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Since Guadalcanal in 1942, United States forces had been engaging Japanese forces in battle, but, until the arrival in the Marianas of the XXI Bomber Command, the homeland, the sustainer of the war effort, had been untouched, save for the Doolittle raid and a comparatively minor effort by the XX Bomber Command from China. The Twentieth operated directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was unique in that the headquarters resided in Washington while the combat element was in the Marianas, more than 8,000 miles away. Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces, as Commander. The B-29 forces which operated from the Marianas were a part of the Twentieth Air Force, activated in Washington on April 4, 1944, with Gen. The course of the Pacific war was soon to change abruptly as the weight of American airpower was felt. Within nine months this aerial armada grew from a single bomb wing with 119 aircraft to five wings and a thousand B-29s. Worse, the Japanese Air Force couldn’t do a thing about it. American air-power was now within reach of the home islands.
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Of these, only twenty-four bombed the primary target, but the appearance of the Superfortresses over their capital on November 24, 1944, brought home to the Japanese people the stark reality of the situation. Weather was bad to and over the target, and only eighty-eight B-29s were able to drop their bombs at all. This mission, code-named San Antonio 1, was the first B-29 attack against Japan from the recently captured Marianas and the first attack upon Tokyo since Jimmy Doolittle’s carrier-based raid of April 18, 1942. Emmett “Rosy” O’Donnell’s 73d Bomb Wing left Isely Field, on Saipan, and set course for Tokyo, some 1,500 miles away. Twenty years ago last month 111 B-29s of Brig.