LargeSlowTarget
Posts: 4443
Joined: 9/23/2000
From: Hessen, Germany - now living in France
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Here's some info paraphrased from Eric Bergerud's book 'Fire in the Sky - the Air War in the South Pacific'':
Before the war, the Lakunai air base had been a small civilian airstrip. The Australians started to improve it into a modest fighter field in Feb 1941. They also built a new air base at Vunakanau for light bombers.
The Japanese further improved those bases after they had seized Rabaul in January 1942. [B]Lakunai[/B] became the main fighter strip with a 4.300 by 630 feet runway (concrete or just graded? Bergerud doesn't seem to mention this, or I missed it) and revetments for 90 fighters and 10 bombers. [B]Vunakanau[/B] became the main bomber field with a graded surface of 5.200 by 720 feet, which included a concrete portion of 4.200 by 135 feet. It had 90 fighter and 60 bomber revetments.
When things began to heat up in late 1942, the Japanese constructed another bomber strip at [B]Rapopo[/B] with a concrete surface of 4.600 by 630 feet and 10 fighter / 94 bomber revetments.
For the Japanese Army Air Force construction also began at [B]Keravat[/B], but drainage problems of the unpaved 4.200 foot strip made it usable only for emergency purposes.
The last field to be built was another fighter strip at [B]Tobera[/B]. The runway was covered with interlocking steel plates (rather unusual for Japanese air bases) and had revetments for 75 fighters.
Bergerud writes that a big problem of Japanese air base construction were the taxiways conecting the revetments with the runways. Since they were all left unpaved, depending on weather they either created dust clouds or mud lakes, impeding aircraft movements. Furthermore they were susceptible for 'soft spots' (e.g. badly filled bomb craters) which could easily lead to landing gear damage and thus a mission kill.
Fishing in troubled waters, I would guess that today's Rabaul has no use for five strips. And JohnK, since they are seperated by miles of rough terrain, they cannot "became the airport". I suspect that at least Keravat and Tobera have been abandoned to the jungle because of usability/maintenance issues. Most likely Lakunai is in use as civilian airport again, since it is closest to Rabaul city. I would also suspect some military forces in the area which might use one of the remaining fields. Maybe our ANZAC friends can shed some light on this...
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Rabaul airfield today - 
Rabaul..... - 
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