Tinian, the former Spanish island from which the atomic bombs flew in 1945

Today, many Spaniards will not be familiar with the name of Tinian Island, but this remote island was part of Spain until 1899.

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Today Tinyan is part of the Northern Mariana Islands, a free state associated with the United States (i.e. with the same status as Puerto Rico) in the Pacific Ocean. The island was formally incorporated into Spain in 1667, a century and a half after being sighted by the Magellan and Elcano expedition. Until then it had been colonized by indigenous peoples from the Philippine Islands, and had a population of several tens of thousands.

The first Spaniards to settle on this island arrived in 1669, led by the Jesuit missionary Diego Luis de San Vitores (1627-1672), who was the first to evangelize the inhabitants of that place. He gave the Spanish name of the island: Buenavista Mariana. Today, the island still retains some of the Spanish place names from the time when it belonged to Spain:

The indigenous population of Tinian suffered from the effects of lacking defenses against diseases to which Europeans were already immune, and their size was greatly reduced. The population of Tinian was eventually relocated to Guam in 1720, although the remote island remained of considerable importance as a logistical point for Spanish galleons sailing from the Philippines to the Viceroyalty of New Spain in North America. Pigs and cows were raised on the island to supply provisions for these galleons.

The Spanish defeat in the war against the United States in 1898 (which led to the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam) left Tinian in a complicated situation, but still under Spanish sovereignty, since the United States showed no interest in it. After losing its main territories in that part of the Pacific Ocean, it was very difficult for Spain to maintain its presence on the island, so it sold it to Germany in 1899. This brought to an end a period of more than 200 years of Spanish presence on Tinian, the longest period of Western presence on the island to date.

The German presence on Tinian lasted until 1914. After the outbreak of World War I, Japan (then an ally of the United Kingdom) took control of the island. The island once had a Japanese population of more than 15,000 people until it was captured by the US in the summer of 1944 in a bloody battle that went down in history as the first time napalm was used in combat.

The US interest in the island during World War II was not accidental. The Manhattan Project was being developed at the time, with which the first nuclear bombs were manufactured. From Tinian it was possible to deploy Boeing B-29 bombers to reach Japan, located some 2,400 kilometers from the island. To deploy these planes, the US built the largest air base of World War II on Tinian. With an area of ​​10,122 hectares, it covered practically the entire surface of the island. As a curiosity, the base was built following a design similar to that of Manhattan Island, in New York, naming its different sites after streets in that city.

Two of the most famous planes in history took off from the North Field section of Tinian Air Base: the B-29 bombers Enola Gay and Bockscar, which carried the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The pits in which the atomic bombs were attached to these B-29s are still preserved on the island, covered with a glass shield. You can watch a video from The History Underground showing these two pits here:

If you want to know more about this former Spanish island, last year Nihi Indigenous Media published an interesting video about Tinian: