carried out by B-29 bombers taking off from three islands against Tokyo, killing up to 100,000 people and wounding a million.
During the relentless bombing of Japan in 1945, Tinian North Airport, with its four 8,000-foot runways and 40,000 staff, became the largest and busiest airport in the world.
The B-29 took off from Tinian, the plane loaded an atomic bomb codenamed "Little Boy" On August 6, 1945, Kitada Airport left its place in history when, in the early morning darkness, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay slipped off the runway and carried an atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima later that morning, killing 70,000 people and bringing the world into the nuclear age.
Three days later, another B-29, named Bokska, would take off from Tinian Island and drop an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing 46,000 people for the first time.
The crater in Tinian's North Field is covered by a wall from which B-29 bombers loaded atomic bombs when Hiroshima was bombed in August 1945. The U.S. Air Force's FY 2024 budget request shows that $78 million has been sought for construction projects in Tinian.
The reclamation project is part of the U.S. strategy's agile operational deployment strategy, with an Air Force doctrine document saying that "shifting combat operations from centralized physical infrastructure to smaller, dispersed networks of locations could complicate adversary plans and provide more options for joint operations."
Most of the U.S. air power in the Pacific is concentrated at a few large air bases, such as Andersen Air Force Base in ** or Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.
If too much U.S. air power is concentrated at these bases, strikes at these bases could weaken the U.S. military's ability to fight back against adversaries.
As China, which the Pentagon considers a "pacing threat," continues to build up its missile power, the U.S. Air Force is looking for places to disperse its fleet to make it more difficult to target targets.
According to a 2022 article by the Air Force Aviation University, the U.S. Agile Operational Deployment helps mitigate the (Chinese) threat by using a hub-and-spoke base configuration to disperse forces across the theater of operations, thereby providing service invisibility and requiring the People's Liberation Army to spend more missiles in response to the impact of reducing U.S. Air Force air power. ”
In January 2020, the North Airport of Tinian Island saw the ruins of World War II-era buildings. Wells told Nikkei: "You've created an aiming problem, and you might actually get some hits, but your superior forces will still have an impact. ”
The Air Force has put the U.S. Agile Operational Deployment Concept into practice in Tinian, including the deployment of F-22** fighter jets from its international airport during the Agile Reaper exercise in March.
The airfield provides an environment in which U.S. fighter jets can rely only on supplies they carry themselves or that can fly through C-17 transport aircraft, while demonstrating that they are "ready and capable of operating in a highly competitive, degraded and operationally constrained environment." The Air Force statement said.
During the "agile harvest", the F-22 also took off at **, 200 km south of Tinian.