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The Pacific Island of Tinian has played an outsized role in US military history. Now, as a US territory, it’s about to take on a new role – as the site of shooting ranges, when some 8,000 US Marines and their dependents move from Okinawa to Guam by 2014. Many Guamanians aren’t wild about the US military expansion, but Tinian welcomes it. With its economy in the doldrums, many of its 2500 residents hope a renewed US military presence will provide a boost. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad visited Tinian. (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad) Download MP3
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MARCO WERMAN: The small Pacific island of Tinian has played an outsized role in U.S. military history. Now that U.S. territory is about to take on a new role as a site of shooting ranges when some 8,000 U.S. Marines move from Okinawa to nearby Guam in the next few years. Many on Guam aren’t thrilled about the U.S. military expansion, but Tinian welcomes it. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad recently visited the island and sent this report.
MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Tinian is a bucolic island just five miles from Saipan. Cows graze, birds chirp and Chinese tourists come to visit the island’s one casino. Japanese tourists come too. Decades ago, before World War II, Japan controlled this island of sugar plantations. During the war, Japanese troops defended it, until July 1944 when U.S. troops invaded.
DON FARRELL: It was the perfect amphibious invasion of World War II.
MAGISTAD: Don Farrell is a historian who lives on Tinian.
FARRELL: It also caught the Japanese completely off guard, so their defensive installations were on the wrong end of the island and our offensive operations were on the right end of the island. It was a slaughter.
MAGISTAD: More than 8,000 Japanese troops were killed and 328 Americans died. Japanese civilians died here too, some in the first napalm attacks the U.S. military ever used in war. Some jumped off cliffs rather than face what they believed would be a more gruesome and humiliating death at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Deborah Fleming, who is part native Chamorro and part Scottish, has brought me here to the cliffs. We look down in silence for a moment to white caps swirling below. She says Japanese tourists often come here and do the same. Japan’s defeat here was only the beginning of Tinian’s claim to fame during World War II. After taking the island, the U.S. military ramped up its presence here to almost 60,000 people. Historian Don Farrell says they built an airbase that became the world’s busiest in the last year of the war.
FARRELL: During a major operation, one B29 would leave each runway every 15 seconds until all 200 were in the air. And there was never a take off in which at least one plane did not crash on take off. So every mission had deaths.
MAGISTAD: Tinian played an even more pivotal role in the war. It was from here that the Enola Gay took off to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and it was from here three days later that another plan took off to bomb Nagasaki. Deborah Fleming offers to take me for a ride in her old pick up to see the site where the planes took off. As we drive north on a dirt road, she tells me the U.S. troops here working on the final phase of the Manhattan Project realized that Tinian was roughly the same size and shape as Manhattan.
DEBORAH FLEMING: And so they designed all the roadways, aligned them the same way and named them the same. So you’re on Broadway. 42nd and Broadway, so Times Square. Welcome to Time Square. And here we are, we’re on Runway Able. This is the end of the runway, the western end.
MAGISTAD: So now we’re going at speed down the runway, the same way they went when they were about to take off to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The runway now is eerily quiet with tufts of weeds growing where bombers once taxied. Like most Tinian residents, Fleming is a U.S. citizen and she has sons in the U.S. military. I ask her how it feels to live in a place with this atomic legacy.
FLEMING: That’s a very interesting question. No one has ever asked that. But I think there’s a general disconnection. Growing up we knew it was a great event. I didn’t know about the catastrophe until much later on in life. Then I did go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I couldn’t finish the tour. It was so, so sad.
MAGISTAD: She says the U.S. veterans who come back here, and will again this summer to mark the 65th anniversary of the end of the war spend less time talking about the human cost of dropping nuclear bombs and more about the lives they saved by shortening the war. But a legacy of the war has lingered in Japan in the form of U.S. military bases. While they help protect Japan’s security, many Japanese don’t want them there anymore. Masatoshi Tenashi, who’s 58, is a Japanese tourist visiting Tinian. He says he worked for 10 years in Okinawa helping to build up the U.S. military bases. But now, he thinks it’s time for U.S. troops to leave. Some of them will. Eight thousand will move to Guam by 2014 with Japan paying most of the 10.6 billion dollar cost. Guamanians have complained about the build up, but Tinian is eager to draw in some of the action and some of the funds. Don Farrell explains what’s planned.
FARRELL: To establish rifle ranges on Tinian; to be able to keep their Marines fully qualified in small arms. While that base is going to be established north of 86th Street, east of 8th Avenue and west of Broadway; somewhere just south of Central Park.
MAGISTAD: All of these places are really just fields. For now, tourists and locals venture here on mopeds to see the remains of wartime sites like the pits where the nuclear bombs were loaded. Once the Marines arrive, many beaches and historical sites will become off limits. But Tinian doesn’t have a lot of options. Many here are on food stamps and the population is steadily shrinking as those with ambition use their U.S. passports to get off the island and look for work elsewhere. The hope is at least the U.S. military will bring in cash and spend it. Meanwhile, Deborah Fleming says Tinian still marks the legacy left by the earlier U.S. military presence here.
FLEMING: Children from Hiroshima and Nagasaki schools, every anniversary, would come here and they do a peace vigil. We do a candlelight vigil and bring all the children to try to teach them for continued world peace.
MAGISTAD: If all goes according to plan, the peace that now pervades Tinian will soon be shattered by gunfire from the new rifle ranges. It’s nothing close to the fateful role Tinian played for the U.S. military in the past, but as Tinian prepares for its new role, it remembers the old and has a story to tell a new generation of U.S. soldiers when they come ashore. For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad, Tinian.
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