China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  Ford opened the throttles and headed downstream, taking advantage of the six-knot current in the river. Ahead lay a series of cataracts. A few feet before the rapids, Ford coaxed the Boeing off the water, by scant inches, then mushed along in the air cushion over the water. He discovered then that he had no aileron control. For several minutes he was forced to fly at full power down the gorges below the cataracts, using only the rudder to turn the Boeing. Cautiously he gathered speed and altitude. Grudgingly, the heavy ship began to climb in the jungle air. The ailerons returned to service, and Ford banked the ship westward, toward the South Atlantic. Not until later did he determine that the great load of fuel in the wing tanks had bent the wings enough to bind the ailerons, locking them in place.5

  Twenty-three hours and thirty-five minutes later, after an ocean journey of 3,100 miles, they landed at Natal, on the east salient of Brazil. As soon as they had fueled and performed maintenance on number one engine, they were airborne again. In Trinidad, forty hours since their departure from Léopoldville and the menacing Congo River, the crew of the Pacific Clipper slept.

  On the freezing morning of 6 January 1942, the duty officer at LaGuardia airport in New York heard the transmission: “Pacific Clipper, inbound from Auckland, New Zealand, Captain Ford reporting. Due arrive Pan American Marine Terminal La Guardia seven minutes.”

  To a flying boat had fallen the distinction of making the first round-the-world flight in a commercial airliner. Bob Ford and the Pacific Clipper, though they had not set out to do so, had entered history.6

  24

  In Service

  Thus ended the age of elegance. With war being waged on opposite ends of the planet, an urgent need existed for long-range transport aircraft. In the United States there were no such airplanes except for a handful of army B-24 bombers, convertible to cargo use, and Pan American’s fleet of oceangoing flying boats.

  The newly delivered Boeing 314s, which had provided a standard of airborne luxury never seen before, entered military service. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Clipper was requisitioned by the U.S. Navy. The Anzac Clipper went into the service of the U.S. Army Air Forces, receiving the designation C-98. The Yankee Clipper, Dixie Clipper, and Atlantic Clipper were also purchased by the navy, although these aircraft never actually left Pan American service. The American Clipper, Capetown Clipper, California Clipper, and Dixie Clipper followed the Anzac Clipper into USAAF service. The Honolulu Clipper stayed with Pan Am, assigned to the Hawaii–San Francisco route.

  The aging Martin M-130s entered the service of the U.S. Navy. The China Clipper and Philippine Clipper were assigned to the Pacific, performing military transport duty. All the requisitioned flying boats were to be operated by the airline under military contracts.

  Stripped of their civilian finery, the clippers all received coats of dull gray paint. Gone were the plush passenger amenities, gone the seats, sleeping berths, lounges, the luxurious lavatories. Gone forever were the days of silver goblets and hot meals served in real china by white-coated stewards. The stately flying boats had become military transports. They carried only cargo and priority passengers.

  Within days of the Pearl Harbor attack, Captain Harold Gray was on his way to Calcutta in a B-314. His cargo was airplane tires, urgently needed for the Flying Tigers’ P-40s to replace the load left on Wake by John Hamilton and the Philippine Clipper. Militarized flying boats were soon ranging across the Atlantic and Pacific, hauling bullets, parts, personnel, mail.

  The North Atlantic, which a decade ago was a no-man’s land crossed only by daredevils and pioneers, became a busy air corridor. Flying boats shuttled daily on the northern route from the United States to Britain and, on the southern route, from Natal to West Africa. One Pan Am pilot, Joe Hart, made twelve ocean crossings in thirteen days. In one twenty-four-hour period, he made two Atlantic crossings.1 Crews flew as many as 197 hours in a three-week period.

  Though still assigned to Pan American, crews had military reserve status and wore the uniform of the contracting military branch. If flying a B-314 under army command, the pilots wore khaki uniforms. When flying the M-130 on navy missions, they wore naval aviator’s green uniforms with gold wings. There were inevitable conflicts between civilian and military authority. Military crews rebelled when told upon arrival at a station that they were to take their orders from the Pan American station manager. Likewise, the flying boat pilots would find their operations dictated by zealous, newly commissioned officers. A furious B-314 captain, Marius Lodeesen, found his orders countermanded by an army major. He fired a message from an outpost in the Indian Ocean: WHO IS RUNNING THIS OPERATION—YOU, THE ARMY, OR ME? From New York his chief pilot wired: YOU ARE.2

  In Britain, BOAC had gone to a wartime footing. With their three B-314s, the Berwick, Bristol, and Bangor, the airline maintained a service between Poole and Baltimore, and from Poole to Lisbon, a neutral port that had now become an important diplomatic center. The Lisbon service eventually was extended to West Africa, where land planes continued to the Sudan and East Africa.

  The “Horseshoe Route” was a joint BOAC and Qantas operation, flown with the C-class Empire flying boats, connecting South Africa to Australia. When the center portion, Singapore and Malaya, were overrun by the Japanese, the Short boats were forced to fly nonstop from Ceylon all the way to Perth, in Western Australia. Two Tasman Empire Airways (TEAL) S.30 Empire boats provided the only passenger service of any kind between New Zealand and Australia from 30 April 1940 until the end of the war.

  Two C-class boats, the Cabot and Caribou, were lost to German attacks during the Norwegian campaign. Two other Empire boats, Coorong and Cambria, evacuated 469 British troops from Crete in April-May 1941. In the New Guinea campaign, Qantas’s flying boats contributed valuable support.3

  In the early weeks of 1942, Prime Minister Churchill journeyed to Washington for the “Arcadia” conference with President Roosevelt. Strategies were discussed, and Churchill received what he had come for—assurance from Roosevelt that the Allies would concentrate on Europe first. Hitler, then the Japanese.

  Following the conference, Churchill planned to fly from Norfolk, Virginia, to Bermuda. There he was to board the battleship HMS Duke of York. Escorted by a destroyer screen, he would cross the Atlantic to England.

  The flight to Bermuda was aboard the Berwick, one of the three B-314s released to BOAC. “I traveled in an enormous Boeing flying boat,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “which made a most favorable impression on me. . . I took the controls for a bit, to feel this ponderous machine of thirty tons or more in the air. I got more and more attached to the flying boat.”

  So attached did he become that he asked the BOAC captain, J. C. Kelly-Rogers, whether the Boeing could fly all the way from Bermuda to England. Yes, Kelly-Rogers assured him, indeed it could. The idea provoked a stiff argument from Churchill’s staff. Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal and First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, thought it was too great a risk. “What about the U-boats you have been pointing out to me?” asked Churchill. Intelligence reports showed as many as twenty German submarines waiting along the route to England.

  The two officers relented after they learned that they, too, could accompany the prime minister on the flying boat. The night before their departure, Churchill had misgivings. “I felt rather frightened,” he wrote. “I thought of the ocean spaces, and that we should never be within a thousand miles of land until we approached the British Isles.”

  The size and luxury of the Berwick put him at ease. He was berthed in the “bridal suite.” There were windows on either side of his cabin. Kelly-Rogers showed the ever-curious Churchill the flight deck, the instruments and controls, and pointed out the de-icing boots on the wings and empennage. Churchill was favorably impressed with the veteran flying boat captain. “We were in sure hands,” thought the prime minister as he turned in for the night.

  The next morning things had changed. The skies had clouded, and celestial na
vigation was impossible. Rogers had intended to reach the British coastline from the southwest. They should have overflown the Scilly Islands, but the island group was nowhere to be seen. Kelly-Rogers decided to turn directly north, a track that would place them somewhere near a friendly coastline.

  The decision, as it turned out, was fortuitous. Another six minutes’ flying time would have taken them directly over Brest, on the French Atlantic coast, a heavily defended German submarine base. But there was danger still from the British coast. Arriving from the south, seemingly from German-occupied Europe, the lone flying boat was picked up on radar and labeled an “unidentified aircraft.” Hawker Hurricane fighters were scrambled.

  The fighters “were ordered to shoot us down,” wrote Churchill, noting with a touch of schoolboy bravado that “they failed in their mission.” Before the Hurricanes could make their intercept, Kelly-Rogers had landed the Berwick safely in Plymouth Harbor.4

  A year later, on the morning of 12 January 1943, Captain Howard Cone was in Port of Spain, Trinidad, with the B-314 Dixie Clipper. He had been given a mysterious passenger manifest identifying his passengers only by number. Not until Passenger Number One, in his wheelchair, came aboard did Cone realize that he would be flying the president of the United States and his retinue on a secret mission.

  Roosevelt was bound for Casablanca. There he would confer with his comrade-at-arms, Churchill, and meet the French general, de Gaulle. They would decide on the terms of an unconditional surrender by the Axis nations.

  In 1943 flying was still considered by many to be an unacceptable risk for a head of state, particularly in time of war. No incumbent American president had flown in an airplane, nor had a president left the country in wartime. Roosevelt’s top aide, Harry Hopkins, was uneasy about the flight. In his diary he wrote, “I sat with him, strapped in, as the plane rose from the water—and he acted like a sixteen-year-old, for he had done no flying since he was President. The trip was smooth, the President happy and interested.”

  The conference proceeded as planned. The trip home was cause for another celebration. The Dixie Clipper’s crew presented Roosevelt with caviar, champagne, and cake. It was the president’s sixty-first birthday. The crew gave him an envelope containing eleven dollars for the Infantile Paralysis Fund, a charity close to Roosevelt’s heart.5

  The war took its toll. On the evening of 22 February 1943, the Yankee Clipper had crossed the Atlantic, stopping at Bermuda, and was approaching the Tagus River, near Lisbon, Portugal. Her captain was R. O. D. Sullivan, who had flown with Musick on the first transpacific flight. It was Sullivan who had made the first landing in Wake’s tiny lagoon, and it was Sullivan, who from time to time outraged other airmen with his brusque manners and heavy-fisted flying. But Rod Sullivan was the world’s most experienced over-ocean pilot. The previous month he had completed his one-hundredth Atlantic crossing, more than any airman in the world.

  Banking low over the river, Sullivan turned onto the final leg of his approach. In light rain and semi-darkness he misjudged his altitude. At 6:47 P.M. the Yankee Clipper’s left wingtip caught the water. The big ship cartwheeled, smashed into the water broadside, and broke up. Within minutes she sank in the chilled waters of the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of the thirty-nine people on board.

  Among the passengers were members of a USO troupe, including singers Tamara Drasin, the 1930s “First Lady of Song,” and night club singer and recording star, Jane Froman. Also on board was author and war correspondent, Ben Robertson, Jr.

  Drasin, who had introduced songs such as “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and “Love For Sale,” was killed in the crash. So was Robertson, on his way to take over the London bureau of the New York Herald Tribune. Froman suffered severe injuries, including a smashed right leg, and would be crippled for life.6

  Out of the disaster came a poignant love story. Froman was kept afloat for forty-five minutes in the freezing river by another survivor, Fourth Officer John Curtis Burns, who was also severely injured with a broken back and a fractured skull. Both were rescued. In 1948 they were married.7

  In the official investigation, the accident would be blamed on Sullivan. He had turned at too low an altitude over the river, the board determined, and had inadvertently flown the clipper into the water. Sullivan, who survived the crash, denied for the rest of his life any fault, insisting that the Boeing’s nose had dipped sharply downward, out of control, just prior to impact.8

  Of the twelve Boeing 314s in wartime service, the Yankee Clipper was the only casualty. She had flown over a million miles and accomplished 240 Atlantic crossings, including the historic first scheduled flight across the North Atlantic.

  On the morning of 21 January 1943, the Philippine Clipper was inbound to San Francisco from Pearl Harbor. Like her famous sister ship, the China Clipper, the Philippine Clipper was assigned to the U.S. Navy. For the past year she had performed shuttle service between the West Coast and Hawaii. In command was Captain Robert Elzay, a ten-year Pan American veteran and a former naval aviator.

  Elzay had been briefed about the stationary front that lay along the northern coast of California. The front was not expected to clear for another twenty-four hours. Visibility was likely to be marginal, and strong winds were forecast to be whipping San Francisco Bay. In ordinary times Elzay might have considered delaying his departure.

  This was a high-priority flight. On board the Philippine Clipper were Rear Admiral R. R. English, commander of the Pacific submarine force, and his staff, including two navy captains, three commanders, two lieutenant commanders, and a navy nurse. The admiral and his party were en route to a submarine warfare conference in Richmond, California.

  Pan American’s flying boat base was moved to Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, from Alameda on the eastern shore. The Philippine Clipper’s estimated arrival time was 10:18 A.M. local time on 21 January. Shortly before dawn Captain Elzay radioed that due to tail winds they would arrive nearly four hours sooner, at 6:35 A.M.

  The coastal storm that worried Elzay appeared exactly as forecast. Treasure Island reported heavy rain, 900- to 1000-foot ceiling, visibility one to two miles. Southerly winds of forty-four to forty-eight miles per hour lashed San Francisco Bay.

  The usual alternate landing site for San Francisco-bound flying boats was Clear Lake, to the north of San Francisco, but conditions there were equally bad. Because of the early arrival, Elzay had more than sufficient fuel to divert southward, all the way to San Diego. Instead, he radioed his intention to hold offshore and wait for the weather to improve. At 7:00 A.M. he reported that the Philippine Clipper was holding over the Farallon Islands, near the mouth of San Francisco Bay.

  Elzay was mistaken. The Philippine Clipper’s actual position was approximately ninety miles farther north, inland from the California coast.

  No further position reports were received. At about 7:30 A.M. the Philippine Clipper flew into a mountain near the Russian River, a few miles west of Ukiah, California.

  Because the aircraft crashed so far from Elzay’s last reported position, nearly two weeks elapsed before the wreckage was found. There were no survivors. Because of the military nature of the flight, little publicity was given the accident. A huge cordon was drawn around the site. There were the inevitable rumors of sabotage, particularly after the search party was unable to find Admiral English’s briefcase, known to contain material pertinent to the meeting he was to attend. Not until several days later was the briefcase found near the wreck. The armed guards were relieved, and souvenir hunters eventually picked over the remains of the Philippine Clipper.9

  What happened? Since the first Pacific flights, it had been a common procedure for flying boat captains, when weathered out of their destination, to drop down to sea level before reaching the coast. With surface contact established, they would continue under the cloud deck, into the bay. It was speculated by Elzay’s colleagues that he did this, not realizing he was already over land when he descended through the clouds.


  The CAB investigation placed the blame for the crash direcly on Captain Elzay for not having fixed his position correctly. But the most pertinent question went unanswered. Why had a seasoned flying boat crew been so far off in their reckoning? No satisfactory answer was ever found.

  Until the crash, the Philippine Clipper had flown 14,628 hours without an accident. She had flown the first transpacific passenger flight, making the historic rendezvous with the SS Lurline in 1936. She had survived strafing by the Japanese at Wake Island in 1941, suffering some twenty bullet holes.

  Of the three Martin M-130s, only the China Clipper remained.

  25

  Requiem for the Big Boats

  Flying boats lived lives of hazard. Their enemies were legion. They included salt water, rough water, slick water, ice-filled water, and the darkness of night. Corrosion was a constant condition. Repair of a ruptured hull was a nightmare.

  By the middle of World War II, the flying boat was in a race with the bulldozer. Across the planet military engineers were pushing aside jungle, desert, and tundra, laying concrete and Marston mat. Where once only flying boats had ventured, rubber-tired land planes were screeching down on newly surfaced runways. The great lumbering boats, with their requirements for safe harbors and their susceptibility to saltwater corrosion, had become inefficient anachronisms.

  As the war progressed, the U.S. Army Air Force gradually developed its own worldwide air transport system. The mainstays of the military long-range fleet were now the Douglas C-54 (the civilian DC-4) and the Lockheed C-69 (Constellation). The army C-98s (Boeing 314s) acquired from Pan American were eventually turned over to the navy. And then when the navy was ready to release the Boeings, before the end of the war, Pan American chose not to repurchase them. Even to America’s premier overseas airline, flying boats had no place in the postwar future.