Warbird Information Exchange

Makes sense, looking for places to disperse aircraft when, err, I mean if, war breaks out with china.
Stands to reason that other mothballed bases lost to time might be on the to do list as well.


China tensions rising, US revives WWII-era Pacific airfield

Washington (AFP) – In the middle of the Pacific ocean, an abandoned US airfield once key to dropping the nuclear bomb on Japan -- and nearly lost to history amid encroaching forest -- is being revived.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/2 ... c-airfield

I'd love to have been at the Pentagon when this was brought up.
Wonder what their rationale is?
It's not like bombers have to be based in theater...though we might be short of tankers.

Is it any safer or more protected than Guam?
A replacement for Okinawa?
If a numerically well equipped adversary wants us out of the region, all it would do is add to the target list.

I knew we should have kept some of the
B-29/36/47/52/58/FB-111s in storage.

If the B-21 survives a budget axe, we know who to thank....

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Remember the vets, the wonderful planes they flew and their sacrifices for a future many of them did not live to see.

Hi John, and happy new year.
The general in the article said [words to the effect of] We are no longer building any super bases, these reactivated bases will be a place to gas up, get bombs, a bite to eat and maybe stay the night.
So we shall see, as of now they appear to be making staging areas more than anything.

Makes sense, we have these resources, long dormant or not, and should use them.
China is making their artificial islands all over the place, these will make a step towards countering them.
The worse comes, we go to war and lose an aircraft carrier, these will be havens for shipless aircraft. Bases for Special Ops. Okinawa is not all that dependable and a bit close to the heat, so this will give a chance to disperse some of those resources, and completely in the boonies away from prying eyes.

I noticed they are tossing around figures in the $10's of millions, which obviously is chump change compared to the amounts being dumped out for other things including our proxy wars in Ukraine and now Israel, where the figures are $10's of billions. So, so far and from little is known, I think reactivating these bases in a limited fashion is highly sensible and, for once, actually in our national interests.

Will be pretty interesting to see those runways/aprons being reclaimed from the jungle, at least I understand the area is heavily overgrown with foliage with time. Would be nice to think they might find some relics from the past but am doubting there will be much of that, or we'll even hear about it if anything historic is found.
I understand that there are no fewer than 4 runways, all used to handle mass B-29 operations, so obviously this is a very sizeable project, though I don't imagine they'll be looking to reclaim all of them.

I had the chance to go to Tinian in 2010 - we spent a lot of time picking through the overgrowth at North field. Looking at the remains of the 509th area, the bomb construction hut area and the airfield buildings that are still standing. It is an amazing place to have visited!
The USMC cleared runway Bravo or Charlie (IIRC) about a year after I was there in an exercise to see how fast they could bring it back to usable condition for C-130 operations. It will certainly take a fair amount of work to bring the base "back" but certainly a historic place to place an advance base.

Tom P.

Wow, sounds like a dream to me, visiting that island.
Is it [hopefully] uninhabited ?

Around 3,000 people live on the island. Pretty sleepy place, with a few tourists from nearby Saipan. The hotel/Casino that was the main employer shut down several years ago.

I believe Bravo runway was the one used for austere base ops in recent years.

Here are a couple of shots from far away and long ago - August 2010
509th CG monument

My brother (on right) and I - he was maybe 2 months home from his second OEF deployment

Bomb assembly building #3


When I was there the hotel casino was making it's last stand. as I gather, it closed shortly after August 2010. Great people and wonderful community there - wish I could make it back!

Tom P.

It is not unusual for "closed" US Air Force bases to be maintained as future auxiliary fields that can be occupied in an emergency or conflict.

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Cheers!

Lance Jones

I don't think anyone said it was unusual, but now that you've mentioned it, the fact that it is happening is instructive and nearly unprecedented.
If there is a list of WW2 bases in the pacific that have been reactivated after 70 years of dormancy, I'd like to see it. The real motivation for this, it would seem, in China itself building and fortifying fake islands in the region left and right, and this is a fairly recent phenomenon.

I asked about the population because I have seen how locals obliterated and trashed historic WW2 battle sites like Tarawa, Philippines, was hoping the same was not the case here. Of course, time marches on and the locals probably don't care much about what happened 2/3 generations ago [plus they are all pretty much drastically over populated], I understand that, but its sad to see.

The US military's Formosa Strait/Taiwan Strait OPLAN gets rewritten annually.

There is a lot of intellectual horsepower put into wargaming and testing the strategies and tactics of the OPLAN every year, and the lessons learned get pumped right back into the next re-write of the plan.

Needless to say, one of the biggest problems with fighting a Taiwan Strait war is that it is China's home turf while US/Allied forces are operating from long distances away and from only a handful of airfields that are all easily targeted by Chinese theater ballistic missiles.

I would expect that we will see the re-opening of a large number of "old" airfields in the Pacific theater over the next 10-20 years as part of the US's strategic "Pacific pivot".

For those who aren't familiar with US OPLANs:

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2006/06/05/2003311784

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When I was there, 65th Commemoration of Peace in the Pacific, the population on Tinian is quite well informed and proud of thier heritage as a WWII historic site. Now, that said, they really have minimal use of the old base, other than the rare tourist. They do/did keep a few monuments cleared and somewhat maintained at the intersection of "Broadway" and "116th street" and "8th Avenue" and "Riverside Drive" as well as the Seabee memorial on 8th Ave. And at the time, they had cleared off the old hospital area, the bomb assembly building foundations, the foundations for the radio beacon that helped returning bombers locate the island, the Northfield Tower building and cleaned up the Bomb Group memorial area (there is a monument similar to the 509th one for all the groups that were based there.

Tom P.

When I was there, 65th Commemoration of Peace in the Pacific, the population on Tinian is quite well informed and proud of thier heritage as a WWII historic site. Now, that said, they really have minimal use of the old base, other than the rare tourist. They do/did keep a few monuments cleared and somewhat maintained at the intersection of "Broadway" and "116th street" and "8th Avenue" and "Riverside Drive" as well as the Seabee memorial on 8th Ave. And at the time, they had cleared off the old hospital area, the bomb assembly building foundations, the foundations for the radio beacon that helped returning bombers locate the island, the Northfield Tower building and cleaned up the Bomb Group memorial area (there is a monument similar to the 509th one for all the groups that were based there.

Tom P.

Thanks for the info, I did see a video a year or so ago and remember the cleared off bomb pit ,, Was tough to visualize how large an area that must have been to handle all those heavy bombers, so its perfectly understandable that its not going to be maintained just because.
My one big WW2 visit was to Corregidor/Bataan in the late 90's, that was quite a dream and stayed for over a week, also got to explore the famous "Concrete Battleship" Fort Drum, which was a heavily fortified island close to Corregidor ,, Impossible to do now, they closed it off a few years back and its been scrapped nearly into oblivion. Was very dangerous back then and I imagine even more so now to explore there, the lower levels are completely flooded and have not seen the light of day since 1945.

Even Corregidor, as isolated, regulated and officially maintained as it is, hasn't been immune to the scourge of scrappers - The Asian appetite for pre 1945 steel is insatiable, they risk their lives to get it any way possible.