"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...

Anyone know which base this could have
been, or if the 'circle runway' was common?

More often the "runway" was simply a square field. Typically you had a
pole in the middle of it, with a windsock hanging from it. You simply
landed into the wind, on any heading out of 360.

Wu Chia Ba airport in Kunming was of this design when it was first
built. Later, specific runways became the rule.

It's not something I associate with WWII, but with the inter-war
period or even earlier. Once runways had to be hardened and lengthened
for big bombers, the USAAC design of three runways in an overlapping
triangle (or an A with an enlongated crossbar) became the rule. This
was the layout of Mingaladon airport in Rangoon, for exampe:

http://www.warbirdforum.com/minglado.htm


Your posit sounds much more plausible than that of large square or circular
airfields with hard-surface runways being built during WWII. Engineer units,
be they the AAF's aviation engineer battalions or the Seabee battalions,
were to thinly stretched and usually time/materiel constrained to undertake
such excessive efforts during the war, when the mantra was, "Make it just
good enough to perform its mission for the specified time period, no
better."

Brooks


all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

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