America Had No Island Airstrips in 1942—So We Built Runways Overnight, Under Fire, With Coral, Sweat, and a Promise to Bring Everyone Home

I first saw the island at dawn, a dark thumbprint on a pink horizon, barely big enough to deserve a name. The sea around it was the color of a new dime—coppery, restless—and every few minutes the transport ship’s bow would lift like it was sniffing for trouble.

The captain wouldn’t let anyone smoke on deck. Not because he cared about our lungs, but because a pinprick of light could travel miles and bring metal and fire down from the clouds.

We were a Seabee detachment—Naval Construction Battalion—thrown together from carpenters, highway men, crane operators, and a few farm boys who could fix anything with baling wire. Two months ago I’d been pouring concrete for county roads in Oklahoma. Now I was leaning over a rail in the South Pacific, watching an island wake up like it had no idea the war was about to move in.

Chief Malloy stood beside me, his face already crusted with salt and annoyance.

“You see it?” he asked.

“All I see is jungle and trouble.”

He grunted. “That’s an accurate survey.”

Behind us, the deck vibrated with the low thrum of engines and the clatter of chains. Crates of everything sat strapped down like they were bracing for impact—bulldozer parts, fuel drums, medical gear, boxes stamped with RATIONS, TYPE C, and the precious things we’d been told to treat like gold: steel planking, the perforated kind that came in long gray sheets and could turn mud into something a fighter could land on.

We’d used it in training. In training, nobody shot at you while you laid it.

A runner came up from below and called, “Lieutenant Harlan, you’re wanted in the chart room.”

That was me—Tom Harlan, twenty-seven, freshly minted lieutenant junior grade because the Navy needed men who knew how to make flat ground where flat ground didn’t exist. I wiped my palms on my dungarees and headed inside.

The chart room smelled like pencil shavings and coffee that had been reheated too many times. Commander Pike, our battalion’s officer in charge, stood with two Marine aviators and an Army Air Forces major who looked like he hadn’t slept since Pearl Harbor.

Pike tapped the map with a knuckle. “Here’s the deal. This island is going to be our forward refuel and emergency strip. Problem is… it doesn’t have one.”

The Air Forces major leaned in, eyes bloodshot. “We can’t keep operating from the rear. Every mile out here is fuel and time. The Japanese are pushing. We need a runway close enough to matter.”

One of the Marines—Captain Ellis—had a cigarette tucked behind his ear like he’d forgotten it was there. “We’ve got Wildcats that can land short, but not on jungle. Not on sand. Not on prayers. If we get bounced out of the sky and there’s nowhere to put down, we’re done.”

Pike’s finger traced a line across the island. “We’re going to cut a strip right here. Coral base, steel planking on top. One hundred and fifty feet wide. Thirty-five hundred feet long if we can swing it.”

I stared at the map. The island looked like a crescent, the inside rim a lagoon. The proposed runway sat on the flattest part—which was like calling a bar fight the quiet corner of a saloon.

“What’s our time?” I asked.

Pike didn’t blink. “Seventy-two hours.”

The room went quiet except for the ship’s heartbeat through the bulkhead.

“Seventy-two?” I repeated, because sometimes your ears need help accepting bad news.

The major’s voice came out thin. “Our next operation is already in motion. We need a place to divert. We need somewhere for damaged planes to land and refuel and get back up. And we need it before the enemy figures out what we’re doing.”

Captain Ellis shrugged like he’d been handed worse odds. “Besides, Lieutenant, I’ve seen you boys build miracles with shovels.”

I wanted to tell him miracles usually took longer than three days. Instead I said, “Yes, sir.”

That was the thing about 1942. Nobody asked if you could. They told you you must.

---

We hit the beach like we were invading ourselves.

Landing craft slammed into the sand, ramps dropped, and men poured out into heat so thick it felt like something you had to wade through. The jungle started just beyond the treeline, a wall of green dripping with moisture, buzzing with insects that acted like they owned the place.

A few islanders watched from a distance, silent and barefoot, dark eyes reflecting the chaos. They didn’t cheer. They didn’t wave. They just stood there like the land itself had taken human shape to witness what we were about to do to it.

I jumped off the ramp and sank ankle-deep in sand. Malloy landed beside me and spit.

“Perfect,” he said. “We’ll just build the runway in the ocean.”

“Get the dozers up,” I told him.

The first bulldozer came off the craft like a stubborn bull, metal tracks grinding, engine coughing. It rolled onto sand and immediately bogged down.

“Chains!” Malloy barked. Men ran, hooking cables, swearing as the sun climbed.

The second dozer had better luck, and together they dragged the first one free. We had graders, a small crane, dump trucks that looked laughably delicate compared to the jungle. All of it was precious. All of it could be destroyed by one well-placed bomb.

We moved fast anyway.

We cut the first swath into the trees with axes and saws because the dozers couldn’t reach until we made a path. The jungle fought back, vines snapping, sap bleeding. It smelled like crushed leaves and wet earth and something sweet that made your stomach uneasy.

A man named Rizzo—Brooklyn accent, arms like bridge cables—wiped sweat from his eyes and said, “Lieutenant, this ain’t an island. It’s a damn swamp wearing a hat.”

“Then we’ll take the hat off,” I said.

Malloy laughed once, short and sharp. “You heard the man. Undress the swamp.”

We felled palms and hauled trunks aside. The Marines had scouts out, and every hour someone would run in with a report: no enemy sightings, no planes yet, but radio chatter hinted they were sniffing around. The war was like that—always a few minutes away.

By afternoon, the first section of ground was clear. We set stakes, ran lines, and started scraping sand and topsoil away to find coral.

Because coral was the trick.

Coral, crushed and compacted, could take the weight of aircraft. Sand couldn’t. Mud definitely couldn’t. The island had coral deposits like buried bone, but we had to dig it up, crush it, spread it, roll it, and pray it set before the rain came.

At dusk, the mosquitoes arrived in formations.

One of the corpsmen tossed each of us a pill. “Atabrine,” he said. “Take it.”

“Does it work?” someone asked.

He shrugged. “It makes your skin turn yellow and your dreams turn ugly. But it might keep you from dying of malaria.”

We swallowed them like we were swallowing the whole war.

That night we worked under blackout conditions—no lights, no cigarettes, just the dim glow of covered lanterns inside tents and the stars overhead that felt too calm for what was happening. The dozers roared and then went silent in shifts. Men rotated like parts in a machine we’d built out of desperation.

Around midnight, I sat on a crate and wrote two lines to my sister on a scrap of paper I’d mail whenever a ship left.

Building a runway on an island that didn’t ask for one. If I come home, I’ll never complain about Oklahoma dirt again.

I stopped because the thought of home felt like a rope you could hang yourself with if you held it too tight.

---

On the second day, the rain came.

Not a gentle rain. A solid curtain that turned the air into a drumbeat and the ground into pudding. Coral slurry ran in rivulets, and our half-graded strip looked like a wound reopened.

Malloy stood beside me, rainwater streaming off his helmet. “We’re losing the base.”

“We’ll re-pack it,” I said, though my voice didn’t sound convinced.

“Re-pack with what? The coral’s washing out.”

I looked toward the lagoon, where the water was shallow and pale. “We quarry it. Right now. From the reef edge.”

Malloy’s eyes widened. “That’s underwater.”

“Then we get wet,” I said.

We sent men with picks and shovels and the small crusher, set up wherever we could keep it from sinking. The reef was sharp, slicing boots, biting into knees when men slipped. But the coral came up, chunk by chunk, and the crusher chewed it down into a gravel that could be spread and rolled.

The rain let up just long enough for us to push the coral into place and compact it with the roller, the machine groaning like an old man with a bad back.

Captain Ellis came by in the afternoon, his flight suit muddy at the ankles. He walked the strip, kicking at the surface.

“How’s it look?” I asked.

He bent, scooped a handful of coral, let it sift through his fingers. “Looks like you’re building a runway.”

“That’s the idea.”

He looked past me toward the jungle. “We got a report. Enemy floatplane spotted north of here yesterday.”

Malloy muttered, “Of course.”

Ellis’s expression stayed even. “If they know we’re here, they’ll come.”

I nodded. “Then we finish before they do.”

He studied my face like he was trying to decide if I was brave or just too tired to be scared. Then he clapped my shoulder.

“You finish it,” he said. “And I’ll put planes on it.”

When he walked away, Malloy leaned close. “You hear that? That’s the sound of pilots promising things they expect us to deliver.”

“Malloy,” I said, “if we don’t deliver, they don’t come back. So we deliver.”

He stared at the strip, rainclouds piling over the horizon. “Aye, sir.”

---

That night, the radio crackled with a warning.

“Bogeys. Multiple. Bearing two-nine-zero. Altitude unknown.”

I felt my stomach tighten like a fist.

The Marines had a few anti-aircraft guns set up—nothing fancy, but enough to make a pilot think twice. We had no radar. Just ears and eyes and a sense of doom.

The first engines came in as a distant hum, then a growl. The sky was moonless, black velvet with holes punched through by stars.

Someone shouted, “Incoming!”

The bombs didn’t whistle like in movies. They made a deep rushing sound, like the air itself had decided to fall.

Explosions punched the beach, throwing sand high. A crate of fuel drums went up in a flash that turned night into day for half a second. Men scattered, diving into shell scrapes and behind equipment.

I flattened myself in the coral dust and felt the ground jump under my ribs.

Another blast, closer, and I heard a scream cut short.

Above us, the anti-aircraft guns opened up, bright tracers stitching the dark. I saw silhouettes of planes—Japanese bombers—sliding overhead like sharks.

One of our dozers took a hit, shrapnel tearing into its engine. It belched smoke and died with a sound that felt personal.

When the last engine faded, the night didn’t return to normal. It stayed tight and listening, like an animal waiting for the next strike.

Malloy crawled over to me. His face looked older in the darkness.

“You alive, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah.”

He swallowed. “We lost two men near the fuel dump. And the dozer. And part of the planking stack got peppered.”

I closed my eyes for a second, not to mourn but to steady the math in my head. Two men. One dozer. Damaged planking. And still the same deadline.

“What’s the strip look like?” I asked.

“Couple craters on the north end. Not deep, but deep enough.”

“Then we fill them,” I said.

He stared. “Now?”

“Now,” I repeated, and pushed myself to my feet.

The men looked at me like I was asking them to fight the ocean. Maybe I was. But they grabbed shovels, and in the smoky dark, we began again.

We filled craters with coral and packed it down by hand where the roller couldn’t reach. We dragged damaged planking aside and sorted what we could salvage. We worked while the smell of burning fuel drifted over us, while the jungle hissed with life, while somewhere two men lay under ponchos with their dog tags still warm.

At some point, Rizzo muttered, “This war’s got no manners.”

“No,” I said, and slammed a shovel into coral. “But neither do we.”

---

By the third day, our hands had become something else—callused, cracked, moving on habit. The strip was mostly packed and graded, and now came the part that turned crushed coral into an airfield: the steel planking.

It arrived in long sections, perforated so it could grip and drain, each piece heavy enough to make your shoulders curse. We laid it like we were dealing cards—overlapping, locking, hammering it into place with sledgehammers and the flat ends of axes.

Men formed a line, passing planks forward, sweat pouring. The sun was brutal, bright enough to bleach the world. Heat shimmered off the coral like an invisible fire.

Malloy walked the line, barking cadence. “Lift—walk—drop—lock! Lift—walk—drop—lock!”

It sounded like a hymn for exhausted men.

Around noon, a young islander—maybe sixteen—approached cautiously. He carried a bundle of green coconuts in a woven sling. One of our men raised his rifle, then lowered it when the boy stopped, hands open.

I stepped toward him slowly, palms out.

He said something in his language, then pointed at the coconuts, then at us.

“You’re offering?” I asked, feeling ridiculous talking English to a boy who couldn’t understand it.

He smiled anyway—quick, bright—and nodded.

I took one coconut, split it with my knife, and drank. The water was cool and sweet, like a memory of civilization.

I offered the boy a ration bar in exchange. He sniffed it like it might bite.

Malloy came up, watching. “Think he knows we’re building a runway?”

I glanced at the strip stretching behind us—steel and coral cutting through his island like a scar.

“He knows,” I said. “He just doesn’t know what it means yet.”

Malloy’s gaze followed mine. “Neither do we, half the time.”

The boy pointed toward the sky, then made a swooping motion with his hand.

Planes.

I felt my spine tighten again.

“Scouts?” Malloy asked.

I nodded and shouted for the radio.

Minutes later, the warning came: “Enemy aircraft possible. Range unknown.”

We were so close. The runway wasn’t fully finished at the far end, but we had enough planking down for a short landing if someone was desperate.

Commander Pike ran up, face set like stone. “Harlan, can you take a plane in the next hour?”

I looked at the strip. The steel shimmered, a hard line of hope. The north end still needed another hundred feet of planking, but the central section was solid.

“If they come in light,” I said, “and if they’re careful.”

Pike’s jaw worked. “We’ve got a Marine fighter section inbound from a rear base. One’s been hit—leaking fuel. They need somewhere.”

The words hit me harder than the bombs had. This wasn’t theory. This wasn’t planning. It was a man in the air, bleeding gasoline, counting seconds.

Malloy looked at me, eyes narrowing. “We can finish that north end,” he said, already moving. “All hands.”

“All hands!” I shouted, and the phrase spread like fire.

Men dropped what they were doing and rushed toward the gap. Planking came forward in a desperate flood. Sledgehammers rose and fell. Fingers bled. Someone cursed God and then apologized out of habit.

The jungle at the edge of the clearing watched us like it had its own opinion.

The sky stayed empty for a long time, and the waiting was worse than the work.

Then we heard it—an engine, high and strained, coming in fast.

A dot appeared over the lagoon, growing larger, wobbling. A Wildcat fighter, wings scarred, trailing a thin mist that caught sunlight like a ghost.

It circled once, low. I could see the pilot’s head in the cockpit, turning, searching.

I ran to the edge of the strip and waved both arms like a madman, signaling him in.

Malloy sprinted beside me, shouting something I couldn’t hear over the engine’s scream.

The Wildcat lined up, dropped its wheels, and came in hard.

For a moment, I thought it would overshoot, smash into the unfinished end and break apart. My heart stopped in advance.

But the wheels hit steel with a shriek, sparks flying, the plane bouncing once, twice, then settling, skidding, slowing—finally rolling to a stop just yards from where our last plank had locked into place.

Men cheered, not because it was pretty, but because it was alive.

The canopy popped. The pilot climbed out, legs shaky. He looked at the runway like it had appeared by magic.

He raised a hand in a quick salute. “Thought I was swimming today,” he yelled.

I laughed—an ugly, relieved sound. “Not on my island.”

He stared at the strip again, then at us. “How long you boys been here?”

Malloy answered before I could. “Feels like a hundred years. Actually, three damn days.”

The pilot’s eyebrows shot up. “Three days?”

“Yeah,” Malloy said. “We’re lazy.”

The pilot shook his head like he couldn’t find words. Then his gaze snapped to the sky.

Another sound—different. Deeper. Multiple engines.

I followed his eyes and saw them: distant specks, moving in a line, sunlight flashing off wings.

Japanese aircraft.

The pilot swore. “They followed me.”

Pike’s voice came sharp through the chaos. “Get that fighter fueled and armed! We use our own runway to defend our own runway!”

It was the most Seabee sentence I’d ever heard.

Men scattered. Fuel hoses came out. Ammunition crates opened. Marines rushed to their guns.

I stood on the runway we’d dragged out of coral and sweat and watched the first enemy planes approach, and the strangest thing happened inside my chest:

Fear, yes.

But also something steady.

Because the runway was real. Because it was there. Because overnight we’d turned an island with nothing into a place a man could land and live.

The Wildcat’s engine coughed back to life. The pilot climbed in, slammed the canopy, and gave us a thumbs-up that looked almost casual.

Then he taxied forward, turned into the wind, and lifted off from steel we’d laid with bleeding hands.

The enemy planes came closer, and our anti-aircraft guns began to speak.

The war had found our island.

But now the island had teeth.

---

Later—hours later, after the raid had been driven off with more noise than elegance, after we’d patched a few new holes and carried a few more wounded men to the aid tent—Malloy and I sat at the edge of the strip.

The sun was setting, turning the lagoon into molten gold. The runway stretched behind us, a hard gray line cutting toward the horizon, humming faintly with heat.

Rizzo walked by with a bandage on his forearm and said, “So what now, Lieutenant?”

I watched the sky, empty for the moment.

“Now,” I said, “we keep it alive.”

Malloy nodded slowly. “They’ll come back.”

“I know.”

He picked up a bit of coral gravel, rolled it between his fingers. “Funny thing,” he said. “Back home, people think a runway is just a place for planes. Flat ground. Paint lines.”

I looked at the strip and the jungle and the sea and the smoke still drifting from the scorched fuel dump.

“Out here,” I said, “it’s a promise.”

Malloy’s eyes stayed on the horizon. “A promise of what?”

I thought of the pilot who’d almost gone swimming. I thought of the two men we’d lost in the night. I thought of the next plane that would come limping in, and the next.

“A promise,” I said, “that we’re not going to let the ocean decide who lives.”

The first stars appeared—small, stubborn lights. Somewhere beyond them, the war continued, indifferent and huge.

But on this little island that hadn’t asked for a runway, we’d built one anyway.

And in 1942, that was how you pushed back the dark: one plank, one shovel, one overnight miracle at a time.

Note: Some content was generated using AI tools (ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity and suitability for historical illustration purposes.