Palapare, Celebes Dutch East Indies March 25, 1943
The work gangs cheered. The last steel mat was in place. The bomber field had already accepted the first B-17s weeks ago. Then it was a narrow forty eight hundred foot long single strip without hardstands. Now, the main runway was one hundred and sixty feet wide by sixty two hundred feet long. The taxi-way was also capable of launching fully loaded bombers into the sky. Hard stands were available. Mechanics were operating under tents now while the promise of hangers had been made as soon as the next supply convoy arrived.
Even as the tired construction engineers came back from lunch, thirty four bombers out of the thirty six launched entered the landing pattern. The raid on Tarakan seemed to have been successful. By now, the Japanese could mainly oppose the bombers with anti-aircraft guns. Their fighters could seldom get the altitude advantage in time, and when they did, they still needed to go through several squadrons of Mustangs or Lightnings which tagged along with the bombers. Any Oscar pilot that survived the fighters then had to face a wall of steel and lead erupting from the flanks of the bombers. A skilled man could do that once, twice, and even ten times, but each time, the chances of doing it safely decreased as the supporting cast was thinner and less well trained.
