Why German Engineers Were Baffled U.S. Airfields Appeared In Three Days

In the summer of nineteen forty four, Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilots began photographing something they could not explain. Operational airfields were appearing behind Allied lines in Normandy where days earlier there had been nothing but farmland. American aviation engineer battalions, armed with a revolutionary portable steel runway called Marston Mat and Caterpillar D7 bulldozers, were building fully operational airstrips in as little as seventy two hours. This video tells the extraordinary true story of how the United States Army and Navy Seabees developed the fastest military construction capability the world had ever seen, from the mud of North Africa and the disaster at Kasserine Pass to the beaches of Normandy, the coral atolls of Guadalcanal and Tinian, and the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima. Featuring the real men of the 819th and 834th Engineer Aviation Battalions who built under fire within two hundred yards of German artillery on D-Day, the Seabees who patched bomb craters at Henderson Field overnight, and the engineers who built North Field on Tinian, the largest airfield in the world and the runway from which the war's final missions launched. Includes documented testimony from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, General Adolf Galland, Albert Speer, and other German commanders who described in their own words why Allied air superiority, projected from airfields that materialized in days, broke their ability to fight. A story of ordinary road builders, dam workers, and farm boys who turned construction into a weapon and changed the course of the Second World War. Sources and References Richard K. Smith, "Marston Mat," Air Force Magazine, April 1989 https://www.airandspaceforces.com/art... "Engineer Aviation Battalions," National Museum of the United States Air Force https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Vis... "The Aviation Engineers in Africa and Europe," Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume VII, HyperWar https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/... "Aviation Engineers in the War with Japan," Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume VII, HyperWar https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/... "Air Dominance From Normandy to the Bulge," Air and Space Forces Magazine https://www.airandspaceforces.com/art... "Airpower From the Ground Up," Air and Space Forces Magazine https://www.airandspaceforces.com/art... 819th Engineer Aviation Battalion, IX Engineer Command Historical Records https://ixengineercommand.com/compone... "These Portable Runways Helped Win the War in the Pacific," Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-sp... "Seabee History, World War II," Naval History and Heritage Command https://www.history.navy.mil/research... "Civilian Conservation Corps," Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Civi... "Building the Navy's Bases in World War II," Bureau of Yards and Docks, HyperWar https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/... "Operation Cobra and the Breakout at Normandy," United States Army https://www.army.mil/article/42658/op... 805th Engineer Aviation Battalion unit history https://digicom.bpl.lib.me.us/ww_reg_... History of 840th Engineer Aviation Battalion https://worldwartwoveterans.org/wp-co...