CXXXIII
Dinner
Key in the early 1930s
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If
anything, the far reaches of the southern Pacific were even more inhospitable
to human conquest than the North Pacific. Heading out from Los Angeles in the
general direction of Australia, aviators were (and are) apt to encounter nothing --- a 7,497 mile flight that
even today takes nearly 15 hours nonstop --- and there is no place to stop.
Lonely
Clipperton Island is a deserted coral atoll in a seemingly strange place ---
just off the coast of North America
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Landfalls
are oddly rare in that portion of the Pacific lying on the California side of
the International Date Line. There is
the Hawaiian Island chain, there is Tahiti, and there is Clipperton, a ring-shaped atoll of just
over two square miles lying 671 miles southwest of Mexico, unmemorable except
for its razor-sharp rocks, its hideous land crabs, and a particularly harrowing tale of shipwreck and madness that took place there during the Great War.
Owned
by France, and occasionally claimed by Britain, Mexico, and the United States,
the island is not even suitable for an emergency landing field.
Other
than Clipperton, there are lonely, mutiny-haunted Pitcairn Island and tiny
Christmas Island. Beyond those lie the many small islands of Polynesia.
Known to Pan American navigators as Tokelau, Samoa, the Phoenix Islands, the Ellice Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, the Bonin Islands, and the Marianas Islands, at the time they were all colonies of the European Powers or of Japan.*
Oceania
in 1930
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Oceania
in 2015
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Japan,
an island nation in and of itself, began to extend its reach into the further
Pacific in 1875, when it annexed the previously independent Ryukyu Islands, and
twenty years later in 1895, when it seized Taiwan (Formosa) after the First Sino-Japanese
War. Japan then took the Kurile Islands
and the southern half of Sakhalin Island from Russia after that nation’s defeat
in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Japan annexed Korea --- long a hermit kingdom tributary to China --- in 1910, the first of many seizures of mainland Chinese territory. During World War I, Japan numbered among
the Allies, and it occupied the German Pacific Island colonies until then known
as Deutsche-Samoa, Die Karolinen, Die Marianen, Die Marschall-Inseln, Nauru,
and Deutsch-Neuguinea.
As
a matter of course, the League of Nations granted Japan Mandatory powers over
the former German territories in 1919. League rules stated that the Mandatory
Power could not fortify the territory of a Mandate, but in one of those bizarre
rulings that made the League so ineffectual, League inspectors could only visit
a Mandate at the express invitation of the Mandatory Power; hence, Japan was
free to do what it would in the far reaches of the Pacific, and it undertook to
build airfields and naval bases in all its Pacific Mandates. Truk, in the
Carolines, became Japan’s equivalent to Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor.
The
Constellation of the Southern Cross (Crux). Easily visible below the Equator,
it can also be seen near the horizon anyplace south of 25°N. as well
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Staged
flights had been Juan Trippe’s idea, an idea he christened “island hopping,”
but it seemed there were no islands to hop. Pan American Airways obviously had
no chance of obtaining landing rights in any of these foreign colonies. Neither
the Gallocentric French, nor the bureaucracy-ridden British with their damnable
“Provision H” would allow an American airline to use their territories as
refueling and staging stops. And that went even more so for Japan, an
increasingly aberrant ally in the early 1930s.
Pan
Am would have to find another way through the skies beneath the Southern
Cross. Juan Trippe continued
gazing, meditatively, at his beloved globe.
*They today
make up the island nations of Tokelau, Samoa, Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Republic of
the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and outliers
of Japan and the United States. In total land area the island groups are small; Kiribati (pronounced 'Kiri-boss') is one of the smallest nations on earth by land area, being comprised of only 313 square miles in 33 atolls, but they are scattered over an area of 1.35 million square miles, making Kiribati larger than India.
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