North Field was a World War II airfield on Tinian in the Mariana Islands. Abandoned after the war, today North Field is a tourist attraction. Along with several adjacent beaches on which U.S. Marines landed during the Battle of Tinian, the airfield is the major component of the National Historic Landmark District Tinian Landing Beaches, Ushi Point Field, Tinian Island.
Oblique airphoto of North Field, Tinian, 1945, showing the massive runway system and number of hardstands. On each hardstand, a B-29 was parked and maintained.
Nakajima C6N-1 reconnaissance aircraft of the 121st Kokutai after being captured on Tinian, July 1944
US Navy Seabee view USAAF B-29 Superfortresses arriving at North Field, 1944
North Field in 1945, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the 509th Composite Group
The Mariana Islands, also simply the Marianas, are a crescent-shaped archipelago comprising the summits of fourteen longitudinally oriented, mostly dormant volcanic mountains in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, between the 12th and 21st parallels north and along the 145th meridian east. They lie south-southeast of Japan, west-southwest of Hawaii, north of New Guinea and east of the Philippines, demarcating the Philippine Sea's eastern limit. They are found in the northern part of the western Oceanic sub-region of Micronesia, and are politically divided into two jurisdictions of the United States: the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and, at the southern end of the chain, the territory of Guam. The islands were named after the influential Spanish queen Mariana of Austria following their colonization in the 17th century.
Tropical dry forest on Saipan
Ruins of Guma Taga on Tinian. The pillars/columns are called latte (pronounced læ'di) stones, a common architectural element of prehistoric structures in the Mariana Islands, upon which elevated buildings were built. Earthquakes had toppled the other latte at this site by the time this photo was taken; an earthquake in 1902 toppled the one seen on the left, and today only the one on the right remains standing.
Reception of the Manila Galleon by the Chamorro in the Ladrones Islands, c. 1590 Boxer Codex
A stamp from the Marianas' late Spanish colonial period, 1898–1899