Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [34]
From June 1944 to August 1945 some fifteen Army engineer battalions (six “colored”) worked on Saipan alone. At least two—the 34th and 152nd—landed before the island was secure. Most passed on to other jobs, especially on Okinawa, but on V-J Day four were still needed on Saipan.
Whether construction crews or aircrews, everyone lived in the same oppressive environment. Most of the Marianas lie within 15 degrees of the equator, and one veteran recalled, “It would rain for a brief, heavy downpour and usually about four times a day followed by bright sunshine. The temperature never varied more than 15 degrees the year round (from 70 to 85) and the humidity stayed so high all the time we had ear and feet fungus and everywhere else fungus. Dengue Fever was rampant and could lay you low.”
Most men lived in tents; the fortunate ones enjoying a wood floor to reduce the mud. Sixty years later, veterans of the Pacific Theater of Operations still grind their teeth over the cinematic images of a balmy climate, Quonset huts, and decent food.
The Saipan invasion began on June 15, and Army aviation engineers went ashore the next day, starting to improve the captured Aslito airstrip on the island’s south coast. Previously a Japanese fighter base, Aslito was renamed in honor of Commander Robert Isely, a naval aviator killed in the conquest of the Marianas. However, due to a clerical error, the field became “Isley” and remained so throughout its existence.
Not counting smaller airfields, the engineers had to shoehorn six B-29 bases with eleven runways onto three islands with a total area of 297 square miles. When work began at Saipan, Guam’s first bomber field was six months from completion; Tinian’s last runway was eleven months downstream.
On Saipan the construction process began by leveling two coral mountains and crushing the material with bulldozers. Then the coral was loaded into 100 trucks, each carrying four tons, shuttling repeatedly from the “quarry” to the airfield site. There the longest runway in the Pacific was laid out, awaiting the expertise of engineers who relished the challenge of doing what some said could not be done.
Though stateside experts insisted that asphalt could not be used in an equatorial climate, the aviation engineers paid no heed. They shipped in drums of hardened asphalt and, like their Seabee counterparts, got on with the job. Some GIs found an abandoned sugar boiler and set about rebuilding the Japanese facility. They welded a tall smokestack from empty oil drums and built their own asphalt melting plant. It proved an inspired idea: the plant provided 700 tons of liquid asphalt a day for the final runway surface over the coral base.
Guam
If Saipan was a big job—and it was—Guam was bigger. After the initial landings on July 21, a three-week slogging campaign was conducted with far better Army-Marine cooperation than on Saipan. When the island was declared secure on August 10, hundreds of Japanese stragglers remained at large, occasionally harassing the Americans but more often seeking food. According to one popular tale, an uncommunicative soldier wearing a mismatched set of fatigues made it through a darkened chow line but was apprehended when he bowed in appreciation.
Meanwhile, construction continued apace. North and Northwest Fields became operational in January and April 1945, while Depot Field housed a heavy maintenance facility. Depot was renamed for Lieutenant General Millard F. Harmon, commander of U.S. Pacific Air Forces, who disappeared over the Pacific in February 1945.
Recreational facilities were scarce at