Flanders' Fields

Pilots and air crews drew the public cheers for the dramatic Saipan-based B-29 bombings of Japan. But airmen themselves had a special hurrah for the prop men of the show, the Army's aviation engineers. In building bases for the Superforts, they had performed one of the great engineering feats of World War II.

Boss of the job was handsome, 27-year-old Lieut. Colonel Edward A. Flanders, one of the top 10% in West Point's class of '40. When "Wonder Boy" Flanders arrived on Saipan, the invasion was only five days old and the battle still raged. Aslito Airfield, a 3,900-ft. Jap fighter strip, had been nailed down by U.S. forces only two days before.

Quick Start. With Flanders came 29 officers, 735 enlisted men, and 9,000 tons of equipment. Next day, while fighting went on in plain view, survey parties, each including six engineer-riflemen, set out to plot the new field. Within 24 hours they had bulldozed enough coral gravel to fill in 600 shell craters, and the first P47 Thunderbolt fighter landed.

By D-plus-12, Aslito, now renamed Isely Field, was longer by 1,000 feet than the Japs ever knew it, and big enough for bombers. On D-plus-15 another airfield was started, half a mile from where tanks were banging away at the enemy.

Time Out for Fighting. At the same rapid pace other fields began to appear on the rough, forbidding terrain of Saipan. Often the engineers, working within earshot of the Japs, had to take time out to fight. One day Lieut. Henry McCoy killed a sniper by running him down in a jeep.

But work went on. Flanders and his men restored a bomb-clogged deep-water well, installed a purification system, built gasoline storage plants. When a bluff stood in the path of one runway, they simply blasted it flat. In all, they reshaped over four million square yards of rock and coral.

One of their biggest tasks was surfacing the fields. To get material, they hacked out two coral quarries. To move the coral, they built a smooth three-lane highway that cut a five-hour haul to 15 minutes. Restricting even generals' cars from the road unless they carried coral, the engineers kept up a round-the-clock shuttle, delivering a truckload of coral every 40 seconds. Then they surfaced the coral with asphalt mixed in a plant built mainly from odds & ends of a shell-shattered Jap sugar mill.

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