the 513th Expeditionary Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers (RED HORSE) Airmen, have spent the past year or so restoring World War II-era airfields on the Pacific island of Tinian.

Dirt Boyz is the term for civil engineer Airmen who get their hands dirty pouring concrete, operating bulldozers, fixing pipes, and all the other work involved in maintaining an air base or building a new one.

Last year, the 820th RED HORSE Squadron from Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., arrived at Tinian to restore the runways at North Field, a complex of ramps, runways, and taxiways at the island’s north end.

the U.S. seized Tinian from Japan in August, 1944, and “As soon as the island was seized, the Seabees, the Navy’s construction battalions, began work on the largest airbase of World War II—and in fact the largest airfield in the world at the time,” according to the National Park Service.

The base had six 8,500-foot runways: four in North Field and two more farther south at West Field.

The former West Field became the Tinian International Airport and is still in use to this day: Air Force F-22 fighters landed there for the first time in March 2023. That year, the Air Force went public with its plans to restore North Field, with then-Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach telling Nikkei Asia that the area would be transformed into an “extensive” facility. The Air Force received $79 million in its 2024 budget for construction projects on the island.

The return to Tinian is part of a strategy called Agile Combat Employment, where, in a conflict with China, small groups of Airmen would launch and recover aircraft from small, scattered air bases to avoid being targeted by long-range missiles. Tinian is one of several locations across the Pacific where the Air Force may operate in a future conflict.

But preparing those airfields takes work, and that’s where units such as RED HORSE come in. The 823rd RED HORSE Squadron from Hurlburt Field, Fla., spent more than six months restoring and rebuilding North Field, putting up new structures and clearing eight decades of overgrown vegetation, according to an April press release. The 823rd went home in April, but other RED HORSE units and Navy Seabees took up the task, with the goal of restoring over 20 million square feet of degraded World War II pavement.

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-red-horse-wwii-airfield-tinian/