Word: runway
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This kind of fighting wrenched the jungle from the Jap, slowly enlarged the Empress Augusta Bay beachhead. Now, after six weeks of fighting, it runs roughly 10,000 yards along the shore, 8,000 yards inland. Last week came the announcement that U.S. engineers had completed a runway within the beachhead. The Allied command could now count on better fighter cover for air and sea attacks on Rabaul, the Jap Southwest Pacific strongpoint...
...page 26 you will find excerpts from White's story of what he saw from the lead bomber as it dropped its fragmentations from almost suicide level on the Jap bombers massed along the runway just below. If the raid had failed of complete surprise, half the American flyers might have been shot down. Actually everything went off with such perfect precision that "all it cost us was the gasoline...
...Guadal, when some of the airmen were griping about the holes in the runway, Geiger walked down to an SBD (Douglas dive-bomber) spotted on the apron, climbed in. Without a single escorting fighter, the Old Man took the SBD off the flight strip, flew north to a village where the Japs were headquartered, dropped his 1,000-pounder, went home. His pilots got the idea...
Within the skeleton walls of the dance hall lay a heap of debris. The roof had crashed upon the dancers. Fires licked over the ruins. Rescue squads fashioned a runway over plaster and planks and bodies to get out the mangled living and dead. Those who had stood at the milk-bar counter had been killed. Dead and injured sprawled in every neighboring doorway...
Their pace seemed slow, the gait of the runty ponies between the shafts of their carts dispirited. But at day's end, when a runway had been completed, a building put up or a force-landed plane fished bodily from a swamp, Americans saw the result and never lost the wonder of China's art in the use of sheer man power...