<text id=00he1000><title>Sixty North to Twenty South: Introduction</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Sixty North to Twenty South: Introduction</hdr><body>
<p>Between the great land mass of China and the huge island that is Australia lie archipelagos with exotic names dimly remembered from primary school geography: Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea, Celebes. Where were Yap, Salamaua, Wakde, Morotai? Who lived in the Caroline or the Gilbert and Marshall Islands?
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<p>They lay in the massive Pacific basin, dotting dozens of smaller seas, stepping-stones that the Japanese trod in their expansion. They were rich in resources, like the oil at Balikpapan in Borneo, or in strategic position, like the port of Rabaul or the island fortress of Truk.
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<p>Far to the north lay the remnants of a land bridge that, eons earlier, had connected Asia and North America. Now a wind-swept and forbidding string of islands reaching in a great arc from Alaska toward the Kamchatka Peninsula, they also were of strategic importance. Their names were spoken in another of the myriad of strange tongues of the Pacific: Kiska, Attu, Unimak, Adak.
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<p>These faraway places were the jungles and tundras, mountains and savannas that American military strength would fight for, because—as they led outward from Tokyo—they also led back to the heart of the Japanese empire.
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<p>It was a war theater of unique parts, tropical islands with bare-breasted beauties and sandy beaches in one region, a consuming jungle in another, and permafrost in a third. Into that theater of operations moved seven separate American air forces, each with a difficult—almost impossible—mission. Each was at the absolute end of the supply and communication lines, knowing with certainty that the planners in Washington and London considered them to be of secondary importance, to be supplied after the European theater got all it needed.
