December 1944. The flight from Hawaii to West Field, Tinian, Mariana Islands consisted of a gas stop at Johnson Island, then a ten hour hop to the Marshalls, where the squadron RON'd (rest over night) and then on to Tinian.
Photos show the living quarters and squadron personnel during their short stay at West Field.
The following was in a letter my dad wrote to my mother after the censors stopped censoring letters sometime in September '45:
"........Tinian was just being built. It's a B-29 Superfortress base now. They have more B-29s there than they have in the States, almost, but when we were there, they only had B-24s and B-25s, a small bombing plane but they did a lot of damage. At that time we were bombing Leyte from Tinian. On Tinian is where we saw a lot of action.
Christmas and New Years, we got up three or four times a night and when we heard th! e air raid warning, we hit the foxholes. The night before and after Christmas we heard them drop bombs and they got three of our planes. We had "watches" on the planes, but when there's an air raid, they go for the foxholes, so no one got hurt. You should have seen the flames. I bet they could see them across the bay on Saipan.
A few nights before we had our raid, they bombed hell out of Saipan. They got a few B-29s. They were always trying to hit Saipan because of the B-29s. You know they did a lot of damage to Japan and they didn't like them one bit. We would look out in the bay and see them shooting at the planes. They would have big radar lights on them. You could see them when they got hit and go up in flames. They had a loud speaker and the announcer would tell us what was going on and when it got to hot for us, he'd say, "hit the foxholes" and boy we did.
Lots of times the fellows would get up on the hut so they could see over the bay to Saipan and when the guy said, "hit ! the foxholes" you should see them come down off the hut. The noise is enough to scare hell out of you. You should see some of the smart guys, they slept instead of going out in the foxholes. When the boys came off the huts, they (the guys inside) think they've been hit. Nobody seemed to mind the raids. They'd raise hell while the raid was going on.
One night we were just sitting there talking when we heard planes. Then all of a sudden, Osborn said it's a bomb. He was out here before and he knew the sound of a bomb. Did we hit the foxhole. I bet you don't know who was the first in the hole? Yes, it was me and five guys on top of me. I didn't even bother to run for it, I just dove for it. When we were in the hole we were laughing but scared to hell. How we hit the hole is what we were laughing about. Some guys got hit by feet, some because they hit the ground to hard. I was lucky because I was on the bottom....."