Messerschmitt - Me109 G-14 - Paper model

Did you know there was an underground airfield at Hanau?

Good Hunting.

MR

There was a complete runway build under the original surface runway. There was a sliding ramp door at the end with a lip for the underground runway. When the planes would hit the end of the underground runway the lip would throw them up into the air. They would literally come out of the ground flying. That's the story we were told about the field.

There were supposed to be FW-190's at least in the underground field. We tried to get into it. Since we were combat engineers and knew about booby traps we were good to go. We (3 of us) requested permission to go down inside and see what we could find out about it. The base commander thought differently. Request denied. FLATLY DENIED. Have a nice day denied.

Several times during my 3 year assignment there they found US 500lb GP bombs around the field that were unexploded. Usually when digging up sewer lines or anything to do with underground excavations. They would have to call in EOD and cordon off that part of the base. Which was always funny to me since they have either been living or driving right over those bombs for almost 30 years by that time.

So, we looked around other parts of Germany and found bunkers, in the Graffenwohr training ground, with some German soldiers remains still inside. The bunkers had elevators for the guns. After the guns would fire they would be lowered into a pit in the bunker to be reloaded and then raised back up to fire. These were bunkers of concrete with walls at least 2 feet thick, I would think thicker but I can't remember us actually measuring them. I know the bunkers were the size of 3 houses and about 12-14 feet tall. Even then, they were hard to see from about 10 meters away.

It was a big deal to turn the location over to graves registration and our unit got lot's of public recognition. Privately we were told to stop digging around in "dangerous" places.

Good Hunting.

MR