Bases of Air Strategy: Building Airfields for the RAF, 1914-1945 (review)

Bases of Air Strategy: Building Airfields for the RAF, 1914-1945. By Robin Higham. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1998; distributed by Specialty Press. Pp. 285. $42.95.

Robin Higham, the author of this excellent volume, served as a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II and flew out of airfields in Britain, Europe, India, and Burma, so he knows at firsthand the problems about which he writes. His thesis is this: Although airfields are critical to the execution of grand strategy, this was not fully appreciated during the years leading up to the war. While RAF doctrine called for heavy bombers, far too little thought was given to providing the airfields such a doctrine required. In short, airfields were "the wasp waist in the hourglass of airpower" (p. 18).

In the mid-1930s, the depression-starved RAF had a mere fifty-two airfields. By the end of the war 684 new airfields had been added in the United Kingdom alone, and that figure does not take account of the eighteen hundred airfields the Royal Engineers constructed overseas. These numbers suggest the enormous outlay of funds required, the many acres of productive farmland sacrificed, and the drain on available manpower. A typical Class A base (not an emergency landing strip or satellite field) required about a thousand acres, twenty miles of drains, ten miles of electrical conduits, six miles of water mains, four miles of sewers, and ten miles of roadways, busying a thousand laborers for up to eighteen months. All this cost about two million pounds.

The problem of airfield construction was complicated because aviation in the 1930s was going through a revolution, with the transition from wood and fabric biplanes to all-metal monoplanes, and aircraft gross weights rose exponentially. The typical prewar RAF field was grass, but as aircraft and bomb weights climbed, concrete runways became essential, increasing costs and delaying until 1943 the time when the RAF and U.S. Army Air Force could launch thousand-plane raids on Germany. Luftwaffe attacks on airfields led to aggressive camouflaging and dispersed parking, but this required additional miles of asphalt taxiways.

Although the RAF and the Royal Engineers designed the airfields, they were built by private contractors. In the early days of the war these firms were largely ill equipped, but laborers using wheelbarrows to spread concrete eventually gave way to far more efficient "highway" machinery, much of it imported from the United States. Higham has little to say about these contractors; few published accounts of their activities are available.

If the RAF was poorly prepared to provide airfields at home, it was even less well equipped to construct them overseas. Fields begun in Belgium before Dunkirk were taken over by the Luftwaffe. When the war spread to North Africa and the Middle East, with rapidly changing ground actions, the need for temporary airstrips posed entirely new challenges. With no local contractors available, the RAF had to rely heavily upon the Royal Engineers. The introduction of pierced steel plate (PSP) made rapid construction of landing strips possible, but PSP was not generally available until 1943. Moreover, no amount of PSP could stop the windblown sand that damaged engines and forced frequent replacement. Water and fuel also posed acute problems in the desert. (The RAF relied on flimsy, ill-designed four-gallon tins, which often leaked. Eventually these were replaced with the better conceived and sturdier German "Jerry cans.") When the war moved to Italy and little PSP had yet reached there, the RAF resorted to brick runways.

The airfield problem in the China-Burma-India theater was worse than elsewhere. Peacetime bases were mostly located along the northwest frontier, while strategic needs called for fields in the northeast. Differing rail gauges inhibited the movement of scarce construction equipment. Tropical rains and disease decimated white troops, and, while native laborers were plentiful, they had little experience with Western machinery.

Higham's...