Military airfields - secrets of the underground world

Yugoslavia had about forty strategic facilities, including several underground airports that were the biggest military secret. The public still tells fantastic stories about them, and the Željava airports near Bihać and Slatina near Pristina were especially attractive, along with the Šipčanik underground military facility near Titograd. Economists claim that nearly ninety billion dollars were spent on them, and four and a half billion in Željavo alone, which is how much a highway through the whole of Yugoslavia would cost. They were located in all Yugoslav republics.

"I know all the military airports in the former Yugoslavia well. I have landed at each one several times and been in their facilities. The first level of the three levels of protection were the Željava airports near Bihać and Slatina near Priština. They are characterized by the fact that they were built together with external infrastructure such as a response to the doctrines of the Cold War era - the strategy of limited sovereignty and the strategy of limited nuclear war," Blagoje Grahovac, a retired aviation general and geopolitical analyst, explains to Monitor.

Željava Airport was the largest underground airport in Yugoslavia and among the largest in Europe. It was technically and technologically protected from powerful nuclear strikes. The four large entrances were closed by steel doors one meter thick. The doors weighed 100 tons and hermetically sealed the galleries to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear missile. The rooms inside the complex were connected by 56 heavy armored doors.

"It was impenetrable even for two counterattacks. The first door could withstand a twenty-kiloton nuclear strike, and due to the breaking of the shock wave, the second door, with the same resistance, could withstand a hundred-kiloton strike, and the third a five-hundred-kiloton strike," he says. Grahovac.

Until 1992, Željava was the most powerful military base in the then SFRY and in Europe. For its construction, a model from Sweden was used, which was then the most famous country for the construction of underground airports. It is located on the border of BiH and Croatia, at the foot of the Plješevica mountain. It was built from 1959 to 1968, when it was quickly opened due to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

It was built in a visionary way - for the 21st century. The entire complex was built exclusively by local companies. The tactical-technical qualities were impressive. Three underground galleries to accommodate 58 aircraft, and according to unofficial sources, 80 and even up to 120 MIG-21 aircraft could be accommodated. Flying from that airport was a big challenge for any pilot.

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