Are the tongues necessary? Can I just take my circular saw right
between the boards, cut them way, and then screw them back down
afterward?
You've been misinformed. The point of tongue-in-groove planking is to keep the floor boards from twisting, slipping and sliding against each other and squeaking (or squeaking more in your case). You still need to secure a tongue-in-groove floor to the subfloor or joists.
Joists almost never squeak on their own. Squeaking comes from two pieces of wood rubbing against each other - usually because a floor hasn't been adequately secured.
Now if you DO need to cut away the flooring, then you should cut along the seams, and then buy Hardwood Floor Spline and rout out the old tongue so you end up with two grooves facing each other, and use the spline to rejoin the flooring when you reattach it.
But BEFORE you do that, I'd get a bunch of 2" coated screws and drop them through the subfloor into the joists below and see if that fixes the squeak. It's subfloor so you don't care about the face, and if it doesn't work, they're easily removed.
*Tip - use a hammerdrill when putting in the screws
One comment on the advice you read is that I don't see a thing in there about deflection - evidently Mike Holmes is sure that if he merely has 1-1/4" of subfloor, all is good. Real tile specs tend to involve a concept called deflection, and that's the distance part of the floor system moves when loaded, relative to the span you measure over. L/360 is a typical spec - L/180 is twice as bad. (It's usually a lowercase L, but on the computer I'm using a capital to be clear that it's an L.) I happen to have a 3/4" subfloor that's L/587, so it really doesn't need another half-inch on that basis.
Consider what a tile manufacturer has to say...
(I'm not going to cut and paste their extensive text here, or rewrite it all) but for one thing they specifically mention setting the backer board in a mortar bed, not "gluing" it down. I'd also venture to sneak in that if you really want "the best" (and will you pay for it these days) look at the "old fashoned mortar bed" (TCNA (Method F145-02)) mentioned at the end of their article. That, of course, means you need to establish an adequately rigid base 3/4" or 1-1/4" + tile thickness below the surrounding floor level, which is why it's not popular these days. But it was a VERY good method, as a lot of old houses demonstrate.
Kinsman Tile
Best Answer
I'd advise against using heat. Last week I removed a parquet floor from my living room that had been stuck down with bitumen. After trial and error I found the best technique was to use a hammer and chisel to prise the tiles up, leaving just the bitumen coating on the floorboards. I then paid a guy to sand up the bitumen with a large industrial sander using very rough sanding paper. It took him about half a day and the floorboards now look great. (Make sure you use very rough paper and a powerful machine - if the paper isn't rough enough, the bitumen just gums it up.)
I did try a heat approach but this just melted the bitumen, making it sticky and even harder to remove. I also tried to use solvents, which had the same effect.