by Susan Butler
Amelia anxiously awaited word; then, taking no chances, she wrote the president, who had been an assistant secretary of the navy and knew intimately its byzantine workings. Obviously possessed of insider information as to the status of the request as well as having more detailed information about the state of naval aviation than the navy appeared to have, she wrote President Roosevelt an artful letter. It helped that she and Roosevelt were such good friends and that she had told the president about the flight when they spent the night at the White House the previous spring.
Dear Mr. President; Some time ago I told you and Mrs. Roosevelt a little about my confidential plans for a world flight.... The chief problem is the jump westward from Honolulu ... This matter has been discussed in detail by Mr. Putnam with Admiral Cook, who was most interested and friendly. Subsequently a detailed description of the project, and request for this assistance, was prepared. It is now on the desk of Admiral Standley, by whom it is being considered.
Some new seaplanes are being completed at San Diego. They will be ferried in January or February to Honolulu. It is my desire to practice actual refueling operations in the air over San Diego with one of these planes. That plane subsequently from Honolulu would be available for the Midway operation. I gather from Admiral Cook that technically there are no extraordinary difficulties. It is primarily a matter of policy and precedent.
In the past the Navy has been so progressive in its pioneering, and so broad-minded in what we might call its “public relations,” that I think a project such as this (even involving a mere woman!) may appeal to Navy personnel. Its successful attainment might, I think, win for the Service further popular friendship.
Within days Admiral Standley agreed to refuel the Electra: the navy agreed to pay most of the costs of deploying the tender and the two airplanes involved; and Amelia’s expenses were limited to reimbursing the navy for the gas and oil they would transfer to her plane.
But Amelia lacked expertise in aerial refueling: as the admiral in charge of the fleet aircraft informed his superior, there remained the problem of “airmanship”—“The ability of the pilot of the receiving plane has not been demonstrated.” Amelia would require “considerable” special training, according to the admiral, to learn the procedures involved in the approach and departure phases of refueling, to avoid fouling the hose in the propellers of her plane. He did not think the navy should bear the expense of this, “either in cost of time of pilots and airplanes.”
Here Gene stepped back into the picture with another idea. Sitting in Washington, D.C., Gene had been so anxious about Amelia as she flew up from Mexico City the year before, so worried that something might happen to her, that he had gone to the airport and had gotten on the radio and pleaded with her to quit and land in Washington—after she had been in the air for only thirteen hours. What was he to think of this scheme of Amelia’s to refuel her plane—but not get any rest herself? To fly four thousand miles nonstop over water—a twenty-six-hour flight if everything went perfectly, and longer if it didn’t. It was certainly fraught with danger. Why not find a place where she could land, refuel, and rest? Suddenly the Bureau of Air Commerce instituted a new policy.
Starting in 1935, the U.S. government, in response to a military buildup by the Japanese, began taking steps to protect its West Coast and “prove up” its sovereignty in the Pacific in as low key a way as possible against Japanese encroachments. The army had developed plans to build the largest military air base on the Pacific Coast at Tacoma, Washington. Coincidentally, Pan American was asking for stepping-stones across the Pacific for its seaplane Clipper service to the Orient, which was planned to carry U.S. mail as well as passengers. The two plans fitted in so perfectly together that the Bureau of Air Commerce gave permission to Pan Am to erect supply bases on Guam, Midway, and Wake Island with alacrity. Pan Am immediately sent supply ships to the islands, began to construct the hangars and other buildings that would be needed for its seaplanes to refuel, and set up communications facilities. The navy went out of its way to help. At Guam the navy unloaded all supplies, and ferried Pan Am personnel from ship to shore when necessary; the naval governor of Guam invited top Pan Am personnel to dinner. Within six months all was ready. The first China Clipper left Alameda airport on a Friday at the end of November 1935, with Captain Edward Musick as chief pilot and Fred Noonan as chief navigator, and landed in Honolulu 21 hours and 3 minutes later. The Clipper continued on to Midway, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines, landing in Manila the following Friday.
At roughly the same time, Gene was suggesting that Jarvis, Baker, and Howland, the so-called Line Islands south and west of Hawaii, should be claimed by the United States for use as bases for land planes flying to Australia and New Zealand. Baker was forty miles to the south of Howland, half a degree north of the equator, while Jarvis lay more than a thousand miles to the east. These islands needed to be clearly staked out as “American,” because of the Japanese but also because Gene was sure that the future of air travel across the Pacific surely belonged to land planes rather than to the lumbering seaplanes then favored. The islands, tiny but big enough for landing fields, had been claimed by the British, in the guano-digging days of the last century and subsequently abandoned. When he informed the State Department of their strategic importance, he was told that they already belonged to the United States, although England “might” raise a conflicting claim, and that “whoever first moved to colonize them would gain undisputed possession under the provisions of international law.”
So Gene proceeded to colonize them. He picked Bureau of Air Commerce aide William Miller, an ex-navy pilot whom he used for special projects, and put him to the task in January 1935. Operating at first with the utmost secrecy, Miller chose twenty young men of Hawaiian blood from the famous Kamehameha school in Hawaii as colonists. In March the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, with Miller, the young men, tents, food supplies, steel drums of fresh water, and other equipment set out for the islands. The young Hawaiian men stayed on the islands, usually four to an island, for nine or ten months, went home for a few months, and then returned. After a year the State Department decided to make the colonization clearly permanant and to install meteorological equipment. Supervision was turned over to the Division of Territories and Island Possessions of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Miller returned to Washington, Richard B. Black of the Department of the Interior took over, and the project was given much local publicity. A prefabricated house consisting of a living room, a radio room, a bedroom, and a kitchen with a large front porch opening off the living room was put up on each island.
The next step Gene undertook was to build a landing field on one of the islands, where land planes could refuel in midocean—in time for Amelia’s trip. Howland Island, eighteen hundred miles from Hawaii, was the most suitable. Carl Allen would write that “there is gallantry even in government and Miss Earhart was the first flyer to suggest putting the country’s new ‘conquest’ of these islands to practical use.” But of course the only way Amelia would have known about the size and suitability of Howland Island would have been if Gene had told her. It was a Gene Vidal production from start to finish.
“During the late part of 1936,” recalled Richard Black, “I received a Trans-pacific telephone call and later a score or so of letters from my Division Headquarters in Washington requesting that I set up a project to build a scratch-grade runway. First they considered Jarvis Island and later Howland Island. It was revealed to me, and it was considered more or less confidential at the time, that this station was to be used by the famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart for her round-the-world flight in what was called a ‘flying laboratory.’
Gene sent Robert L. Campbell, another Bureau of Air Commerce aide, to help Black do the job (having more or less assigned Miller to Amelia), and Campbell and Black and eight additional young Hawaiians, some World War I tractors, graders, scrapers, and rollers, left Hawaii on January 12 to begin construction, with the assistance of the regular coloni
sts, of three scratch-grade runways on the treeless mile-and-a-half-by-half-mile island. Eventually, a cache of some eighteen drums of 87 octane gasoline were deposited on the island for her.
Amelia knew about the airstrip on Howland before the president, for on January 8 she sent FDR a wire that threw various aides into convulsions and resulted in the following memo to FDR from the acting director of the Bureau of the Budget.
She wrote about her proposed round the world flight this spring and hoped for Navy cooperation in refuelling west of Hawaii, which was subsequently kindly arranged by Admiral Standley. Says since then the necessity for such difficult and costly maneuvers has been obviated and instead she hopes to land on Howland Island where the Government is about to establish an emergency field. Says Dept. of Commerce approves her plan and the Interior Dept. is very cooperative as is the Coast Guard. Says all details are arranged and the construction party with equipment due to sail from Honolulu next week. Says she is now informed that apparently some question re WPA [Works Progress Administration] appropriation in amount of $3000 which covers all costs other than those borne by her for this mid-pacific pioneer landing field which will be permanently useful and valuable aeronautically and nationally. Understands its moving requires executive approval and asks that it be expedited.
On January 11 Amelia learned that the president had released WPA funds to the Bureau of Air Commerce to build the field on Howland Island. Richard Black, Air Commerce aide Robert Campbell, the additional workers, and the machinery left Hawaii the next day. So that most vexing problem was taken care of, courtesy of Gene.
The next Bureau of Air Commerce intervention for Amelia involved the army—the only branch of the armed services not yet helping the flight. Here, too, George relied on help from Gene’s bureau. George wrote a letter to the secretary of war saying that he was looking for housing for the Electra, and for maintenance work by army aviation mechanics, “competent aviation mechanics to service her plane, check her Wasp H engines, and Hamilton constant speed propellers,” when she landed at Wheeler field in Honolulu. “We are fortunate in having the kindly cooperation of the Department of Commerce and the Navy and the Coast Guard,” he baldly wrote. To insure that the secretary of war actually issued the specified instructions, George requested that ubiquitous Commerce aide William Miller personally deliver the letter.
Amelia knew she needed a navigator for the over-water portion of the flight. Several were under consideration. George, with his restless, creative mind, inevitably had a suggestion: Brad Washburn, whose book he had published ten years before, in the boy explorer series; Brad had gone on to make a great name for himself as an explorer and was now a professor at Harvard. George knew Brad had been in Alaska and had taken the first photographs of Mount McKinley while flying an Electra. Brad received a phone call from George one day asking him to come and talk to them. Although he had known George well, he didn’t know Amelia except by reputation, but he felt as if he knew her, for before she was married, his wife had worked at Denison House and had lived in Amelia’s room. When Brad arrived, it was to see Amelia sprawled on the floor with her maps lying around her. They had supper and talked all evening. She showed him the itinerary, marking out the first two legs, Hawaii to Howland Island, Howland to New Guinea. She traced the lines on the maps with a finger, mentioning the distances between points. Brad spent most of the evening next to her on the floor, talking about the flight, with George in a chair next to them. She charmed him—and probably knew instantly that he wouldn’t do.
Brad asked what radio signals there would be on Howland for them to home in on and was told there wouldn’t be any. He thought that was unwise, since her 50-watt radio wouldn’t be powerful enough to pick up ground stations. He knew he didn’t have the navigational experience to hit such a tiny island as Howland: “I backed out of it with their clearly not having asked me to be navigator. She would naturally have wanted someone who agreed with her plan, and I didn’t. I would have turned it down anyway because my navigation experience was not adequate to handle that kind of a job. Very frankly I knew all about how to get it done, but I couldn’t do it.”
Another prospective navigator whom Amelia consulted in the early stages was Paul Collins. He, too, remembered spreading maps on the floor and discussing the feasibility of the routes, but he now ran an airline—he couldn’t up and leave. She finally settled on Harry Manning, who had been captain of the President Roosevelt, the ship that had brought her home from England after the triumphal flight of the Friendship. He too was a pilot; they had talked during the crossing of possibly someday teaming up for a flight.
Harry Manning graduated from the Marine Academy, worked his way up from able seaman, and rose rapidly in rank. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1929 for rescuing thirty-two passengers from a sinking ocean liner. When Amelia asked him to be her navigator as far as Port Darwin, Australia, he agreed and arranged a leave of absence.
In mid-February 1937, with all the decisions for Amelia’s flight having been made, the only thing left for Gene to arrange was the smooth execution of the flight itself. He assigned William Miller to officially interface with the navy and coordinate the plans for Amelia’s flight. The navy was notified by telegram. MR. MILLER AIRWAYS SUPERINTENDENT DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE WILL COORDINATE PLANS FOR FLIGHT. HE WILL ARRIVE OAKLAND ABOUT TWENTY FIVE FEBRARY AND WILL CONTACT NAVAL DISTRICT AUTHORITIES KEEPING ADDRESSEES ADVISED REGARDING DEVEL OPMENTS. All the big decisions had been made. It was a rare moment in history—Amelia had wrapped the entire U.S. government—up to and including President Roosevelt—right around her finger. She was planning to take off within two weeks.
Gene’s unprecedented step of assigning one of his best men, Miller, a government employee, to a nongovernmental project, was one of his last acts. His final act was to issue a bureau directive requiring all commercial planes to have radio direction finders and antennae shielded against snow, rain, fog, and dust static. Radio direction finders had become operational just that spring. DFs, as they were called, had been developed by Bendix Aviation at the behest of Pan Am for the Clippers. Then, on the last day in February, tired of government inflighting, too entrepreneurial to be happy in bureaucratic Washington, probably realizing that his dream of building planes for the common man would continue to be blocked, Gene threw in the towel and resigned. He would be visiting his mother in Santa Barbara, he announced, and flew out to California a few days later, to be met at the Burbank airport by Amelia, with George in tow.
There was much speculation about Gene’s plans. Rumors floated about that he was going to form a connection with a company that would set up sea dromes in the ocean and fly land planes across the sea in competition with the Pan Am Clippers. Other rumors had it that he would join Bendix Aviation. The idea of forming a new airline resurfaced; there was talk that he would join Amelia, George, and Floyd Odlum, head of the immensely powerful Atlas Corporation, in the formation of a transatlantic air service. Gene did nothing to dispel the rumors, saying, “I can say this much, however. It’ll be something quite unusual in the way of aviation. Airline operations will enter into it.” Theirs would have been a natural alliance, fueled by his closeness to and respect for Amelia, the powerful financial aid of her friend Floyd Odium, and the enmity that existed between Gene and Juan Trippe, the head of Pan American.
Gene’s orders to William Miller to facilitate naval aid to Amelia once she had left the United States provided for the following: that a seaplane tender would take a station midway between Honolulu and Howland and return to Pearl Harbor after she had landed at Howland; that the coast guard cutter Duane, with two aviation mechanics, would proceed to Howland to service Amelia’s plane while she was there; that weather information would be collected from the governor of Samoa and other points; that the USS Ontario would take up a station midway between Howland and New Guinea; and that personnel would be available on Howland Island to scare away the birds.
The countdown to the world fli
ght had begun. By Tuesday, March 9, ever-present reporters noted food, maps, and a hodgepodge of other necessary articles piled on a small table in the hangar next to the plane. On Thursday, March 11, Amelia flew the Electra into Oakland, the takeoff point, accompanied by George, Bo McNeely, her mechanic, and a representative of Bendix Aviation, who was checking out both the direction finder and the radio. Amelia was undoubtedly the first private pilot to receive a radio direction under—indeed, a Bendix official had made a special flight from Washington at the end of February so that Lockheed could install it on the plane. It had a loop, carried on the outside of the plane just above the cockpit (Amelia posed with the loop: it was a circle just big enough to frame her face), which the pilot could turn to face the direction of a radio signal. Pan American relied heavily on radio direction finders—in fact, they would not start service until the direction finder at each refueling stop was up and calibrated and ready to guide them in. The new system was unerring, according to Amelia’s friend Carl Allen, as he wrote in one of his columns, coming to point “as unerringly as a bird dog questing a quail-scented breeze.”
Upon their arrival in Oakland, she and George movedinto the Oakland Airport Inn along with Allen, her chosen observer who was syndicating the story for the Herald Tribune. She was planning to leave Monday, she announced, “unless the weather goes against me.” In fact, if the weather permitted she planned to take off on Sunday, shortening the agony of expectation by one day. It was raining that Thursday. The next day it was also raining, and the weekend prospects were for heavy rain. Friday saw the lowest barometric reading in seven years for San Francisco. Amelia was handling the waiting better than George. As usual before one of her flights, he was wound up tighter than a drum. As newsreel photographers were asking Amelia for yet another pose, he startled them by taking center stage and asking, “What’s the idea of flying around the world? Don’t you know a woman’s place is in the home?” He immediately laughed and promised to say something nice, and the scene went off according to the best of newsreel intentions, according to the newsmen present. But the day before when he was asked if he wanted to go too, he replied, “Well, between 185 pounds of husband and 185 pounds of gasoline, there’s a lot of difference—and the gasoline wins.”