China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  Though the M-130 was designed to carry thirty-two passengers, it could do so only on short-range segments. The California-to-Hawaii leg of 2,410 miles required such a burden of fuel that the load for the first crossing was restricted to eight passengers. Trippe selected seven notables, matching his own political priorities, to accompany him on the first Pacific passenger flight: Senator William McAdoo of California; William Roth and Wallace Alexander, the two who headed the Matson Steamship Line; Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney, Trippe’s old friend and chairman of the Pan American board of directors; Roy Howard, who directed the Scripps-Howard newspapers and who wrote favorably about Trippe’s ventures; Paul Patterson, president of the Baltimore Sun; and Amon Carter, publisher of the Fort Worth Star Telegram.

  The remaining passengers, including Betty Trippe and two other wives, would travel ahead on the SS Lurline and join the flying contingent in Honolulu.

  The morning before their arrival in Hawaii, the passengers on the Lurline rose before dawn. From the rail they scanned the horizon. In a dramatic rendezvous, the Philippine Clipper, commanded by Captain John Tilton, appeared in the eastern sky. The flying boat swept over the steamship. Betty Trippe, watching from the rail of the Lurline, was moved to tears.

  The Pacific air route was in business. The supply ship, the North Haven, had returned to the islands, and the bare shelters on Midway and Wake were now expanded into elaborate overnight inns. On Midway great refrigerators were installed that contained six months’ supply of food. Long deplaning docks were constructed with electric lights and a pergola. The hotels were sprawling, forty-five-room structures, incongruously Georgian in architecture, with white pillars and a plat of grass on each side of a brick walkway. The two wings of the inns spread like giant claws in either direction. While a wild surf crashed against the encircling reef outside, the guests in the hotel were served exotic cuisine by white-uniformed Chamorro stewards. There were Simmons beds in the rooms, bathrooms with hot showers, spacious verandahs, elegant lounges with wicker furniture.

  Gooneyville was the name given to the bright, bleached little village on Midway. It was named for the baldheaded, turkey-sized Laysan albatrosses who migrated there from the Aleutians. The gooney bird provided endless entertainment for the travelers at Midway. Dusky-colored young gooneys would run wildly along the beach, flapping their wings in an effort to fly, then suddenly nose over and crash in a flurry of feathers and sand. Passengers enjoyed Midway.

  Wake was different. Not everyone enjoyed the barren, relentlessly tropical atoll. Until the coming of the flying boats, Wake had been uninhabitable. Wake had no fresh water, no edible vegetation, no shelter, no shade, no harbor, no protection from the howling typhoons that periodically scoured the sparse brush from the sand dunes.

  Nor did it have gooney birds. Instead, Wake had hermit crabs, armored creatures that clanked like mechanical toys across the sand. And Wake had rats. Wake’s rats had short front legs and elongated rear legs and seemed specially constructed for scuttling over the island’s windblown surface. Sporting guests were offered air rifles and the opportunity to go “hunting” during their layover.3

  From Wake Island the clippers flew on to Apra Harbor in Guam. Guam in the 1930s was a scruffy, tropical U.S. Navy–administered territory in the middle of the Japanese-mandated Marianas group. The harbor, ringed by low cliffs, served as an anchorage for navy warships and passing freighters. Clipper passengers were taken to a facility rented from the U.S. Navy. There they sat on shaded verandahs, sipped their drinks, and waited until four o’clock the next morning when their clipper would take off for Manila.

  The next link in the over-ocean chain, Manila, had been the original terminus of the transpacific service. After extending the route to the Chinese mainland, and then abandoning Macao in favor of Hong Kong, Pan American sent a Sikorsky S-42B to the Far East to fly the Manila–Hong Kong segment. The Sikorsky workhorse was given the official name Hong Kong Clipper. To her irreverent pilots, she was “Myrtle.”

  To the public, China Clipper became a generic name and was generally applied to all three of the Martin M-130s and, later, even to the Boeing B-314s. During the 1930s the China Clipper became an airborne Orient Express, embarking diplomats and spies, generals and journalists, the famous and the infamous.

  Passage aboard the China Clipper was not cheap, at least in 1930s dollars: $278 from San Francisco to Honolulu. All the way to Hong Kong, one way, cost $950.

  For her time, the China Clipper was a flying palace. Forward of the main passenger space was the galley, eventually fitted with steam cookers. Abaft the galley was the crew cabin, which contained the navigator’s station as well as the crew rest berths. Farther aft was the largest compartment, the passenger lounge, which seated as many as fifteen. Then came two smaller cabins, each with ten seats or six berths. Behind these compartments were dressing rooms and wash rooms, with hot running water. The last space aft was the rear cargo hold.

  The cabin seating configuration varied. Though the seats in the main lounge were sometimes arranged five abreast, they were large, comfortable, and afforded more space and moving room than latter-day big jets. The cabin soundproofing permitted conversation in a normal voice, a remarkable feature in an airplane of 1935.

  Usually one steward flew on the Pacific flights, but sometimes two. He (there were no stewardesses at that time) served dinner on white tablecloths with real china, silver, and heavy water goblets. No liquor was served. No smoking was permitted. Only on the all-night San Francisco-to-Honolulu leg were the sleeping berths used.

  As a cargo ship, the China Clipper carried day-old chicks to a Pacific island for a poultry colonization experiment. To another island she carried queen bees. She transported spare tires for trucks on the Burma Road, gowns for Hollywood stars vacationing in Hawaii, Thanksgiving turkeys for construction workers on Wake.4

  Ernest Hemingway, riding the wave of his recent success with his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, traveled to China to view firsthand the Sino-Japanese conflict, and then returned to America on the China Clipper. General Douglas MacArthur, by then a field marshal of the Philippine Army, arrived in Manila aboard a clipper. Major General Claire Chennault, commander of the volunteer Flying Tigers, crossed the Pacific three times aboard the Martin clippers. Most of his fighter pilots, en route to the air war in China, also traveled by clipper. Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff of the Soviet Union flew aboard the China Clipper on his way to the United States on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  By late 1941, desperate, eleventh-hour negotiations were taking place to avert war in the Pacific. Journalists, military leaders, and diplomats winged between America and the Orient aboard the Pan American clippers. The China Clipper had become an instrument of geopolitics.

  In China, the Sino-Japanese war was dragging into its fifth year, stalemated in the vastness of the Asian countryside. In 1941 Japanese troops marched unopposed into French Indochina. Tensions had heightened further when President Roosevelt retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets in America and proclaiming an embargo on Japanese trade in oil and steel.

  In November of 1941 a Japanese diplomat, Saburo Kurusu, flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong aboard a Japan Airways flight, then boarded the Hong Kong Clipper. Kurusu was on his way to Washington in a last-minute attempt to negotiate an accord between Japan and the United States.

  Kurusu boarded the China Clipper in Manila. Between Wake and Midway one of the M-130’s engines failed. The diplomat was forced to spend two idle days in Midway waiting for the clipper to be repaired. Then, in Honolulu, he stepped aboard the waiting California Clipper, a Boeing B-314, for the last leg of his Pacific mission. Even with the delay, he had managed to reach America in nine days instead of the customary month by ship.

  Kurusu arrived in Washington 15 November 1941. On 26 November, an armada of Japanese vessels sailed in secret from the chilled waters of the North Pacific. They were warships of the Kido Butai, Admiral Yamamoto’s carrier strike force, bound for
Pearl Harbor.

  18

  Losses

  Ed Musick was a man who seldom used profanity. But when he looked down for the first time at Pago Pago harbor, he loosed an untypical flurry of expletives. Beneath the nose of the S-42B, he could see green Samoan hills swelling to 1,500 feet at each end of the harbor. An ocean breeze piled up the waves in a white froth at the mouth of the bay. Pago Pago harbor was ill-suited for landing a twenty-ton flying boat.

  To alight in the harbor, Musick would have to descend along the slope of the encircling hills, using full flaps, then flare at the last instant and slap the Sikorsky down on the water before he ran out of harbor. If he glided too far, he would coast into the ocean combers at the mouth of the bay.

  In the specially outfitted S-42B, Musick and his crew were surveying the route from San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand. They had followed an improvised course that stopped in Hawaii, then continued southwestward to a tiny Pacific atoll called Kingman’s Reef, then on to American Samoa with its treacherous Pago Pago harbor. Because all three Martin M-130s were committed to the San Francisco-Far East route, and because the awaited Boeing B-314s were not yet delivered, the Sikorsky workhorse, the S-42B, was again pressed into service.

  No one liked the operation. Kingman Reef, like Wake Island, was the summit of an undersea mountain, but it was less than a tenth the size of Wake. The island amounted to a single sand dune, barely visible above the waves, encircled by a coral reef. Inside the reef was a sizeable lagoon, suitable for the landing of a flying boat. The tiny desert island had no room for a hotel or hangars or a radio facility as on Midway and Wake. A chartered tanker, the North Wind, lay at anchor in the lagoon. Laden with aviation gasoline, the North Wind served as a mother ship, transmitting radio directional signals to the inbound aircraft.

  As with the first Pacific proving flights, the cabin of the Sikorsky was stripped and extra fuel tanks and plumbing installed. A new feature had been added, a fuel-jettison system with dump valves under the wings so that in the event of an engine failure the heavily loaded flying boat could reduce its great weight. Named the Samoan Clipper, the ship was dubbed by the crew the “flying gas tank.” The ever-present smell of gasoline pervaded the cabin.

  The danger of fire preyed on Musick’s mind. On the first leg of the initial survey flight, midway between San Francisco and Hawaii, Number One engine had overheated. Musick ordered the engine shut down. He told flight engineer Vic Wright to open the wing dump valves and jettison fuel. A short while later, the crew became aware of gasoline vapor inside the cabin. To his horror, navigator Harry Canaday discovered that drops of fuel were appearing on his charts. Somehow gasoline had blown inside the cabin, making the S-42B a potential incendiary bomb. Hurriedly Wright shut off the ship’s electrical supply. All the windows were opened. For the rest of the night Musick and his crew flew on three engines, with no lights, radio, or electrical equipment, praying that a spark would not ignite the combustible atmosphere inside the Samoan Clipper.1

  The route to New Zealand was the most demanding feat yet undertaken by Pan American. The risks were considerable: the hazard of fire in the fuel-laden Sikorsky, the microscopic target of Kingman’s Reef, the tortuous approach to Pago Pago harbor. As Pan American’s chief pilot, Ed Musick had been responsible for selecting the crew of the Samoan Clipper. It was typical of Musick that for the job of captain on the survey flights he assigned himself.

  The New Zealand operation had political overtones. Though Pan American now served the mid-Pacific route to China, the real prize—the Atlantic—still eluded Juan Trippe. The gateway to Britain was still blocked by the restrictive Clause H of the Pan American–Imperial agreement, which denied Pan American the right to commence scheduled transatlantic flying until Imperial Airways was ready to fly a reciprocal service.

  It was 1937 and Imperial was still not ready. Until Imperial Airways possessed a true transatlantic airliner, the British Air Ministry was not inclined to give the Americans a chance to demonstrate their technical superiority on an ocean so bound to British prestige as the North Atlantic.

  So, in the meantime, Trippe sought other opportunities. One such was the 7,000-mile route from California to New Zealand and Australia. Even from Europe, traveling westward by air over the Atlantic and Pacific to Australia was quicker than the traditional route over the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Indian Ocean. Trippe believed this could be a lucrative route, initially for a postal service and eventually for scheduled passenger flights.

  Again the British lion stood in the way. Imperial Airways was already flying through the Middle East, Malaya, and Burma. Imperial’s Australian partner, Qantas, was extending its own routes through the Pacific and had ambitions to fly all the way to Canada. The sticking point was Hawaii, essential as a refueling stop for any Pacific crossing. The U.S. War Department had refused landing rights to any foreign carriers. The British, tit for tat, closed the gates to Australia and New Zealand. Once again Pan American’s plans foundered on the reciprocity issue.

  Trippe, the tireless finagler, dispatched Harold Gatty, the pioneer Australian navigator, to Auckland. There Gatty played upon New Zealand’s historical sense of isolation not only from the empire but from the rest of the world. With the proposed air route, Gatty pointed out, New Zealand would be separated by only four flying days from modern civilization. Instead of being a junior and generally ignored partner of Australia, New Zealand could sit astride a major new commercial artery.

  The government of New Zealand considered the matter, and then made a bold decision. New Zealand would break ranks with Britain and Australia. On 11 March 1937, Pan American received the concession to operate a commercial route from San Francisco to Auckland. Six days later, Ed Musick was preparing to fly the first trip.

  The first approach to Pago Pago harbor was not to Musick’s liking. He was too high, and the lightly loaded Sikorsky, at the end of the 1,600-mile flight from Kingman’s Reef, tended to float too far before touching down. Ahead, Musick could see the spray from the combers at the mouth of the bay. He pulled up for another try.

  On the next pass he flew at treetop height, diving down the slope of the hills. Flaring abruptly, almost at stall speed, he smacked the Sikorsky down on the water. As the big flying boat slewed to a halt in the harbor, it was quickly surrounded by outrigger canoes filled with Polynesian natives who had never before seen a flying boat.

  Taking off from Pago Pago was the same ordeal in reverse. But this time the S-42B was heavy, loaded with fuel for the 1,800-mile flight to New Zealand. Musick made two trial runs across the harbor before attempting a takeoff. With a good wind on the nose, he then lifted the S-42 off the water, clearing the breakers by only a few feet, and climbed out to the southwest.

  The reception in Auckland was unlike anything Musick had experienced before, exceeding Manila’s reception of the China Clipper. To Musick’s astonishment, thirty thousand New Zealanders turned out to cheer him and his crew. Some wept openly when the American flyers took the reviewing stand. The New Zealanders were colonists, a people grown weary of isolation from the mother country and from the rest of civilization. Their lives, it seemed to them, had been changed overnight by the accomplishment of Musick and the Samoan Clipper. In a single epic flight, Ed Musick had propelled them into the twentieth century.

  Musick took the reviewing stand. When the cheering finally abated enough for him to speak, Ed Musick remained in character. “We are glad to be here,” he said and, having nothing more to say, broke into a grin. The crowd cheered all the more.

  Musick came to Pago Pago again on his third South Pacific survey flight. He liked the narrow harbor no more than when he had seen it the first time.

  The Samoan Clipper took off from Pago Pago at dawn, 11 January 1938. Two hours and twenty minutes later, Musick radioed that an oil leak had developed in number four engine. A short while later he reported that he intended to dump fuel to lighten the ship, then return for a landing in Pago Pago.

>   Ed Musick never made it back to Pago Pago. The Samoan Clipper exploded in mid-air and fell to the sea like a flaming comet.

  That evening the U.S. Navy ship Avocet, searching the area, recovered from an oil slick the charred flotsam of the Samoan Clipper. There were pieces of the crews’ uniforms, pages from the engineering log, fragments of wood.

  The death of Ed Musick stunned the aviation world. Musick had been the world’s most famous airline pilot. He had just been awarded the Harmon Trophy. In New Zealand, where he was worshiped as a hero for linking that small country with the continent of North America, they had just named an aeronautical station in his honor.

  What happened? It was revealed that Pan Am had already conducted dye tests of the Sikorsky’s fuel-dumping system and determined that the fuel jettisoned from the valves beneath the wing circulated forward, over the top of the wing. Worse, experience showed that after dumping, fuel vapors somehow collected inside the wing structure. Although a bulletin from the Bureau of Air Commerce was issued prohibiting fuel dumping from the S-42, the ban applied only to passenger flights and not to Musick’s survey flight.2

  Why had Musick elected to dump fuel? Though he may have been unaware of the recent prohibition against dumping from the S-42, he had already experienced the vapor hazard during his first South Pacific survey flight. It seems likely that Musick’s concern about the tiny Pago Pago harbor probably overrode his fear of fuel dumping. A landing with the overloaded Sikorsky, still glutted with fuel for the flight to Auckland, would almost certainly end in the combers at the mouth of the bay and probably destroy the aircraft.

  When he commenced dumping, either jettisoned fuel was sucked into the engine exhaust and ignited or, more likely, collected as a vapor inside the wing. When the electric flap motor was actuated to extend the flaps for his approach to Pago Pago, the vapor detonated, turning the Samoan Clipper into an incendiary bomb.3