AIRFIELD ISLAND

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 4, 28 February 1944, Page 32

AIRFIELD ISLAND

A KORERO Report

Few people are aware of the colossal effort which enables the R.A.F. ’s

bombers to be marshalled from forty to fifty airfields for a single attack against Germany. This effort is illustrated by the following facts partly included in a recent issue of the Times, London.

The average R.A.F. airfield is 2 to 2| square miles in area, surrounded by a 5-mile perimeter track 50 ft. wide. Inside are three runways : one of 2,000 yards, two of 1,400 yards, all 50 yards wide. The larger airfields have four runways, 3,000 by 100 yards.

The total area of the runways and perimeter tracks of British airfields is nearly 160,000,000 square yards, equivalent to 9,000 miles of road 30 ft. wide. The total area of all British airfields, is 250,000 acres, equivalent to 196 airfields of the average type described. The average airfield costs £1, 000,000 to £2,000,000. The total cost to date is

£615,000,000, of which £497,000,000 has been spent on R.A.F. airfields, and the rest on lend-lease to U.S.A.

To build these airfields cost Britain an immense effort. The runway concrete averages 9 in. thick. This required 30,000,000 tons of materials for all airfields, partly supplied from bombrubble. London alone supplied 1,250,000 tons of hard core for this purpose.

The materials needed for the airfields built for the U.S.A.A.F. —over 100 in numberwould fill a lorry convoy 22,000 miles long : the vehicles actually hauling the material covered over 25,000,000 miles, the equivalent of a thousand times round the world.

In addition, airfield buildings required 18,000,000 cubic feet of wood and 1,000,000 tons of steel and cast iron. Six of the U.S. airfields required over two thousand buildings. British factories contributed 336,000 miles of cables and nearly 7,000 electrical transformers.