I confess I did not go to Tinian. The process involved going to the airport, being weighed with all of your belongings and then put on a specific spot on a 6 seater plane. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but the tour was mostly of the air strips and other places that were directly in the Mariana sunshine. It was so hot and humid so that’s the day I actually took the beach pictures.
However, the lecture on Tinian was actually very interesting. The island of Tinian is about the size of Manhattan and was taken by Americans for the sole purpose of expanding the runways so that the B 29 Bombers could take off and land there, being within the 1500 mile range to Japan. The battle was at the end of July/first of August in 1944 and the Seabees (Gregg’s grandpa was a Seabee) built out the runways and had B29s landing there by October.
And of course, this was where the Enola Gay took off to drop the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima. But backing up before that, the Americans were firebombing Tokyo and other primary cities, then secondary cities and then tertiary cities. But still the Japanese would not surrender. Even after the Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the Japanese did not surrender. I didn’t know that the reason is that they suspected that the Americans only had the 1 bomb (we had two), and that the leadership wanted to arrange the terms of surrender so that the Emperor could stay in power. So all of that death and destruction to save one man’s job. But then the Bockscar dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki and the Japanese ended up surrendering days later on the USS Missouri. The lecturer (James M. Scott) says that people remember the bomb on Hiroshima, but really it was the one that landed at Nagasaki that was the important one.
Anyway, Gregg toured the runway (yeeha), the fuel dumps, the tiny landing beach and a couple of memorial sites. The other thing that was interesting is that the atomic bombs were so large, that they had to be lowered into the ground and then brought up into the plane from underneath, much like getting your oil changed at Jiffy Lube.
When the group arrived back from the tour, I took one look at them and knew I had made the right decision. They were all completely wilted and exhausted from the extreme heat and humidity on Tinian, with very little shade. Unlike my very lovely beach umbrella seat by the ocean. Nope, I don’t regret it a bit.
~Dawn
