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“China remains our most effective base for aerial operations against Japan.”

Was in one of the articles. That sounds good until you think about the logistics of supply? On the other hand if your army continues east from Europe, then that is closer.

Just caught my attention this morning. There was a lot of thinking and arguing of strategy going on.

The B-29's are about to be deployed and the first plan was to base them in China. That required China to raise/assign a bunch of divisions to keep the area secure. But the biggest problem was what you identified, supply. The Chinese never opened an ocean port during the war and at this time Northern Burma is still under Japanese occupation, so the only supply route was by air, over the Hump.

About this time the Navy high command learned about the B-29 deployment and firmly fixed the objective of the Central Pacific campaign as the Marianas Islands (which they wanted all along) rather than the Philippines.

A few airstrips capable of handling B-29's were built in the Aleutians, but no units were stationed there. Weather was a big problem and they could only hit the Kuriles and Hokkaido.