Massive WWII B-29 Bomber Base Fully Reclaimed For Future Pacific Fight

By The War Zone | Created at 2025-02-25 11:54:40 | Updated at 2025-03-04 11:29:38 1 week ago

Satellite imagery shows the extent of the massive amount of work that has been done in the past year to restore more than 20 million square feet of runways and other World War II-era infrastructure at historic North Field on the U.S. island of Tinian in the Western Pacific. The airfield was originally established as a launchpad for B-29 bomber raids on Imperial Japan, including the ones that saw atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The facility has been refurbished to again offer a critical power projection node with its original grid-like layout presenting targeting challenges for a modern opponent, all of which could be especially valuable in a future high-end fight in the region against China.

A series of satellite images of North Field taken between Dec. 3, 2023, and Jan. 29, 2025, by Planet Labs starkly illustrates just how extensive the reconstitution of the derelict airfield has become. The images, as can seen below, show the progressive clearing of the previously overgrown runways, taxiways, and other infrastructure.

Additional satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows the ongoing work to expand Tinian International Airport further to the south of North Field, which is also to support U.S. military operations in the region. As seen below, a very large new apron and adjacent taxiway are being built to the north of the airport’s existing runway. Additional infrastructure, including new fuel storage facilities at Tinian’s main port at the south end of the island, is also included in the divert field project, as you can read more about here.

The U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force have been working together on the military construction across Tinian.

Tinian is one of the 14 islands that comprise the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). It is situated in the Western Pacific some 120 miles northeast of Guam, which is another U.S. territory, but is not part of the CNMI.

At the height of operations in 1945, North Field had four 8,500-foot-long runways and associated taxiways, ramp space for more than 500 B-29s, and other facilities to support the approximately 40,000 personnel stationed at the base, according to the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). U.S. Navy construction battalions, better known as Seabees, led the work to enlarge what had been a far smaller Japanese airfield following the island’s capture in 1944.

“Because the shape of the island was reminiscent of Manhattan, New York, the Seabees laid it out in a pattern, and with place names, based on the city streets there,” per NPS. By the time World War II ended, North Field was the largest airfield anywhere in the world. However, the massive drawdown that followed the conclusion of the war led what was then the U.S. Army Air Force to completely abandon the facility in 1947, and it sat largely idle for the next five decades.

The U.S. military did some much more modest work to restore parts of North Field in the 2000s and 2010s to expand its utility for training purposes. The extent of this was using one of its runway areas as a semi-improved landing strip and an area for austere forward-deployed operations training.

By 2020, the decision had been made to make the aforementioned improvements to Tinian International Airport, located south of North Field, primarily to expand its ability to serve as a divert field, especially in case Andersen Air Force Base on nearby Guam is put out of action for any reason. By the end of 2023, the U.S. military had decided to reclaim all of North Field, as well.

The Air Force highlighted what it described as the “adaptive rehabilitation work being done on the North Field” in a press release last April. “The Airmen [on the island] there are restoring over 20 million square feet of degraded World War II pavement so that ultimately the rejuvenated runway can serve as a power projection platform.”

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“Our Airmen at Tinian are successfully expanding our Agile Combat Employment options to enhance deterrence, increase flexibility, and, if needed, rapidly generate combat power,” Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David W. Allvin said in a statement at the time. “They are the pathfinders for advancing our scheme of maneuver in the Indo-Pacific.”

Agile Combat Employment (ACE) refers to a set of concepts of operations the Air Force has been refining for several years now that are heavily centered on short notice and otherwise irregular deployments, often to non-traditional and austere locales. Expanding available operating locations, including similar work to refurbish Northwest Field on Guam, as well as new camouflage, concealment, and deception capabilities, are also important elements of ACE. The core idea is to reduce vulnerability by upending enemy targeting and other planning cycles.

Concerns about the availability of large established facilities, especially in any future high-end conflict in the Pacific against China, wherein facilities like Andersen on Guam would be prime targets, have been key drivers behind ACE. Other branches of the U.S. military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps, have been developing their own new expeditionary and distributed concepts of operations for the same general reasons.

Within this context, a heated debate has also emerged about whether or not the U.S. military should be doing more to physically harden bases against attack. The Air Force, in particular, has largely pushed back against passive hardening in favor of active air and missile defenses and ACE. A huge new air defense architecture is being established in Guam in line with this broader strategy. This is despite global trends going in the opposite direction on hardening, especially in China, as you can read more about here.

Rehabilitating North Field on Tinian provides not just an additional operating location, but one that is also inherently more difficult for an opponent to target. An enemy would have to devote significant resources to ensure the disruption, let alone destruction, of the facility and its runways. Andersen on Guam, an absolutely strategically critical location for U.S. air operations in the Western Pacific, located to the South of Tinian, is a similarly sprawling facility. Still, in December, the Henry L. Stimson Center think tank published a report highlighting the danger posed by Chinese missile strikes aimed just at cratering runways to hobble flight operations at key U.S. bases in the Pacific.

Aircraft operating from North Field could also regularly move between different parking spots at the base’s grid-like apron, which would make it far harder for an enemy to achieve maximum destruction by targeting just one section. In a report released in January, the Hudson Institute think tank assessed that just 10 missiles with warheads capable of scattering cluster munitions across areas 450 feet in diameter could be sufficient to neutralize all exposed aircraft on the ground, as well as, fuel storage facilities at U.S. airbases like Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, or Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

All of this also highlights the growing interest in new runway-independent aircraft, crewed and uncrewed, across the U.S. military. Short and vertical takeoff and landing designs could make use of the restored North Field, as well. Underscoring this, U.S. Marine Corps short-takeoff and vertical landing capable F-35B Joint Strike Fighters forward-based in Japan conducted a routine training deployment to Tinian International Airport in January.

The U.S. military also uses mobile arresting gear systems to provide critical safety margins for tactical jets operating from shorter runways, including at remote and austere locations like North Field. Defense contractor General Atomics has gone a step further in proposing the adaptation of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) catapults and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) it originally developed for the U.S. Navy’s Ford class aircraft carriers to support flight operations on land.

North Field is one of a number of other airfields being readied in the Western Pacific for combat aircraft to operate out of should a war with China erupt, and it appears to be the largest by a good margin. While they are in no way hardened from enemy attacks, having so many airfields as potential operating areas deeply complicates the enemy’s targeting process and puts a strain on precious resources, notably standoff weaponry, that would be used to attack American airpower where it is most vulnerable, on the ground.

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