China Clipper

by Robert Gandt

  And in New York, where it was still Sunday, Juan Trippe went to his office in the Chrysler Building. He knew that the American base at Pearl Harbor had been ravaged. He knew, too, that everything had changed, that his fleet of commercial flying boats would be diverted toward another, yet undefined wartime mission. But what Trippe did not know was what had become of his four flying boats out there in the Pacific on this December morning. He only knew that they were in extreme danger.

  For several weeks all Pan American flying boat captains had carried sealed orders on board their aircraft. In the event of a war emergency, they were to open the orders and proceed accordingly. Lanier Turner, commanding the Anzac Clipper, opened his orders and learned that he was to divert to Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, about 150 miles to the south of embattled Pearl Harbor on Oahu.

  For the next two hours Turner flew on to Hilo, hoping that this new route would not bring him into the scrutiny of the Japanese task force. Not until they had safely landed in the bay at Hilo did Turner inform his passengers about the events at Pearl Harbor. He advised them that they could either stay in Hawaii or return to San Francisco with the Anzac Clipper. He intended to depart, he said, just as soon as the flying boat could be serviced and refueled. All elected to stay.

  All day Turner and his crew worked to make the Anzac Clipper ready to fly. There was no Pan American ground staff in Hilo, nor were there pressure fuel pumps. Fueling was done by gravity, laboriously pouring each gallon into the over-wing receptacles. By nightfall the job had not been completed, and so Turner and his crew were obliged to stay over all the next day. That night, Monday, 8 December, they departed Hilo in blackness and radio silence. By the time the Anzac Clipper reached San Francisco eighteen hours later, Lanier Turner and his crew had neither shaved nor slept in a bed for seventy-two hours.1

  John “Hammy” Hamilton, thirty-four, was a bull-necked, muscular man, sometimes given to postures of bravado. But he was known as a solid pilot, navy-trained, a veteran of nine years on Pan American flying boats. Now, as captain of the Philippine Clipper, sister ship of the China Clipper, Hamilton was about to face the severest test of his career.

  Bound for Guam when he received news of Pearl Harbor, Hamilton was now en route back to Wake. He ordered flight engineer T. E. Barnett to dump 3,000 pounds of fuel from the heavily loaded M-130. Landing in Wake’s sheltered lagoon, Hamilton taxied to the pier and then went to confer with the senior naval officer on the island, Commander W. S. Cunningham, and the ranking marine, Major James Devereux.

  Wake now possessed a landing strip, built earlier that year to accommodate a squadron of Marine Corps F4F-3 Wildcat fighters. The Wildcats, however, had no navigational capability. Now it was an urgent necessity to sweep the seas around Wake for an approaching enemy force. Without homing devices, the Wildcats could not patrol far enough from Wake without risking becoming lost. Would Hamilton take the Philippine Clipper on patrol, escorted by the fighters?

  Hamilton consented, but with conditions. He insisted that the Martin M-130 be fueled not only for the patrol but for the onward flight to Midway, plus a four-hour reserve. He would take his load of civilian refugees along with him. Even though high-octane fuel was now a critical commodity on Wake, the officers agreed.

  An hour later Hamilton was standing on the loading dock with the Pan American station manager, John Cooke. The two men watched the final fueling of the flying boat. As they talked, they became aware of the rumble of engines. They looked up. Out of a low, rolling scud line they could see two formations of airplanes. Cooke thought they were American B-17s. Hamilton knew better.

  The two formations split, the first going for the airstrip. The second formation bore down on the north fork of the island, toward Hamilton and Cooke and the freshly fueled Philippine Clipper. The men felt the thud of bombs hitting the island. A trail of bullets kicked up the sand, coming toward them. Hamilton and Cooke and their Chinese chauffeur, Tommy, dived into an unfinished foundation hole. Twenty feet away a bomb exploded, showering them with sand and debris. More bullets whined across the sand, kicking spray.

  In the next few minutes the Wake Island airline colony, built with the sweat and spirit of the adventurers from the North Haven, was blown to bits. The hotel, Pan American’s oasis on a desert island, was hit and set afire. John Cooke’s house was flattened. The clipper loading dock disappeared in a geyser of debris. Hugo Leuteritz’s Adcock antennas crashed to the sand. A fuel dump took a direct hit, gushing flames and smoke.

  The attackers finished their work and withdrew. John Hamilton climbed out from his ditch and peered through the smoke and dust. The island was ablaze. Columns of oily smoke curled into the low clouds. Hamilton ran toward the Philippine Clipper, expecting the worst.

  The flying boat was still at her mooring, rocking in the waves from a bomb that had exploded a hundred feet away. Hamilton could see holes where a Japanese gunner had stitched a line of bullets across the fuselage. With flight engineer T. E. Barnett, Hamilton climbed on board to assess the damage. The fuel tanks seemed intact. The engines had not been hit, nor were the control surfaces damaged. She was flyable.

  Hamilton told Cooke to round up all the passengers and Pan American employees. At the same time he gave the order to strip every nonessential item from the clipper—every piece of cargo, baggage, passenger amenity.

  Ninety minutes after the Japanese attack, the Philippine Clipper was ready. She carried thirty-four people on board—twenty six Pan American station personnel plus eight crew members. Two were seriously wounded from the air attack. The Adcock direction finder was down, and Hamilton had no idea what to expect when he arrived at Midway. For all he knew, the Japanese would already be there.

  One thing was certain: The Japanese wanted Wake. They would return soon. For the Americans still on Wake, the only means of escape was the Philippine Clipper.

  Hamilton taxied the heavy ship out into the lagoon. The Martin flying boat rode low in the water, filled beyond her design capacity with fuel and human cargo. Hamilton opened the throttles, and the Philippine Clipper began to gather speed. But as she plowed across the narrow lagoon, it became clear that she would use up her sea room before reaching flying speed. Hamilton closed the throttles and turned the clipper around for another try.

  Once again the Philippine Clipper labored to reach flying speed. Hamilton pumped the yoke trying to make her unstick from the water. Again he was forced to abort the takeoff.

  On the third attempt the clipper’s hull skipped free from the surface. She skimmed along, trailing a cascade of spray, struggling to remain airborne. Clinging to her few feet of altitude, the Philippine Clipper roared over the sandy beach, barely clearing the dwarf magnolias and scrub brush, and pointed her bow to the open ocean.

  It was a bittersweet moment. From their gun positions, the marines watched the Philippine Clipper become a speck on the horizon. On board were thirty-four of their countrymen, now on their way to safety. Left behind on Wake Island were the marines and the civilian construction workers who had come to build the air strip. They would remain to face the Japanese.2

  In the meantime, Midway, too, had come under attack. Warships of the Japanese Kido Butai, the same task force that struck Pearl Harbor, were shelling the island. While the Philippine Clipper was droning across the central Pacific at near sea level to avoid enemy contact, Japanese gunfire destroyed the Adcock direction finder on Midway. Hamilton and his crew had no way to find their tiny island target except by celestial navigation.

  Darkness came, and Hamilton climbed the Philippine Clipper up into the night sky. Now there were stars by which navigator J. A. Hurtsky could take celestial fixes. Over the radio Hamilton broadcast his intentions to reach Midway and transmitted the names of those he had airlifted from Wake.

  Midway stood out like a beacon. Fires still blazed from the afternoon’s attack. With all his lights on to avoid misidentification, Hamilton made a reconnoitering pass over the blacked-out base, picked a landing area on the d
ebris-strewn lagoon, and set the Philippine Clipper down.

  When refueling was completed, the flying boat was airborne again. Navigation was no longer a problem as they followed the familiar chain of island signposts on the 1,304-mile route to Hawaii. Though Hamilton was prepared to divert to Hilo, he was instructed by radio to come on into Pearl Harbor. Despite the devastation to the base and the moored vessels, the Pan American facility had escaped destruction.

  The escapees from Wake, most of them still wearing the standard island uniform—shorts and sneakers— disembarked at Pearl Harbor. The full realization of what happened now struck them. The military complex was in ruins. Fires still raged. Smoke blotted the tropical sky. The navy’s battleship row had become an oil-slicked gravesite.

  Two days later, on 10 December 1941, John Hamilton flew the Martin M-130 back to San Francisco. The 2,402 mile trip was, he said, “like any other we have ever made with the exception that we maintained radio silence.”3

  For the Philippine Clipper and her famous sister, the China Clipper, it was the end of an era. The six-year adventure of the “Pacific Highway” was now a romantic memory. Both remaining Martin clippers would acquire military paint and finish their careers performing wartime logistical duty. The Philippine Clipper would wear a “wound” stripe as testimony to her machine-gunning on Wake. The glory days were over, and neither of the Martin clippers would survive the war.

  Captain Fred Ralph, thirty-four, had a special affection for the Hong Kong Clipper. Her nickname was Myrtle. She was an S-42B, an aging Sikorsky flying boat brought to the Far East in November 1941 to fly the Manila–Hong Kong segment of the transpacific air route. She had now completed eleven shuttle flights.

  Fred Ralph had just finished preflighting Myrtle. It was Monday morning, 8 December 1941, a few minutes before eight o’clock. An eerie stillness lay over the colony. Ralph had planned to fly the Sikorsky and her passengers that morning to the presumed safety of Manila, but he had just been told that Manila, like Pearl Harbor, was under Japanese attack. Now Ralph had new orders. He was to fly Myrtle out of Hong Kong to an inland lake near Kunming in the interior of China.

  But it was too late. The rumble of aircraft engines split the morning stillness. Looking to the north, Ralph saw the silhouettes of airplanes descending over the Sha Tin Pass. They were coming directly at Kai Tak airport.

  The first bombs struck Kai Tak. Bullets chewed up the tarmac where Fred Ralph and his working party stood watching. They ran for cover. Most of them jumped into the water behind concrete dock pilings.

  Fred Ralph sprinted to the end of the dock, and as the bullets pinged against the concrete, he leapt into the water and ducked behind a piling. Too late he realized that he had chosen an open sewer for his shelter.

  Ack-ack bursts smudged the sky, hitting nothing. Air raid sirens began to wail. Explosions rocked the colony. The Zeros roared low over Kai Tak, dropping their externally mounted bombs, cratering the runways, firing on the CNAC (China National Airline Corporation, Pan American’s affiliate) transport aircraft parked on the tarmac, strafing the buildings and hangars.

  From his shelter Fred Ralph watched the Zeros dive on the Hong Kong Clipper. He counted six passes, and each time the incendiary bullets stitched a path over the dock and across the water, missing the flying boat. Then, on the seventh pass, the bullets found their target. Myrtle erupted in flames. While Fred Ralph and his crew watched helplessly, the big Sikorsky flying boat burned to the waterline.

  The warplanes withdrew, soaring northward back toward occupied Kwangtung province. Fred Ralph climbed from the foul water. Dripping wet, he stared at the burned-out hulk of the Hong Kong Clipper.

  Meanwhile, William Langhorne Bond, Pan American’s boss of CNAC, was already busy dispersing the undamaged CNAC aircraft. Three of his transports had survived the bombing, and he ordered these aircraft camouflaged and pushed off into the vegetable gardens that surrounded the airport.

  That night Fred Ralph and his crew escaped Hong Kong aboard a CNAC DC-2. For a month they were not heard from. They wound their way across Asia and Europe, finally arriving in New York in January 1942. Hong Kong, they learned, had fallen to the Japanese on Christmas Day.4

  In Auckland, Captain Robert Ford pondered his situation. His way home—the Pacific island route to San Francisco—had become a battleground. Between New Zealand and Hawaii there were no safe harbors.

  Ford and his crew of nine had flown the Boeing 314, the Pacific Clipper, to Auckland without incident. For a week he waited for orders. The big flying boat was the most advanced long-range aircraft in the world. Ford knew that it would be desperately needed back in the United States. Pan American, like the rest of America, was at war.

  Finally, Ford received instructions, such as they were. He was to fly the Pacific Clipper home the long way, via Asia and Africa and the South Atlantic. The specific route was up to him. So was everything else, including the details about obtaining fuel, maintenance, navigational aids, weather reports, and, incidentally, protection from the Japanese.

  No one had yet made a round-the-world flight with a commercial aircraft. Although Bob Ford had no abiding wish to enter history, he now had little choice. If he wanted to go home with his crew and the Pacific Clipper, he had to take the 23,000-mile-long way around.

  He received an extra assignment. Before commencing the westward journey to America, he was to fly part way north across the Pacific, to Nouméa, pick up the Pan American personnel stranded there, and fly them to Australia.

  Ford landed at dawn in Nouméa. An hour later, with twenty-two company people and their families on board, he took off again. Six and a half hours later he arrived at the Australian east coast town of Gladstone.

  Throughout the next day the Pacific Clipper droned over the waterless stretches of Australia. Darwin, their destination, was a raucous, rowdy north-coast port town, now in the throes of a war emergency. A Japanese air attack was expected at any time. All night, while a tropical storm spat lightning and drunks fought in the streets, they fueled and serviced the flying boat. At dawn they were airborne again, bound for Surabaja in the Dutch East Indies.

  Flying in radio silence over the island of Java, the Pacific Clipper was suddenly intercepted by fighters—Dutch—whose pilots had never seen a Boeing flying boat and were unable to identify the aircraft. For several tense minutes the fighter pilots debated by radio whether to shoot the intruder down. Finally one of the Dutchmen thought he could discern part of an American flag on the top of a wing. The fighters stayed on the Boeing’s tail, their guns armed, until the entire entourage arrived in Surabaja—with the clipper landing in a minefield.

  Not until later, when they chatted with the young fighter pilots in the officers’ mess, did the flying boat crew realize how close it had been. The Dutch in the Far East had been badly mauled by Japanese air raids. The fighter pilots were anxious to retaliate. They wanted to shoot something down. It had almost been the Pacific Clipper.

  The Boeing’s Pratt and Whitney engines needed one-hundred-octane aviation gasoline. The only fuel available on Java was automobile gas. With no other choice, Ford topped off his tanks with the auto fuel. On the afternoon of 21 December 1941, he headed out over the Java Sea.

  The next twenty-one hours were the longest flight that Ford or his crew had ever made. The engines popped and complained because of the low-grade fuel, but they continued to run. Flying low over the Bay of Bengal at dawn, Ford flew directly over a surfaced Japanese submarine. Before the surprised enemy sailors could man their deck gun, Ford managed to climb up into the low clouds. With no charts to make an accurate landfall, Ford managed to find Ceylon and landed the Boeing in the tropical harbor with the romantic sounding name of Trincomalee.

  On Christmas Eve the strange odyssey was under way again, now bound for Karachi. An hour later they were back in Trincomalee with oil gushing from a failed number three engine. The engine had gotten them across the Indian Ocean—twenty-one hours of flight time on impro
per fuel—and then failed only thirty-four minutes into the next leg. Bob Ford was beginning to believe that luck was, after all, on his side.

  Flight engineers Jocko Parrish and Swede Rothe, working without special tools or parts for the complex engine, labored for two days. For the rest of Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day they worked, fabricating parts and tools from material borrowed from the Royal Air Force base.

  On 26 December 1941, Ford made his second takeoff from Trincomalee. The overloaded Boeing climbed slowly in the hot, tropical morning air, barely clearing the groves of palms that lined the harbor. All day they flew over the vast brown landscape of India, landing that evening in Karachi. From there, on 28 December, Ford flew the Boeing along the coast of the Gulf of Oman, over the Persian Gulf to the island of Bahrain.

  Again no high-octane aviation fuel was to be found. Fueling once more with automobile gasoline, and once more hearing his engines knock and ping, Ford pointed the flying boat westward over the Arabian desert, across the Red Sea, into the Sudan. That evening he landed in the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, below Khartoum.

  From the Sudan they flew over the interior of Africa, past barren hills to the equatorial jungles of the Congo. At Léopoldville Ford put the Boeing down in the fast-flowing muddy waters of the Congo River. It was New Year’s Day, 1942.

  The next leg, and the next takeoff, were the most perilous of the journey. The day was humid, hot, without a breath of wind. The high-density altitude, due to the tropical temperature, deprived the Boeing of her maximum takeoff performance. She carried a load of 5,100 gallons of gasoline—33,660 pounds—for the long flight across the South Atlantic to Brazil.