Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [33]
Masatake Okumiya, the Imperial Navy officer who had glimpsed some of Doolittle’s Raiders skimming the rooftops in 1942, recognized the Superfort’s potential. He recalled, “There was good reason to believe that the Marianas conflict might give the enemy the final advantage necessary to defeat Japan. Should American troops successfully occupy the islands, then the Japanese homeland itself would fall within the effective bombing range of the U.S. Army Air Force’s new B-29 bomber, which could well cripple our production.”
Between June and August 1944 the Americans seized three Japanese-held islands in the Marianas, 1,500 miles south of Tokyo. Saipan, Guam, and Tinian were remade by incredibly efficient engineers, providing runways, housing, and support facilities for the 20th Air Force’s growing bomber fleet. The Army and Navy both fielded engineering and construction crews, though the sailors got by far the most ink. The Navy Seabees were so popular that they featured in a John Wayne movie; nobody ever made a film about the Army’s aviation engineers.
The Pacific Theater was the largest of World War II. It dwarfed any conflict before or since, not merely in size (3,800 miles from Honolulu to Tokyo; more than New York to Paris) but in unprecedented challenges. For airmen it was especially daunting, requiring the routine reliability of a commercial airline for lengthy combat missions, new operating procedures, and unerring navigation on flights spanning hundreds of miles over open water.
The Pacific also required more bases than had ever been built. In less than four years Army aviation engineers and Seabees provided more than 100 airfields in that vast expanse, from Hawaii to New Guinea to the Marianas to Okinawa. The preferred runway material was asphalt, but Pacific Theater engineers encountered the conventional wisdom that blacktop was unsuited to the hot, humid climate. Until that was disproven, the construction crews managed with packed dirt, coral, gravel, and PSP: pierced steel planks. As always, solutions placed a premium upon innovation, and the engineers never lacked that invaluable commodity.
Airbase construction represented as great an advantage to the United States as aircraft production. Commander Mitsugu Kofukuda wrote, “A world of difference existed between the ability of the Japanese and Americans to construct air bases in combat theaters. Basically, we relied upon primitive manpower to clear jungles and pound out airstrips for our planes, while the Americans literally descended in a mass mechanical invasion on jungle, coral, and rock to carve out their airbase facilities. This difference . . . undeniably and seriously affected the air operations of both belligerents, much to the benefit of the Americans.”
The U.S. Army and Navy arrived at similar structures for their construction units. A typical aviation engineer battalion included a headquarters company and three engineer companies. The first two battalions, formed in 1940, each numbered twenty-seven officers and 761 enlisted men operating an astonishing array of equipment. The gear included 146 vehicles plus 220 other items: air compressors, asphalt and concrete pavers, bulldozers, cement mixers, graders, pumps, rock crushers, rollers, mechanized shovels, scrapers, trucks, and tractors. There were also small arms to repel enemy attacks and machine guns for air defense.
Most Seabee battalions included a headquarters company and four construction companies, each with platoons specializing in construction, maintenance, road blasting and excavation, waterfronts, and tanks and pipes.
Construction