Now he needed Roosevelt to come to the rescue. On April 16, a week after returning home from Rio, Eckener had lunch in Berlin with his old friend the journalist Karl von Wiegand and William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador. There, Eckener outlined his predicament to Dodd, who promised to get a message to the White House.
Two days later, Dodd wrote to Robert Walton Moore, the assistant secretary of state. He explained the pickle Eckener found himself in and suggested that he thought it appropriate “for the President to give him some attention when he goes to Washington. The whole outside world respects Eckener, and it would seem to me to be nothing but fair if our Washington authorities could even give him a luncheon and allow the press people to know it.”
Lo and behold, the White House soon lodged a formal invitation with the Air Ministry in Berlin for Eckener to have luncheon with the president “upon his arrival in the United States aboard the new airship Hindenburg.”
In other words, the president of the United States was expecting to see Eckener, and not Lehmann, when the Hindenburg came over. The gambit stirred Göring into action, not least because he saw an opportunity to twit Goebbels over this burgeoning diplomatic imbroglio his rival had caused with his idiotic unpersoning scheme.
Eckener was invited to Berlin to see Göring in an effort “to clear up the difficulties…in which he finds himself.” In their chat, Göring did not bother bringing up the tired subject of whether Eckener had made the disrespectful comments during the plebiscite flights. Of course he had. He was more concerned with why Eckener had refused to, as Eckener put it, “sing a hymn of praise” for the reoccupation of the Rhineland, and why he’d heard reports that Eckener had made fun of the Hitler salute at various times. Eckener assured him, not entirely believably, that all that was idle gossip, and Göring seemed content to let it go.
Then the air minister brought up one other little matter. “They say you would have liked to have succeeded Hindenburg as president!” To this exhumation of the bizarre, astrology-imbued Neues Deutschland story from January 1933, Eckener could honestly reply that this rumor had been started by a gutter rag, but it was evident “from Göring’s dissatisfied manner that this point carried a certain weight in high Nazi circles.”
Moving on, Göring suggested that Eckener write to Goebbels to say that his seeming lack of enthusiasm for the plebiscite flights had been misinterpreted; his misgivings had actually been due to his “understandable anxiety about the ship being endangered.” Eckener would pretend to apologize; Goebbels would pretend to accept the apology. Once done, Göring would talk to the Führer about having the unpersoning edict lifted.
The intervention worked, and Eckener was quickly rehabilitated. To save face, Goebbels demanded that Eckener Avenue in Berlin be renamed Adolf Hitler Street, but Eckener’s was only a tactical victory. It was actually Goebbels who had won the battle: The master of propaganda had kept Eckener in the country working (albeit unenthusiastically) for the regime, and Eckener’s apology made it look as if he had thrown in his lot with the Nazis.
So intent had Eckener been on gaining the eternal glory of taking the Hindenburg to America and spanning the Atlantic with a passenger airline that he failed to notice that he had trapped himself in the Mephistophelian labyrinth.2
47. Here Be Dragons
TRIPPE HAD NOT been idle since he’d announced the pivot to the Pacific in October 1934. Six months later, in March 1935, the same month Eckener was ousted as head of Zeppelin, Pan American began its mission to Mars, or at least so it might have seemed, judging by the variety and quantity of the equipment Trippe’s men were taking to Midway and Wake to build his bases. Everything was thought of, nothing forgotten.
Alongside four landing barges and four motorboats, there were water tanks, cisterns, five tractors, two ten-ton generators, windmills, electrical fixtures, mobile floating docks, and sufficient prefabricated, anti-vermin-treated plywood buildings to erect two villages plus huts for radio equipment, storage needs, and medical facilities. There were also 250,000 gallons of aviation fuel in barrels and forty large antenna masts. Creature comforts included a movie projector, a “library” of forty-five books (there would not be, it was hoped, much time for reading), ten decks of playing cards, board games, and tennis equipment.
Meat and vegetables were packed into dry ice and stored in giant refrigerators. Since no one knew what, if anything, would grow on Wake and Midway, there were seeds to cultivate royal palm, coconut, papaya, beets, onions, radishes, spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, cauliflower, and peas. There were even some for assorted flowers, in case anyone wanted to make the place look a little less Robinson Crusoe–like. Ink, chewing tobacco, pillowcases, coat hangers, eggbeaters, sugar bowls, pie tins, and, rather optimistically, a dozen iced-tea stirrers—all were counted and packed. One could say that they brought “everything but the kitchen sink,” but there were a few of those as well. All in all, Trippe spent $500,000 outfitting his expedition, which, according to its manifest, contained exactly 1,018,897 items and weighed some six thousand tons.
Pan American had chartered a freighter, the North Haven, to depart San Francisco and return in six months. Its 118 men had no idea of what they would encounter. Anything could be out there: Maybe the islands would be ravaged by merciless tsunamis; maybe the ferocity of the storms would put those of the North Atlantic to shame; maybe fierce and strange tribes would shrink their heads or chew their flesh. Who knew? Truly, as the medieval maps had marked of regions unknown that existed beyond the realm of civilization: Here Be Dragons.
The men Trippe sent were not the laborers New Dealers sought to employ in the PWA and the Works Progress Administration. Aside from the specialist Pan American staff attached to the project, most were fresh-faced, clean-limbed volunteers scarcely out of their teens, students or graduates of Harvard and Yale (or Stanford, at a pinch) up for an adventure. They were also cheap to hire.1
Meanwhile, Trippe didn’t even know whether a Pacific run was feasible. Someone needed to fly to Hawaii and back; if that proved impossible, he could still recall the North Haven. Lindbergh had originally been slotted to make the exploratory flight, but the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, who had kidnapped and killed his child, had begun in January and for obvious reasons the aviator was ill equipped at that moment to undertake such a dangerous task.
The job fell instead to Pan American’s “Pilot Number One,” Ed Musick. Like Lindbergh, Musick was a former barnstormer who had learned to be exceedingly careful. Before every flight, every detail, every part was fastidiously triple-checked, then triple-checked again. Few knew much about him, but there was little to know.
Aged forty, the son of a hardware salesman, Musick was tight-mouthed, five-o’clock-shadowed, round-shouldered, and maintained a permanent squint, perhaps acquired from staring so intently out of a cockpit window at the horizon. With ten thousand hours’ flying time under his belt, Musick was one of the very few pilots in the world qualified to fly any type of airplane. He was habitually silent in the air, uttering little else but necessary commands, his face otherwise a wooden mask. Time magazine ran a cover story on him, and its researchers sought in vain for “color” vignettes to liven up its profile; the best they could do was, “He lives quietly with his blonde wife, Cleo, has no children, likes baseball, Buicks, apples, ham and cheese sandwiches, [and] vacations in Manhattan.”2
In preparation, an S-42 had been taken off Caribbean duties and sent for modification. The luxurious interior was torn out and replaced by fuel tanks with pipes leading to the wings, resulting in an ineradicable smell of gas inside the plane. The tanks contained 4,500 gallons of the precious stuff—enough for an extra three hours in the air, or 500 miles, over an already bone-stripped S-42’s absolute maximum of 2,500 miles.
Musick took the plane, now named the Pan American Clipper, up over Miami to fine-tune the ideal carburetor settings, engine speeds, fuel mixture, and altitudes for stretching its ran
ge to the very last quarter mile. He had to know with scientific precision what the point of no return was, for he would have absolutely no room for error. Weather reports from that deep in the Pacific were sparse and untrustworthy, and there were few radio stations to help fix his location. Hugo Leuteritz, Trippe’s radio expert, had managed to extend coverage to 1,200 miles, but after that Musick would be on his own.
Fortunately, he had a fine navigator, Fred Noonan (later to vanish alongside Amelia Earhart), assigned to assist him. He specialized in finding coral atolls in remote places in the Caribbean, and it would be his eyes (and celestial measurements) that would spot the tiny, greenish islets hiding amidst the camouflaging waters.
On April 16, 1935, just before 4 P.M., Musick took off from San Francisco with no fanfare (which he would have hated anyway). Every half hour he radioed in a progress report, frustratingly dry. Hoping for a vivid description to feed hungry reporters, William Van Dusen, Trippe’s public relations man, asked Musick to “send something about sunset over the Pacific,” and received in reply: “Sunset, 6:39.”
The overnight flight to Hawaii went so astonishingly smoothly even Musick cracked what passed for a joke when the crew spotted Molokai: “We can swim to port from here.” The return home was more troublesome as the S-42 bucked head- and crosswinds the entire time. Noonan noted with alarm at one point that they were far west of where they should have been and hundreds of miles behind, but it was impossible to measure their angle of drift at night.
By 10 A.M. the next day, Musick was still five hundred miles from the California coast, the plane was flying at less than 100 mph, and their fuel was running worryingly low. Trippe sat in his New York office listening to updates. He could do the calculations as well as anyone: The estimated travel time from Hawaii was at most eighteen hours, no one had ever flown a S-42 for more than twenty-one and a half hours straight, and yet there was no sighting of Musick—twenty-three and a half hours after he’d set off.
On board the plane, Musick saw that he had only thirty minutes of fuel left, and California was not in sight. But then the clouds parted and there, in the shimmering distance, it was. He steered straight for San Francisco Bay. At 5:21 P.M., he smacked the water and taxied slowly in to the dock. One of the engineers on board later checked the tanks with a gauge stick: They were “just about damp on the bottom. I don’t think we could have made it once around the bay.”
It was the closest of close shaves, but it was enough for Trippe to announce that “the results justify early inauguration of through service to the Far East.”
* * *
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PAN AMERICAN’S WHEELS started turning. The trusty Pan American Clipper was dragooned into further exploratory flights over the coming months to survey Guam, Wake, and Midway as the North Haven and its crew completed its assigned tasks.
At Wake, the freighter unloaded three thousand tons of cargo using the barges and motor launches; it was then hauled over the sand piece by piece on the men’s shoulders until a primitive railway was rigged using spare lumber and girders.
Sunburned and steaming hot, the teams began to erect their village. During the Age of Exploration, the first building had always been a church; in the Age of Pan American, it was the airline business office. Then came the antenna masts for Leuteritz’s radio boys, and only after that, accommodation for the work crews.
The lagoon, where the flying boats would land, was quickly discovered to be too shallow for easy use. The coral heads lurked menacingly just under the surface and would tear the guts out of any plane that landed. They had to be blasted away using dynamite to form a channel a mile long, three hundred yards across, and at least twelve feet deep. Over the next three months, at least a hundred reefs were blown up, and they were barely halfway done.
Work at Midway was faster. By mid-August there was even a concrete tennis court, a nine-hole golf course, and a baseball diamond. Unwilling to be held up any longer, Trippe ordered the S-42 (under Musick’s former copilot Rod Sullivan) to land at Wake to test conditions. It would carry morale-boosting salads—nothing grew on Wake, it turned out—and a cage of canaries to cheer up the lads.
It was touted as a “historic” visit. Van Dusen unimprovably wrote in the company magazine that “crimson fire flooded the glassy surface of the ocean as [Sullivan] took off from the shelter of the Midway base at dawn today.” Later, he encountered clouds like “towering battlements that dissolved into rainbow-silver mist as the Clipper flashed through. Coming out of these misty baths, the sun, sparkling on tiny drops of water, turned the great wing into a brilliantly glittering strip of jewels.”
The reality was that Sullivan’s flight had been so featureless—eight hours of flying over nothing but water—that he’d felt as if he were in suspended animation, as if the S-42 weren’t moving. Tedium, however, turned to horror when he eventually reached Wake and saw that the water runway was still too short for a safe landing. He was furious when he eventually taxied into the dock, telling the base manager that he wouldn’t have come if he’d known the conditions were that bad. A celebratory cake that had been made, with “Welcome to Wake Island” inscribed in icing, went uneaten.3
* * *
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THE WAKE FACILITIES would need to get better, faster. On October 9, 1935, Trippe accepted delivery of the first of three Martin M-130s in Baltimore after a brief ceremony, broadcast nationally. In his speech, Trippe announced that “this flying boat will be named the China Clipper, after her famous predecessor which carried the American flag across the Pacific a hundred years ago.”
Glenn Martin, however, wasn’t there. He claimed he was sick and couldn’t attend, but really he just didn’t want to see Trippe. Martin’s M-130s may have been the best in the world, but Trippe, annoyed at the production delays, had told him that he was already searching for a replacement and that his services were no longer required. Martin was crushed by the betrayal of trust: He had invested a huge amount in the factory infrastructure to build M-130s and needed a large order to cover the $850,000 he’d put up. Martin was almost bankrupted—“Sure, Martin lost money, but he didn’t have the next step,” Trippe casually remarked—and never forgave the Pan American boss.
Another casualty of Trippe’s decision to bridge the Pacific was Sikorsky. The S-42 was at heart a Caribbean and South American plane and could probably have served in the North Atlantic, but it was unsuited to Pacific use. All Pan American operations in the latter would henceforth be based on the Martins. Lindbergh pleaded with Trippe to give his friend Sikorsky a chance to produce a larger plane, but the boss was unmoved. This was business, and Sikorsky had nothing in the works.
Lindbergh, for that matter, was a diminishing force at Pan American. Suffering under the harsh spotlight of press attention during the Hauptmann trial during the first few weeks of 1935, Lindbergh had become quite reclusive and moved his family to Britain to escape its blinding glare. He would remain close to Trippe, but their once-Siamese relationship became one of separated twins. Trippe was coming into his own as lord and master combined, even as Eckener had lost his status as king and pope after the creation of DZR that same year.
The inauguration of the Pacific route was arranged for the afternoon of November 22, 1935, and Trippe turned it into a truly international affair. In America, CBS and NBC carried the ceremony live while seven other networks in Europe, South America, and Asia rebroadcast it. Something like a hundred thousand people gathered to watch Musick take off from San Francisco Bay.
Trippe was given the microphone to talk to Musick. “China Clipper, are you ready?” “Pan American Airways China Clipper, Captain Musick, standing by for orders, sir.” “Stand by, Captain Musick, for station reports.”
One by one, nicely choreographed by Van Dusen, the Pan American radio stations crackled their call signals: “KNBF, Honolulu. Pan American Airways ocean air base No. 1—Honolulu, Hawaii. Standing by for o
rders.” Then the same from KNBH (Midway, No. 2), KNBI (Wake Island, No. 3), KNBG (Guam, No. 4), and KZBQ (the Philippines).
Trippe: “Captain Musick, you have your sailing orders. Cast off and depart for Manila in accordance therewith.”
The China Clipper’s engines roared in response as a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. Car horns blared as twenty-two cannons exploded in salute and ships’ whistles tooted. A fireboat loosed streams of water from its hoses to wish it farewell.
As the China Clipper vanished into the distance, the reporters moved into a lobby equipped by Van Dusen with a giant Pacific map on which he studiously marked Musick’s position every hour. In the back room, he went to work, churning out copy for the press ostensibly written by the seven crewmen. “Within a few short weeks,” ghostwrote Van Dusen in Cosmopolitan, “Mr. Manhattan Business Man will be flying into Manila Harbor with a briefcase full of papers five days after he leaves his home office.”
Even he, though, could not compete with Musick’s typically succinct quote upon reaching Manila on November 29 after 59 hours and 48 minutes of flying time. When asked what it was like, he replied it was “without incident, an uneventful trip.” It was exactly what Trippe wanted to hear. Tourists and businessmen alike could fly across the Pacific in the safe and capable hands of Pan American.4
Empires of the Sky Page 49