B Company of the 864th Engineer Aviation Battalion stepped ashore on 8 June 1944. The rest of the battalion arrived by 11 June. The engineering challenge was straightforward by wartime standards - a few dozen acres of scrub forest, a few meters of sandy topsoil, and beneath it the white coral bedrock that gave the island its runway-friendly character. Bulldozers and graders stripped the surface down to coral and leveled it. The runway opened on 22 June 1944, three weeks to the day from MacArthur's initial order. Improvements continued through the summer. Revetments for fighter parking, dispersal areas for bombers, a taxiway system, ammunition dumps, fuel lines - all built onto coral that needed only a touch-up grading to repair whatever damage Japanese raids caused. The white coral is now a distinctive feature of surviving photographs: a bright runway against dark green jungle and bright blue lagoon.

Headquarters of the Fifth Air Force moved to Owi in August 1944. So did V Bomber Command and V Fighter Command. The bomber groups included the 22nd and the 43rd, both flying B-24 Liberators on long missions against Japanese airfields, oil facilities, and shipping lanes across the Dutch East Indies and into the Philippines. The 8th Fighter Group brought P-38 Lightnings - the long-range twin-boom fighter that ruled Pacific air combat. The 35th Fighter Group brought P-47 Thunderbolts. The 418th, 421st, and 547th Night Fighter Squadrons flew P-61 Black Widows - the strange twin-engine, twin-boom night interceptors that hunted Japanese bombers in the dark. For a few months in 1944 Owi Island was one of the most densely populated military airfields in the hemisphere. Japanese pilots tried to damage the runway. The coral absorbed the hits. American fighters eventually achieved air superiority over the western end of the Vogelkop Peninsula and the Molucca Sea, and the raids became rare.

On 24 August 1944, Bob Hope brought his traveling troupe to Owi Island. Hope had been performing for Allied troops across the Pacific that summer - in Australia, New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands - and Owi was one stop among many. The troupe included singer Frances Langford, guitarist Tony Romano, and comedian Jerry Colonna. They performed a stage show for bomber crews and engineers on a plywood stage the base had rigged up near the flight line. Surviving photographs show thousands of airmen seated on the coral, shirts off in the tropical heat, watching a Hollywood entertainer do what Hollywood entertainers did in 1944. Pacific veterans remembered the visit for decades. Hope remembered Owi in his later memoirs as one of the hottest, most uncomfortable shows his troupe ever gave - and one that the men most needed. The crews flying B-24s out of Owi were losing aircraft. The shows mattered.

Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945. Within weeks, the Fifth Air Force pulled out of Owi. The B-24s flew home or to scrap yards. The P-38s and P-47s were crated up for disposal. The engineers departed. The 864th Aviation Engineer Battalion was deactivated. What remained was the runway, the taxiways, the coral hardstands - and nothing else. The jungle came back fast in Western New Guinea, which is to say within a few rainy seasons the revetments were green with secondary growth and the drainage ditches had silted in. Satellite photos from the twenty-first century show the runway outline still legible after more than sixty years, a long pale scar across the island that no road or town has ever reused. The island of Owi was returned to Indonesian administration in 1963 and now belongs to Biak Numfor Regency. A few fishing families live there. The airfield is not.

Fly the Biak approach today - Biak's civilian airport, Frans Kaisiepo, has a 3,570-meter runway inherited from its own wartime past - and Owi Island appears just off the south coast. Look down on it from altitude and you see the runway as a pale straight line cutting through the forest, with fainter parallel lines to either side where the taxiways and dispersal areas used to be. Closer inspection reveals foundations, rusted fragments of corrugated iron, the outlines of the revetments. Pacific Wrecks, a preservation organization that documents abandoned World War II sites across Oceania, maintains detailed catalogs of what remains. Very little is marked on the ground. Indonesian authorities have not turned Owi into a memorial. What you see from a low-flying Cessna is roughly what a returning B-24 crew would have seen at the end of a long mission - minus the ground crews, minus the bombers, minus most of the evidence that the war ever happened here. The coral is still the coral. The jungle is winning.