Superfortress.

This is coolbert:

Here from "The Best of Yank - - The Army Weekly".

The construction of the B-29 bases at Chengdu, China.

Pick and shovel labor reminiscent of the building of the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. But being done in 1944. And on a rush basis.

As reported at the time by Sgt. Lou Stoumen.

"A SUPERFORTRESS BASE - - WESTERN CHINA."

"Half a million Chinese laborers, working from dawn till dusk and getting about 10 cents and a bowl of rice a day, built the vast system for forward airfields in China that made possible the first B-20 raid on the industrial heart of Japan.

Lt. Col. Waldo L. Kenerson of the U.S. Army Engineers, a native of Marblehead, Mass., supervised the construction of the air-base system,, together with officials of the Chinese Ministry of Communications. The bases form a great Chinese fan covering many square miles of former riceland. Several of the fields. are oversized and extra hard, so they can take the B-29s'. others are fighter fields, housing new high-altitude pursuit planes. Still others are outer ring emergency fields.

Army engineers have compared the job with the building of the Burma Road and the Great Wall of China. But they said the project was so vast and so quickly accomplished that it has no parallel in history.

On Apr. 24, 1944, just 90 days after the first dike was broken to drain the water from the rice paddies, the first B-29 landed on one of the airfields.

Individual GI's . . . had as many as 23,000 men working under them at one time.

While the plans [for the bases] were still on the drawing boards, the preliminary draining and clearing of the land was already in progress, and the Governor of "Air Base Province" . . . was already conscripting Chinese farmers for the heavy labor ahead. About 360,000 laborers were drafted.

The other 140,000 were employed as workers by private Chinese construction firms which had contracted to do various specific jobs, such as rice carriers, pay clerks, Red Cross workers and administrators servicing the armies of laborers.

Only in patient, hard-working China, with its manpower reservoir of 400 millions, could this job have done in such . . . time. 'I doubt very much,' said Lt. Col. Kenerson, 'if we could require a job of similar magnitude in the States to be completed within the time allowed, even with the skilled labor and mechanical equipment available.'
. . . .

The rice paddies were drained. The soft century old mud, sometimes six to nine feet deep, was carried away in the picturesque shoulder-borne tandem baskets so common throughout Asia. Tons of stones, worn round by the water, were carried from river beds to the strips in the same useful baskets. Large boulders were patiently crushed with small sledges, the fragments crushed again into gravel, the gravel carried in the baskets to the strips. Acres of dirt were dug up with iron Chinese tools, a cross between a pick and a shovel [a mattock]. The dirt was carried to the strips in the baskets by never-ending queues of workers - - men, women and children doing the job entirely by hand.

And then 10 ton rollers, some carved by hand from sandstone and others made of iron, were pulled by ropes by many hundreds of workers the wearying length and breadth of the strips. No bulldozers or other mechanical equipment had been flown across the hump to do the job, although there were a very few trucks with little gas on hand.

When the strips had been rolled, black tung oil - - a tarlike substance that comes from a Chinese tree - - was spread out to bind the dirt and gravel and help keep down the dust."

[tung oil is a particularly unique preservative that the Chinese are known to have used in the building of the Great Wall!!]

All done by hand - - pick and shovel - - no machinery - - men, women and children!! The most sophisticated aircraft in the world at the time operating out of airbases built by labor of the most menial variety!!??

The various Emperors of China have over the millennium used similar vast armies of conscripted laborers for the building of the Great Wall, the canals, etc. Enormous projects the canals of which ARE STILL IN USE AND THRIVING!!

These are the type of projects that at one time used to be near and dear to the hearts of Americans. Construction projects that were always touted as the biggest, the most expensive, the tallest, and all done in record time!!

You do not see that anymore.

Chengdu is a major city in China. I wonder if remnants of the air bases can be see with Google Earth. It would be interesting to find out.

coolbert.