If you were the United States and you wanted to drop bombs on Japan, how would you do it? Solving that problem took the better part of the war. The first step was building the B-29 Superfortress, the greatest bomber ever built, with an effective range of more than three thousand miles. The next step was capturing a string of three tiny islands in the middle of the western Pacific: Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. They were the Mariana Islands, controlled by the Japanese. The Marianas were 1,500 miles across the water from Tokyo—the closest possible spot where you could build a runway. If you could
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