<text id=00he1005><title>Mustangs Escort the Heavies</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Mustangs Escort the Heavies</hdr><body>
<p>Late that autumn, Seventh AF sent strikes to the Volcano and Bonin Islands. Iwo Jima, the island selected as an emergency base for B-29s because it was about halfway between Saipan and Tokyo, was invaded on 19 February 1945. When the island was declared secure on 16 March, Vll Fighter Command moved to Iwo to escort B-29s on their missions. The first was flown on 7 April; 108 P-51s went with the big birds to Tokyo, shot down 21 intercepting fighters and lost one of their own. By then the B-29s had begun flying unescorted night incendiary raids, and there was little demand for daylight escort.
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<p>Vll Fighter Command went out on its own long-range sweeps, hitting targets in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka that were more than a 1,200-mile (1,930-km) round trip distant. Vll FC flew 51 long-range missions between 7 April and 14 August. Thirteen of them were B-29 escort flights; the rest were fighter sweeps, The longest was a 1,600-mile (2,575-km) round trip flown on 14 August by 48 P-47Ns of the 507th Fighter Group. They left their base on Ie Shima and flew to Keijo, in Korea. About 50 defending aircraft met them; the P-47s fought at that extreme range for about half an hour, shot down 20 of the enemy and lost only one of their own aircraft. That action won the group a Distinguished Unit Citation, the only such battle honor awarded to a P-47 unit in the Pacific.
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<p>The Seventh was another of the small Pacific air forces, whose statistics were overshadowed by the larger numbers of the European war, and by the superior publicity generated by the Navy fast carrier task forces, their fighter and bomber squadrons, and the Marine Corps.
