[Larry deZeng]

You must be a contractor or a retired contractor, Brian. You know your stuff about concrete.

I want to go with lean mix because the runway construction season in central and north Norway was mid-May to the end of September and a bit longer than that in south Norway. The concrete runways were in some cases constructed by Lw.-Bau-Btle. using Norwegian civilian labor, Norwegian political prisoners, Russian POWs, etc., and in other cases by the Organisation Todt with the same variety of labor. Some of the concrete runways were put down in a single season while others were under construction for 2 and 3 years before they were completed. Some were even started in 1940-41, abandoned from 1941-44, and then restarted and completed by the end of the war.

Coastal ships carrying timber from sawmills in the Trondheim area were continually sailing back and forth to ports serving the airfields in northern Norway, and some also had steel matting listed on their manifests, at least that's how Bletchley Park translated it.

So it looks like your strong reinforced mix was used in some cases and your lean mix in others. But your thoughts on how the treseksjoner sections might have been used in conjunction with a lean mix runway are very interesting.

The airfields north of Trondheim (Bardufoss, Banak, Alta, Kirkenes and some others) had a permafrost problem that plays into the drainage issue because it would have been quite difficult and time consuming to dig down below the peat outer layer and penetrate the permafrost to lay any kind of a foundation for the concrete that was deeper than a few inches. Unlike the others, Kirkenes had gravel runways which the Luftwaffe bomber guys hated because the He 111s and Ju 88s could not use Kirkenes to fly torpedo strikes. The gravel would kick up and damage the torpedos.

L.