World Battlefronts: Hold Them & Wear Them Down

X-Mile Airdrome* near Port Moresby, New Guinea, is no pilot's paradise. It is a flight strip about one mile long, paved with steel mats laid on gravel. The mats are a fairly recent improvement; there was a time when the tricycle landing-geared 6-243 could not be used from X-Mile Field because the nose wheel would sink down in the loose dirt. At the lower end of the field is a graveyard of cracked-up and salvaged planes. When the bombers lift their wings over this they are quickly out over the open sea.

X-Mile...

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