Beyond the Front Lines
“Yes, we have,” said one of the officers, “if you mean those damn’ fools who wouldn’t pay any attention to us and took those big machines out. We think they’re about 10 or 15 miles down the road.”
Finally Davison found his engineers. They had put in a few defensive guns, had dug themselves slit trenches, and were at work building an airfield right under the Nazis’ noses.
In three days—three days is 72 hours of work to the engineers—the men built five serviceable fields and moved north 110 miles to the area around Le Sar, to grind out more ‘dromes.
The five-in-three deal was the result of careful planning and fast movement. The whole north African battlefront had been looked over from the Air, and spots picked out which seemed generally favorable for landing fields. When it developed that a batch would be needed especially around Sbeitlan, the engineers again flew over the ground, choosing more definite locations. Then the Engineer troops, with their bulldozer and scrapers and shovels and all the rest of their equipment, went roaring overland, marching day and night, and they went so fast that they paid no attention to the fact that they had gone clear through the front lines. Or if they did notice it, they were too stubborn to care.
Keeping Ahead of the Troops
Their ability to build airports just one jump ahead of our combat airplanes is one of the big reasons we gave the Axis such a bouncing around in North Africa as well as in Sicily. By having airfields up front, we kept our air support constantly with—and ahead of—our troops.
There could be no delays in bringing up our airpower. The Tactical Air Force always had to get places ahead of our troops, to blast down enemy resistance before our troops arrived. The Strategic Air Force had to reach deeper and deeper behind the enemy lines, hacking at the channels through which the enemy brought up food, ammunition and other supplies. Both groups constantly had to be as near the Nazis’ as they could get.
This meant turning out airfields at an amazing rate. It meant flattening out barren mountains, filling in colossal mudholes, trying to hold down expenses of drifting, destructive sand. It meant using fumbling native labor, carrying special peewee equipment and airborne engineers hundreds of miles at a leap by air, working night and day in bleak stretches of perilous battlefields. It wasn’t the sort of job you’d pick for a week-end diversion.
When General Davison got to North Africa, ten days after Oran folded up, we had nine airfields which we could use if the weather was good, and that was rarely. When General Davison left North Africa, some five months later, we had more than a hundred usable airfields splattered all over the landscape.
The permanent fields were mostly along the Northafrican Coast. They were perhaps harder to build than the quickies. They had to be solid, but they also had to be easy to supply always, and the points that were easy to supply always seemed to be on the worse possible land. As a sample of what the boys were up against, take the case of the airfield at Bone. The mountains come right down to the sea at Bone, and the only flat area is the delta of a river called the Seybousse. General Davison’s first inspection of the Bone site was discouraging. He saw a crater left by a thousand-pound bomb the Germans had thrown at his engineers. The crater was 18 feet deep—and from the top to bottom, the sides of the hole were pure, think, nasty mud. Davison says it must have taken nature thousands of years to make a mess so awful. And who are the Aviation Engineers to think they can make anything useful out of such well-planned gunk?
With fine old Yankee impudence, the engineers decided to try. Across the Seybousse River from this magnificent mudhole was a pile of sand dunes. Somehow the engineers got their equipment across the river, to the dunes. Then they started building a road with the sand. The road wound down to the river, and then had to turn into a causeway to cross the river. Over this causeway, the engineers would haul enough sand to salt down the mud and make it usable. The catch was that the engineers had been allowed just two weeks to build the airport, and these two weeks had to be dry weather, or rains would swell up the river and wash out the causeways, and the mud would stop everything. This was in April, when the Rains were still roaring away like a gymnasium shower bath. General Davison says, “I told the battalion commander to go ahead, and just leave the weather to me.”
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. The rains stopped. The Germans did their best to work out a substitute. They bombed the field several times, but mere bombs couldn’t slow up the engineers. It took five days to build the road and the causeway, and in the next nine days before the deadline, the engineers hauled 68,000 yards of sand, spreading it out three or four feet deep over the mud—and producing a runway 6,000 feet long. Upon this went the steel matting. And, believe it or not, just as the last piece of steel plank was down, on the fourteenth day, a cloudburst hit the airport.
That’s what the Aviation Engineers are up against. Yet they conjured up airports so fast that the pilots never knew, from day to day, where they’d find one next. One happy example concerned a B-26 Maruader that had been taking pot shots at Axis ships over the Mediterranean. The plane was caught in a storm, got lost over the mountains, and everything was pretty hopeless. The pilot offered to let his crew bail out, but they didn’t like the idea of bumping around on the peaks of the mountains they saw below, so they decided to stick with their ship. The pilot then turned north, intending to crash land in the shallow water on the North beach of Africa. He got to the ocean, banked for his landing, closed his eyes and started down. Suddenly his copilot tapped him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes, looked where the copilot was pointing—and there below him stretched the longest runway he’d seen in North Africa. It was the brand-new runway at Bone. It hadn’t been there a few days before, and he didn’t actually believe it was there now. But he took a chance, flipped his ship down, and rolled to a stop, without enough gasoline left to even taxi off the runway.
Robert McCormick
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