SPECTACULAR JOB

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 February 1943, Page 4

SPECTACULAR JOB

■ NETWORK OF AERODROMES AUSTRALIA’S TASK. BIG CONSTRUCTION PROBLEMS. In nine months thousands of Australian workmen have built a great strategic network of aerodromes, airfields and dispersal strips, to give the Allied Air Forces ooerating in Australia maximum offensive mobility and protection against air attack, states an overseas exchange. It is one of the most spectacular constructional jobs ever undertaken in the Commonwealth. ■„ Airfield construction was begun when our air strength was being augmented by reinforcements of American and British aircraft, when existing aerodromes proved inadequate for the rap-idly-growing resources of the combined Australian and American air fleets assembled in this country. The plan was to make Australia an aerial bastion against Japan’s southward drive. At that time few Australian aerodromes were big enough for the world’s biggest bombers. They haff to be made so. More flight strips had to be built. A sneciih need was the improvement of aerodrome defences by the construction of dispersal airstripst,built to qualifications devised as a result of bitter experience ip Hawaii and Malaya. An airfield cannot be built in a day. To construct a single runway a mile long and 400 feet wide may absorb the combined energies of 200 men for anything from two to six months, working at breakneck speed night and day. It is just because it takes so long to build' that a properly constructed airfield is so important. The seal of doom was upon the Malayan campaign the moment it became clear that we could not hold our aerodromes. Guadalcanal is still American territory because the Marines have held' on, so tenaciously to the Henderson airfield. WHY GOERING FAILED. One of the most significant reasons why Goering failed to bomb Britain .into submission after the fall of France was the lack of suitable aerodromes in Holland, Belgium and France. There were not. enough of them to put the full weight of the Luftwaffe into the air. Most of therp were too small for big bombers, and inadequately camouflaged and dispersed. Great Britain, on the other hand, possessed nearly 600 aerodromes, landing grounds and satellite aerodromes, so dispersed as to give the Royal Air Force maximum mobility. In spite of ferocious attacks on England’s inland fighter aerodromes from August 30 to September 6, 1940, the Luftwaffe never once succeeded' in putting that strategic chain of airfields out of action. What Britain, had; done .Australia set out to do. All over the country, from north to south, east to west, the C.C.C. scattered 1 its high-speed: labour brigades, armed with the most formidable aggregation of heavy mechanical equipment ever assembled in Australia. A popular fallacy is that concrete . makes the best runway. Actually, the best choice is bitumen, which is more readily repaired after damage by bombs. Equally fallacious is the notion that you can make a runway by merely clearing a piece of level ground. Some country is often swamp country, so that without the construction of an elaborate drainage system your airstrip quickly becomes a quagmire. BUILDING THE RUNWAY. Rain, heat, mosquitoes and primitive camp conditions are only some of the handicaps with which the men of the C.C.C. had to contend when they set out to make Australia safe from aerial attack. In addition .they had to work harder than most of them had ever worked in their lives. Take the constructional problems involved in making a typical bush, runway. First to arrive on the scene is the C.C.C. flying squad, which erects a semi-permanent encampment for 200 or 250 workers. It is the beginning of the offensive. If trees are in the way they are loosened round the roots and. pushed over like ninepins by a battering squad of bulldozers until the strip is clear of all obstructions. Mechanical scoops and graders level the ground to the specifications of a carefully-pre-pared survey. With the aid of a porcupine roller, weighing 15 tons, the ground is packed tightly to a depth of two feet. The rollers (there are two of them) are studded with iron pins like a porcupine’s spikes, which press into the subsoil as the machine moves over the runway. When the runway has been consolidated to a length of a mile or more it is covered with a layer of thick gravel which, after being compressed with flat rollers and brushed clean with power brooms, is topped with metal scrapings. Over tbis surface is sprayed a layer of hot bitumen, which receives more coatings of blue metal scrapings to produce the fine, hard finish that will stand up, to the wear and tear of bomber traffic. We now have a hard tar-sealed strip a mile long and 150 ft .wide. On each side runs a 125 ft. earth surface strip, and it is in this strip that an elaborate drainage system is laid down. A cover-ed-in drain, 6ft. deep, skirts the tarsealed strip, and a 4ft .wide ditch runs round the earthen embankments, a total of five miles of drain for each runway. These drains are dug out by a mechanical ditcher. Runways so constructed are permanent structures. There is no reason why, when the war is over, they should not form a useful link in a chain of civil airports extending from one end of the Commonwealth to the other.