North to Asia

CXXXII

From the time when the British had effectively slammed the door in Juan Trippe’s face regarding a transatlantic route, Juan had been making plans for a transpacific route. 

The Pacific Ocean --- misnamed The Peaceful Sea --- is the largest body of water on earth. Its 64 million square miles are greater than the area of all the continents combined, and alone it covers thirty percent of the earth’s surface.  From the Bering Strait to the coast of Antarctica, the Pacific stretches nearly 10,000 miles. From the Panama Canal to the Kra Isthmus the Pacific reaches nearly 11,000 miles. Most of the distance between these points is open water, with scatterings of islands --- a pseudocontinent men have named Oceania --- mere dots on its surface. No matter how one measures it, crossing the Pacific Ocean is a daunting task . . . and never more daunting than by air in the early adolescence of aviation. 

 

Looking at a map, the Pacific resembles, somewhat, a vast triangle, with its apex at Beringia leading into the Arctic Ocean. The base of the triangle merges invisibly into the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. Major nations that border the Pacific include Russia, Japan, China, Indonesia, Australia, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Toward the point of the apex, the great landmasses of Asia and North America draw so close together that they nearly close off the vast Pacific. 

And it was at that apex that Juan Trippe first imagined he could be.  

On paper, it looked simple enough, an easy jaunt for the dependable Sikorsky S-42. A series of hops --- from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Seattle to Juneau to Anchorage to Dutch Harbor (with feeder lines to Fairbanks and Nome) ---  on to Anadyr, Magadan and Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, and then south to China. 

China. Juan Trippe, blessed with a romantic soul beneath his piratical exterior, loved the idea of his sky clippers voyaging to Cathay, just as the sea clippers of his Trippe ancestors had done the century before. 

 

But Nature was not fated to cooperate. Assuming he could make the flight, Juan had bought two Alaska-based airlines, but when the Lindberghs surveyed the route (going as far as Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians) Charles’ report was not favorable. It was wild up there at the top of the earth, mountainous and untamed, and it would be difficult to install the necessary infrastructures to ensure safe flight in Alaska. Worse yet was the weather. In the short summers, the thawing cold waters Arctic Ocean collided with the warm waters of the Pacific’s Japan Current, creating soaring towers of fog no S-42 could outclimb. Given that the plane would be overflying the sawtoothed Aleutian chain, the prospects for a safe journey were poor.  In the winter, storms froze the Arctic and chilled the North Pacific, winds howled, and even on the clearest days, the biting cold would make a flight in this region nearly impossible to navigate, incredibly uncomfortable to endure at best, even with the cabin heaters set to roaring (today’s jets, with their pressurized cabins, can fly well above the weather).   

Reeve Airways was a part of Pan American’s “System.” In 1954, this DC-3 crash-landed in the Aleutians due to fog

 

Man would not cooperate either. The desperately paranoid Josef Stalin flatly refused Pan Am’s request for airfield facilities in Pacific Siberia. Juan had earlier sent Charles Lindbergh on a goodwill visit to Leningrad in order to lay the groundwork for such cooperation, and here was Stalin repudiating his earlier bonhomie. Juan was bewildered at the man’s mercurial nature. History would guarantee that he would not be alone in his confusion. 

Even if Stalin had agreed, there was another problem. Pan Am’s S-42s would have to thread a fine needle moving down the Pacific Coast of Asia, flying the narrow corridor between the mutually hostile Soviet Union and the increasingly aggressive Empire of Japan, which claimed vast swaths of northern China as its own. As of 1931, the Japanese began waging a war of extermination against the Chinese in Manchuria, and in 1932 the Empire of the Sun would seize the region, rename it Manchukuo, and continue its depredations more silently. 

Japan already controlled Korea (Chosen) to the south and the southern half of long, narrow Sakhalin Island to the east when it seized the Chinese region of Manchuria in 1932 in order to exploit its iron mines. Renamed “Manchukuo,” the area functioned as a puppet state under Puyi, the last Chinese Emperor (a child).  The Japanese occupation cost hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives, including those unfortunates subject to Chemical-Bacteriological Warfare testing by the infamous Unit 731. The Japanese vivisected human beings, infected them with diseases, performed bizarre medical experiments, and tested the effects of trauma --- such as mass rape --- on Chinese men, women and children

And the Chinese themselves refused to allow Pan American, or any other foreign airline, to function within China, fearing that an extension of such rights would constitute a pretext for the Japanese to land their planes at Chinese airfields. Passengers did not have to carry valises, the Chiang government reasoned, they might just as easily carry rifles.

With a sigh, Juan Trippe returned to studying his globe . . .