CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION
OF A WWII AAF FORWARD BASE

From the PREFACE of the document, as Capt. James L. Ross explains, "this study of Shemya AFB is a unique publication in the Alaskan Air Command. Very few publications have described the details of W.W.II base construction. Because the Shemya base was on an isolated island, its forming was unlike any other in the American military establishment."

This document is about 196kB, and depending upon the speed of your modem, may take a minute or two to download. This document is a PDF file, and requires the Acrobat Reader (download for free from: http://www.adobe.com).

(Example) Selecting Both Bookmarks and Pages

If you click on Acrobat Reader's "both bookmarks and page" button (see the depressed button example on the left) you will have access to a hyperlink menu that will make navigating around the document a little easier. If you click on the "triangle" symbol near the bottom of the bookmark window as shown in the image to the left (at the bottom), this will expand the Appendix for even more hyperlinked choices. If you select and go to the "CONTENTS" page, each item listed is also hyperlinked to the indicated location in the document.

My thanks to Capt. Ross, wherever he is, for writing this account, and to Dan Lange (Shemya, 1945) who had included several segments of this story in his Shemya Mailbag, and who also graciously provided this document for our web site...and granted permission for us to use it!