Tinian, Mariana Islands · March 27, 1945 An island nation, Japan was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food and strategic materials. On this date, March 27, 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy, hoping to put the final nail in the enemy’s coffin, kicked off Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japanese…
Tinian, Mariana Islands · December 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 eighty-six 4-engine B‑29 Superfortresses belonging to XXI Bomber Command, a unit of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force, left the northwestern Pacific Mariana Islands base on Tinian on their third Tokyo bombing mission. Ten days earlier 111 of these heavy bombers had launched the first raid…
Chungking, China · October 31, 1944 The war against the Japanese in China was desultory at best, and service in that theater was viewed as a graveyard by U.S. military and diplomatic officials. On this date, October 31, 1944, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer arrived to replace dismissed Gen. Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell as commander of…
Honolulu, Hawaii · October 29, 1943 In World War II’s Pacific Theater, sea mines—explosive underwater devices that damaged, sank, or deterred Japanese warships, submarines, and maritime commerce—were weapons that had difficulty gaining the same respect as guns, bombs, and torpedoes enjoyed in the U.S. arsenal. Over time, however, a small number of mining advocates in…
Northern Mariana Islands · October 12, 1944 The Pacific Theater was the largest theater of World War II. Because of its watery expanse, Army aviation engineers and Seabees had to build more than 100 airfields on islands that dotted the Pacific Ocean, from New Guinea in the south, up through Guam, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, to Okinawa….
Aboard the U.S. Carrier Shangri-La · July 14, 1945 On this date and the next in 1945, less than four months after the start of the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits, aptly named Operation Starvation, Navy air groups destroyed over…
Chengtu, China · June 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 67 B‑29 Superfortresses took off from their base in Chengtu, mainland China, to release 221 tons of bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the southernmost Japanese Home Island of Kyūshū. This was the first attack on the Japanese homeland…
Tinian, Mariana Islands · March 27, 1945 An island nation, Japan was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food and strategic materials. On this date in 1945 the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy, hoping to put the final nail in the enemy’s coffin, kicked off Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japanese…
Tokyo, Japan · February 24, 1945 The first appearance over Japan in June 1944 of the massive 4‑engine B‑29 bomber—with its service ceiling of 33,000 ft/9,144 m, an operational range of over 3,200 nautical miles/5,926 km, and a maximum takeoff weight of 133,500 lb/60,555 kg—meant that the enemy’s Home Islands were squarely in the crosshairs of the war’s deadliest delivery system….
London, England · January 3, 1943 By the end of 1942 U-boats operating from ports in Germany and occupied Europe had sunk just over 1,160 ships (see Battle of the Atlantic). U‑boats claimed nearly 70 percent of all Allied and neutral shipping losses (about 7.8 million tons), and the Kriegsmarine appeared to be winning the tonnage race,…