by W. N. Brown
Excerpt from Great Escapes #4: Survival in the Wilderness
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DEATH-DEFYING GREAT ESCAPE!
Chapter One
A Fateful Decision
Monday, December 13, 1920
“Beautiful view from up here,” murmured navy lieutenant Walter Hinton as he looked down from the wicker basket that hung beneath the gas balloon. “But it’s a long way down!”
Two thousand feet below lay the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The ships just off the coast looked like toys in a bathtub. Hinton gazed in wonder at small buildings, tiny roads, and people the size of ants. The entire world stretched out in miniature beneath him.
“Don’t lean so far over the side,” cautioned Lieutenant Louis Kloor, only half seriously. “We wouldn’t want to lose you this early in our flight.”
Kloor, the leader of this training flight across New York state, smiled. At age twenty-two he was ten years younger than Hinton and young enough to be the son of forty-five-year-old Lieutenant Stephen Farrell, the third member of their team. Hinton and Farrell, both good friends of Kloor’s, were on board because the navy wanted all its officers to have some balloon experience. The two older men called blue-eyed, smooth-faced Kloor “The Kid,” but despite his youth, Kloor was a seasoned ballooning veteran.
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THREE MEN OF ACTION
Hinton and Farrell may not have been experienced balloonists, but they were veteran airplane pilots.
Hinton grew up on a farm in Ohio and joined the navy as a young man. In May 1919, he was one of two pilots in a six-man crew that flew the NC-4, a pioneering four-engine airplane, across the Atlantic Ocean. The NC-4 was the only one of the three airplanes in the flight to succeed. The other two were forced to land in the ocean due to poor visibility. But Hinton’s NC-4 carried on, arriving in Lisbon, Portugal, after a nineteen-day flight. They were the first aviators to cross the Atlantic, eight years before Charles Lindbergh’s celebrated transatlantic solo flight. Hinton was awarded the Navy Cross and a Congressional Gold Medal for his achievement.
Farrell was born near Oswego, New York, and enlisted in the navy in 1896. In World War I he was an armament officer at a US naval air station in England. In his younger days, Farrell was a first-class boxer and attained the title of heavyweight champion of the Pacific Fleet, a title he defended for years. Now, at age forty-five, he weighed two hundred pounds and struggled to keep his weight down with exercise and diet.
Kloor, despite his youth, had his own list of achievements. A native of Louisiana, he was one of the youngest aviators in the US Navy and had already flown ten balloon trips. He’d also seen his share of danger. In 1918, a balloon he was flying snagged on a tree over Milford, Connecticut, and was destroyed. Then in July 1920, only five months before his flight with Hinton and Farrell, Kloor had survived a crash over Jamaica Bay, New York, when his navy dirigible, a gas-filled airship, crashed into the sea. Kloor was well aware of the risks of flying, but on the morning of December 13 he had no reason to believe the training flight across New York state would be anything but routine.
* * *
About two hours into the flight from the Rockaway Naval Air Station at the westward end of Long Island, Kloor took out a sheet of paper and began writing.
“What are you doing?” Farrell asked.
“I’m writing down our coordinates for the naval officials back at Rockaway to let them know our position,” he explained. Then he opened the birdcage attached to the rigging and carefully lifted out one of the four carrier pigeons with both hands. He attached the note to the bird’s leg and gently let it go. The pigeon flapped its wings and took off for home.
“Smart bird,” said Hinton.
“The smartest,” agreed Kloor. “It’ll get our message back to the station..”
Lieutenant Farrell looked at the bird as it slowly grew smaller, until it became no more than a dot in the sea of sky. Then he stared down at the earth far below. He was both fascinated by and fearful of the balloon.
Unlike an airplane, it had no engine and no mechanism to steer. It was the hydrogen gas that allowed it to soar in the skies. The pilot could only control it going up or down. To go up, he had to pour out sand from one of the twenty-one thirty-pound sandbags in the basket, lightening the load. This was the ballast. To descend, the pilot opened a valve to release some of the hydrogen gas.
* * *
CARRIER PIGEONS
For more than three thousand years, carrier pigeons have been able to find their homes over long distances, using “compass sense,” which allows the birds to orient themselves by the sun, allowing them to deliver written messages. The ancient Egyptians were among the first people to keep carrier pigeons.
In 1860, newsman Paul Reuter, who would go on to start a news wire service, developed a fleet of forty-five pigeons to deliver news and stock reports between Brussels, Belgium, and Aachen, Germany.
Carrier pigeons were also used in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) to deliver messages. Pigeons were released from balloons hovering over the city. Pigeons were used in even greater numbers during World War I. One particularly heroic French pigeon, named Cher Ami, was awarded the Croix de Guerre (War Cross) for delivering twelve important messages. On his final mission, he survived being shot through the breast and leg.
The United States Signal Corps used carrier pigeons to send messages in World War II (1939–45) and in the Korean War (1950–53).
Today, carrier pigeons, more often called homing pigeons, are mostly kept for racing. The birds are let go at a release point by each owner. The bird arriving back at its home loft in the fastest time is the winner. However, in a remote part of eastern India, police were using pigeons to communicate with victims of natural disasters as late as 2002.
* * *
The three men passed a pleasant afternoon in comfortable chairs in the balloon’s basket as they crossed the state of New York in a northerly direction. Although it was cold, they stayed warm in their bulky flight suits, which were lined with silk, insulated with a layer of fleece, and overlaid with a tightly woven, weatherproof cotton.
“Sorry to be so last-minute in inviting you on the flight,” said Kloor, as he bit into one of the eight sandwiches they had packed.
“It’s all right,” said Farrell, sipping hot coffee from a thermos bottle. “I needed to get away and get my mind off Sis.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” said Hinton.
“Oh, no,” laughed Farrell. “Sis is what I call my daughter Emily. She’s ill at home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, with scarlet fever. But I hope to cheer her up with stories about our balloon adventure when we get back.”
The night slowly descended like a thick curtain and they gazed up at the stars beginning to appear in the darkened sky, sparkling like salt crystals.
“It’s beautiful,” murmured Farrell. “Thanks again for inviting me along.”
“You would have had to go up sooner or later,” Kloor said to Farrell.
“Well, I’m glad it’s sooner than later,” said Hinton, taking another sip of the hot coffee. It warmed his body as the night air grew colder.
“What’s that down there?” asked Kloor, scanning the ground below. “Looks like a light coming from a house.”
“You’ve got a good pair of eyes,” said Farrell, squinting into the darkness. “I never would have spotted it.”
“Well, gentlemen,” said Kloor, “I think it’s time we found out what our position is.”
He opened the valve and released some of the gas. The balloon began a slow descent through the deepening darkness. Suddenly, the drag rope trailing outside the balloon pulled tight, getting caught in a tangle of tree branches. The balloon came to a stop about a hundred feet from the ground.
“Not to worry,” said Kloor calmly. “We can get the rope untangled once we find out where we are.” Through the trees, they saw the house again, more clearly now. A man emerged from within.
&nb
sp; “Excuse me, sir!” Kloor yelled down to him. “Can you tell us where we are?”
The man was startled by the balloon hovering above his home, but soon regained his composure. “You’re near the town of Wells,” he cried. “In the Adirondacks.”
“And how far are we from Albany?” asked Kloor, referring to the state capital.
The man raised one arm and pointed to the southeast. “About sixty miles thata way,” he said.
Kloor thanked him and turned to his two companions. “Well, gentlemen, if you’ve had enough, this could be the end of our voyage. We could land the balloon safely right here, walk into town, and make our way home in the morning,” he told them.
Farrell and Hinton exchanged looks.
“Is that normal for a training flight?” Hinton asked.
“Well, no,” replied Kloor. “They normally last a full twenty-four hours, meaning we would be landing tomorrow.”
“Then I’m for going on,” said Hinton.
“I agree,” said Farrell.
About the Author
Photo credit 85 Photo Productions Inc.
W. N. BROWN is a writer and journalist from Henderson, Texas. In addition to authoring Civil War Breakout, he has written for Time-Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown and Mysteries of the Criminal Mind, and written articles on historical artifacts, scientific discoveries, and popular culture for Men’s Journal, Fox News, and Maxim. He lives in New York City.
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About the Series Editor
MICHAEL TEITELBAUM has been a writer and editor of children’s books for more than twenty-five years. He worked on staff as an editor at Golden Books, Grossett & Dunlap, and Macmillan. As a writer, Michael’s fiction work includes The Scary States of America, fifty short stories—one from each state—all about the paranormal, published by Random House; and The Very Hungry Zombie: A Parody, done with artist extraordinaire Jon Apple, published by Skyhorse. His nonfiction work includes Jackie Robinson: Champion for Equality, published by Sterling; The Baseball Hall of Fame, a two-volume encyclopedia, published by Grolier; Sports in America, 1980–89, published by Chelsea House; and Great Moments in Women’s Sports and Great Inventions: Radio and Television, both published by World Almanac Library. Michael lives with his wife, Sheleigah, and two talkative cats in the beautiful Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where he and Sheleigah also host a music program on WIOX Community Radio.
Books in This Series
Great Escapes
Nazi Prison Camp Escape
Journey to Freedom, 1838
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Copyright
GREAT ESCAPES #3: CIVIL WAR BREAKOUT. Copyright © 2020 by Stonesong Press LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2020 by James Bernardin
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Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-286043-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286041-5 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-06-286042-2 (trade bdg.)
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