Pan Am at War

How the Airline Secretly Helped America Fight World War II

Mark Cotta Vaz, John H. Hill

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781510729506
• eBook ISBN: 9781510729513
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Filled with larger-than-life characters, and revelations of the vision and technology it took to dominate the skies before and during, World War II, here is a gripping piece of aviation history. Pan Am at War chronicles the airline's historic role in advancing aviation and serving America's national interest before and during World War II. From its inception, Pan American Airways operated as the "wings of democracy, " spanning six continents and placing the country at the leading edge of international aviation.At the same time, it was clandestinely helping to fight America's wars.Utilizing government documents, declassified Freedom of Information Act material, and company documents, the authors have uncovered stories of Pan Am's stunning role as an instrument of American might:

• The airline's role in building air bases in Latin America and countering Axis interests that threatened the Panama Canal
• Creating transatlantic and trans-Africa supply lines for sending Lend-Lease equipment to Britain
• Cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese nationalist government to pioneer the dangerous "Hump" route over the Himalayas
• The dangerous seventeen-thousand-mile journey that took President Roosevelt to the high-stakes Casablanca Conference with Winston Churchill
• The daring flight that delivered uranium for the atomic bomb.

For anyone interested in aviation, business, or military history, here is astonishing story filled with big ideas and the leaders who made them a reality.

PART I

AIR POWER

CHAPTER 1

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

“In a sense, the formation of Pan American Airways turned out to be the first countermeasure the United States ever took against Nazi Germany.”

—HENRY “HAP” ARNOLD, COMMANDING GENERAL,
U. S. ARMY AIR FORCES IN WORLD WAR II¹

The Nazi blitzkrieg thundered over London, their bombs lighting up the blacked-out city as searchlights swept the sky and anti-aircraft batteries returned fire from Hyde Park. It was an hour before midnight and two Yanks were viewing the spectacle from their hotel rooftop. Juan Terry Trippe, president of Pan American Airways, would remember this day, June 17, 1941—now he was certain the United States would be drawn into the war in Europe. Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Force, saw grim confirmation of the prophecies of air power crusaders. Suddenly, a man stepped out of the shadows, tapped Trippe on the shoulder, and said, “The Prime Minister asks that you join him for dinner.”²

Earlier that evening, Trippe appeared before the Royal Aeronautical Society to deliver the Twenty-Ninth Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture. His topic, “Ocean Air Transport,” detailed Pan Am’s advances since pioneering commercial airways across the Pacific and Atlantic. Flying oceans was a “developing art,” and with war curtailing Atlantic steamship service Pan Am provided a vital link between neutral America and besieged Britain. Trippe himself had made his crossing from New York on one of his airline’s iconic Flying Clippers.

The muffled explosions of aerial bombing were audible throughout Trippe’s lecture. Afterwards, Trippe was invited into the Air Ministry where Royal Air Force officials kept him talking before a gigantic world map. The topic was North Africa, where the tanks of General Erwin Rommel had cut off British supply lines and threatened Egypt and the Suez Canal. With the world map at hand, Trippe explained how a South Atlantic airway through Africa could supply the desert troops.

Trippe’s ensuing meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill begs the question: were Trippe and Arnold on a secret mission, using the prestigious lecture as cover? Since the summer of 1940, Trippe and President Franklin Roosevelt had discussed securing the South Atlantic skies between Brazil and Africa since the Nazi conquest of France gave Hitler a foothold in French colonial Africa, making South America vulnerable. An operation across Africa had also been discussed in months of secret correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt. The day of Trippe’s lecture, Roosevelt reported to Churchill: “Army is studying possible ferry from Natal [Brazil] with idea that African landing places might be three in number—Bathurst, Freetown, and Liberia.”³ General Arnold even proposed using a commercial airline to do it.

Whether by accident or design, Trippe found himself at 10 Downing Street for a private midnight supper with Churchill. Scotch and sodas fueled two hours of poring over maps and talking strategy before Churchill gave his blessing—Pan Am would organize a ferrying and military supply operation across Africa. Churchill would cable Roosevelt and Trippe should expect to hear from the president when he landed in New York.

When a Clipper returned Trippe to New York a waiting Marine Corps officer escorted him to another plane that whisked him to Washington. Although Churchill and Roosevelt regularly corresponded by letter and telegram, the apparently serendipitous nature of the midnight brainstorming between the airline executive and prime minister is revealed in Roosevelt’s first question to Trippe when he was ushered into the Oval Office: “What did you tell the Prime Minister?”⁴

Four months later, Life magazine took readers into Trippe’s office on the 58th floor of New York’s Chrysler Building. Writer Noel Busch described the squeak of a giant world globe as Trippe turned it, measuring with parcel string a new airway from Brazil’s eastern hump to the African ports of Monrovia, Bathurst, Freetown, and Leopoldville. “By the time President Roosevelt was ready to talk plans for running a Pan American service across the South Atlantic to the Sudan, Trippe had already issued instructions for installing it,” Busch revealed. “Trippe’s latest display of his ability to transfer an extra hemispheric enterprise from blueprints to blue water on short notice was characteristic.” The article’s headline added: “Young Chief Helps Run A Branch Of U.S. Defense.”⁵

Time magazine observed the airline’s 1941 annual report “read like a military communiqué,” and Pan Am was “an instrument of U.S. policy and a weapon of global war.”⁶ Trippe wrote in the report, “That Pan American today is able to serve the United Nations throughout the world, is due in large measure to the fourteen years of pioneering and scientific progress which have gone into the development of its facilities and the training of its personnel.”⁷ To the public those fourteen years, encompassing the existence of what was considered the world’s greatest airline, were not about wartime exigencies but the miracle of commercial aviation.

Once upon a time, an airplane passing overhead made people stop and stare; even fall to their knees in wonder. Powered flight unshackled terrestrial bonds, obliterated ancient barriers of time and space. An airplane spanned distances in hours and minutes that took weeks or days by land and water. More than any other airline, Pan Am made that miracle a reality.

The “System,” as Pan Am called itself, fulfilled the promise of air travel with style, serving up winged adventure with cocktails and gourmet meals. Within twelve years of its birth, Pan Am encircled the Caribbean and South America, conquered the oceans, boasted 65,000 miles of air routes serving fifty-five countries, and made its four-engine Clipper seaplanes a fixture of the skies. Pan Am was America’s first and only international airline and sole possessor of the technology, infrastructure, and procedures to safely and systematically fly the oceans. By 1939, when Pan Am inaugurated commercial transatlantic flights, a print advertisement proclaimed: “It is a small world . . . by Pan American.” The ad observed that the world had essentially shrunk, thanks to speedy flying Clippers binding together formerly distant lands. “Think what this change signifies . . .,” the ad rhetorically asked. “It means a new American leadership in this changing world! Those Flying Clippers are America’s Merchant Marine of the Air. They are recapturing, on international trade routes, a prestige that has been lost to this country since the days of sail.” The ad practically proclaimed that Pan Am was spearheading America’s global interests.

Pan Am’s status as “instrument of the nation” was hinted at in news describing how the airline out-maneuvered a competitor or negotiated its latest exclusive air agreement with a foreign power.⁸ What was not generally reported was that Pan Am’s stunning rise was promoted and facilitated by power brokers from Washington to Wall Street. By World War II, Pan Am was key to the strategic maneuvering of America and its allies.

Trippe and Arnold represented the dual forces shaping aviation since the first rickety winged gliders took flight—Trippe saw commercial potential, Arnold a weapon of war. Aviation’s ability to overcome natural barriers convinced Arnold that foreign military air powers would one day fly across the two oceans that still seemed insurmountable bulwarks guarding the nation’s coastlines, with those imagined enemy aircraft commanding the air space as it penetrated the vulnerable interior. Even the international expansion of commercial aviation, when operating under the flag of a hostile nation, posed a threat—and such an enterprise was operating in the hemisphere. And so, with his strategic military intuition, early flying experience, and a still uncommon grasp of the practical applications of the airplane—both among the general public and military planners—Hap Arnold formed Pan American Airways in the interests of national security.

In the summer of 1909, Hap Arnold was a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant, two years out of West Point and heading home after a tour of duty in the Philippines. During a stopover in Paris, he saw his first airplane dramatically suspended on display over a street near the Place de L’Opéra—the monoplane of Louis Blériot, the first powered aircraft to fly the English Channel, a feat accomplished a few weeks previous. The “queer contraption,” Arnold recalled, was “the forerunner of a human instrument that, for good or evil, in war and peace, was to change the face of the earth.

“I’ll confess I hadn’t any blinding vision of the future of Air Power at this moment, but one thought I did have was probably as good as anybody else’s who looked at Blériot’s plane that summer. I thought: ‘If one man could do it once, what if a lot of men did it together at the same time? What happens then to England’s Splendid Isolation?’ ”⁹

Arnold returned to New York in time to witness an exhibition of powered flight at the Hudson-Fulton Celebration marking the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river that bore his name, and the recent centennial of Robert Fulton’s navigation of it by steamship in 1807. Among those marveling at the seminal aviation event was ten-year-old Juan Trippe. The boy and the soldier didn’t know each other then, but the exhibition inspired their respective visions of aviation and sparked the passion that created Pan Am.

The Celebration Commission had fifty-one committees, including one to showcase “aerial locomotion.” The Celebration report observed, “there was something peculiarly striking, even dramatic, in the thought that in a commemoration which recalled the days when the Hudson River was navigated only by canoes, and which celebrated the advent of Hudson’s sailing vessel and Fulton’s steamboat, the climax of three centuries of progress should be marked by the navigation of the river—or a part of it—by airships.”¹⁰

The aviation star was Wilbur Wright. There had been lighter-than-air flights in hot air balloons that floated on air as a sailing ship floated on water. But flight in heavier-than-air flying machines, such as winged airplanes and gliders, depended on airflow over its surfaces for aerodynamic lift and upward thrust. In 1903, a motorized airplane designed and built by brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright lifted above the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was the first recorded flight in a mechanically powered, heavier-than-air machine successfully flown and controlled by an onboard pilot. Six years later, the Celebration was showcasing Wright as a master of aerial locomotion. The Celebration’s takeoff and landing field was Governor’s Island, a military base across from Battery Park between Staten Island and Brooklyn to which Hap Arnold reported. Arnold later called Governor’s Island New York’s first “airport.”¹¹

Wilbur Wright made his first flying attempt the morning of September 29. His Model A Flyer was rolled from its shed and placed on a monorail facing due west to New York Harbor. A red canoe was strapped to the bottom as a lifeboat in case the aircraft crashed into the water. Wright lifted almost one hundred feet into the air, covered two miles, and spent seven minutes and ten seconds aloft as steam whistles of ships and nearby factories echoed cheering spectators ringing the shoreline and crowds on ship decks in the harbor. Wright made four successful flights that day, his last a spectacular trip up the Hudson and back covering almost twenty miles and lasting thirty-three minutes and thirty-three seconds in the air.

But his second flight was the most celebrated. At 10:18 a.m., Wright ventured over open water, aiming for Bedloe Island and the Statue of Liberty. He flew over the Lusitania, which was bound for England, as passengers on deck cheered and waved handkerchiefs.¹² As Wright made it to the Statue of Liberty, Juan Trippe and his father watched from Battery Park.

Charles White Trippe suspected his boy would be thrilled. Aviation fascinated Juan, and he had made a wooden model airplane with a three-foot wingspan that he propelled with elastic bands during outings in Central Park. (Orville also traced the Wright’s aviation interest to a childhood toy, a rubber band driven helicopter from their father.)¹³ It was said that Juan saw The Future as he watched Wright circle the Statue of Liberty.

The Celebration record alluded to aviation’s military possibilities. Indeed, aviation’s military and commercial potential were already entwined. The U.S. Army began studying the “flying machine” in August of 1907. On February 10, 1908, the Wrights signed a contract with the War Department to develop a military plane. The first known fatality in American aviation occurred during its development when Army Lieutenant Thomas L. Selfridge died...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I: Air Power
• Photo Insert
• Part II: War Clouds
• Part III: Wartime Missions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Authors