Beneath the Southern Cross

CXXXIII

Dinner Key in the early 1930s

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

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

Oceania in 2015

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

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.