Apollo11
Posts: 24082
Joined: 6/7/2001 From: Zagreb, Croatia Status: offline
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Hi all, Here is what history tells us about this: http://www.npca.org/explore_the_parks/new_parks/marianas.asp quote:
By the last year of World War II, North Field was the largest air base in the world. It was the primary staging point for the newly developed long-range B-29 Superfortresses that were capable of making the round trip between Tinian Island, the site of the air base in the Northern Marianas, and Japan. The Enola Gay and Boxcar aircraft took off from North Field to drop their atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The assembly sites for those bombs, located adjacent to North Field, are still intact. Construction of the air base began shortly after Allied forces assaulted Japanese strongholds on Tinian Island in June 1944. The Marianas had been under the control of Japan since the end of World War I, and their position in the Pacific Ocean was of extreme strategic importance to the Allied war effort. North Field was the largest construction project that U.S. Navy Seabees had undertaken up to that time, and it was a major engineering challenge. According to military historical cartographer William Stewart, the Seabees of the 6th and 107th Construction Brigades “dug, blasted, scraped, and moved 11 million cubic yards of earth and coral on Tinian. This quantity of material would fill a line of dump trucks 900 miles long.” Six huge bomber strips were built, each a mile and a half long and a block wide, and each was completed in 53 days or less. North Field was put to immediate use by U.S. airmen of the 504th, 505th, 6th, and 9th B-29 Groups and the 509th Composite Group. It is said that if the Marianas had not been seized from the Japanese and if North Field and other air bases on nearby islands had not been built, the war in the Pacific might have gone on for much longer. This means that there were 2 (two) large ENG units there historically and that they needed 53 days (almost 2 months or 8+ weeks) for each of those 6 airstrips (i.e. to enlarge the existing airbase to accept B-29's). BTW, I believe that this was top priority US project and yet just 2 ENG units were used. Joel Billings (and some helpful WitP BETA's) tested that and they come with few months of work give-or-take in WitP time as well. Unfortunately player in WitP can place as many ENG units he wishes to Tinian and he can significantly shorten that historic time... This is what I am against and only because of this I started this thread (again - the old thread months ago was destroyed by hacker attack on Matrix)... Leo "Apollo11" P.S. [Edit] Sorry for being so passionate about this but this is my "pet" issue...
< Message edited by Apollo11 -- 8/10/2004 7:55:23 PM >
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Prior Preparation & Planning Prevents Pathetically Poor Performance! A & B: WitW, WitE, WbtS, GGWaW, GGWaW2-AWD, HttR, CotA, BftB, CF P: UV, WitP, WitP-AE
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