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…
58th Bombardment Wing HQ, Kharagpur, India • January 15, 1945 The final strategic bombing raid by American B‑29 Superfortress heavy-bombers based in China occurred on this date in 1945. Targets of Operation Matterhorn, as the bombing of Japanese assets by India- and China-based B‑29s was called, were on the Japanese-occupied island of Formosa (today’s Taiwan). Behind Operation…
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…
Saipan, Marianas, Central Pacific · July 6, 1944 The Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944) was a pivotal U.S. naval victory, effectively eliminating Japan’s ability to both conduct large-scale carrier actions and reinforce its garrisons to the east in the Marianas. The most important islands in the Mariana chain were Guam (an American…
Aboard Admiral Spruance’s Flagship USS Indianapolis · April 1, 1945 For weeks the largest Allied fleet since D‑Day—nearly 1,500 U.S. and British vessels—fired 2.3 million shells onto Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago and a little more than 300 miles/483 km from Kyūshū and Shikoku, the southernmost Japanese Home Islands. Kyūshū and Shikoku were home to many…
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…
Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands · March 14, 1945 On this date in 1945 the U.S. flag was raised over the 8.1‑sq‑mile/21‑sq‑km island of Iwo Jima in a formal flag-raising ceremony. The Battle of Iwo Jima (February 19 to March 26, 1945)—a battle for the isolated and barren Japanese-held island lying some 760 miles/1,223 km southeast of Tokyo—was the most…
Tokyo, Japan · March 9, 1945 Apart from Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s April 1942 raid on the Japanese capital, Tokyo, early air raids on Japan focused on military and industrial targets with disappointing results. So U.S. Army Air Forces Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, a veteran of the horrific air campaign over Nazi Germany, filled each…
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….