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

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 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E