Pacific Steppingstones: Midway

CXLVI

The China Clipper

This friendly sign that hung on the portico welcomed guests to Gooneyville Lodge, formally known as The Pan American Hotel At Midway. The sign, missing for decades, was discovered among the flotsam and jetsam in the island’s unused buildings

Having established the Alameda-to-Honolulu leg of the transpacific odyssey in April 1935, Pan American Airways moved forward toward Midway in June. 

The airport at Tern Island in French Frigate Shoals, an atoll of the Hawaiian Islands chain lying halfway between Oahu and Midway started out as a World War II emergency field. Privately owned, it is still in use today

The relative position of French Frigate Shoals

The flight to Midway was a relative cakewalk. Lying just 1,200 miles northwest of Honolulu at the far end of the Hawaiian Island chain there was no doubt that the surveying Pan American Clipper could make the flight. It was by far the easiest of the transpacific hops as well, because the airline’s Clippers would never be out of sight of land on this leg --- the Hawaiian Islands, great and small, lay strewn along the route like mileposts.

Midway (seen from space) consists of several islands. The Pan Am facilities were on Sand Island

The Commercial Pacific Cable Company buildings on Midway date from 1903

The “Reef Hotel” provided living space for the contract laborers (mostly adventurous college boys) who helped build Midway

The 45-room hotel served gourmet meals, cocktails, and provided other creature comforts for travelers crossing the Pacific by Clipper. During World War II, the hotel became a military barracks. It was torn down in 1957

The interior of Gooneyville Lodge. A one-way ticket to Hong Kong cost $1,368.00 per person by Clipper, or $24,147.00 today. And the country was still in the midst of the Great Depression when China Service began. Clearly, this was a world beyond the ordinary

Midway itself was not entirely remote. There was already a transpacific cable station there and a U.S. Navy wharf for offloading supplies. Midway’s infrastructure was insufficient for an airline terminal, however, and so Pan Am installed one of the world’s first desalinization plants, greatly enlarged the existing cisterns carved by the Navy out of the coral rock, and built a comfortable tropical hotel for short-term guests nicknamed the “Gooneyville Lodge.”  The Gooneyville Lodge ran on solar power (in the 1930s!), and each guestroom had a screened-in porch. The hotel was outfitted with a tennis court and its own gardens for fresh vegetables.  Passenger transport from the flying boat dock to the hotel was provided by “woody” station wagons.

A “woody” of the type used by Pan Am on Midway

Besides building a flying boat mooring station for its Clippers and building (and /or enlarging) the aircraft workshops and tank farms at Midway, Pan Am also installed runways and hangars meant eventually to be used by landplanes. An Adcock array was constructed.

A typical Pan Am ad, circa 1936

The China Clipper arrives at Midway for the first time, November 24, 1935

Most of the work was done by contract workers, and most of the contract workers were college boys looking for a rough, tough and romantic summer job. Want ads for “Midway Men” had begun popping up in college publications as soon as the Pan American Clipper had landed in Honolulu for the first time. Since Midway was listed as under U.S. Navy jurisdiction, the contract workers applied at Navy recruiting stations and by mail. They were told they had misapplied, that the project was strictly civilian and strictly Pan Am’s. Many of the applicants dutifully reapplied to Juan Trippe’s office address.

One of Midway’s rusted antiaircraft guns. Light defenses were installed in 1935, a covert courtesy of the U.S.  Navy,  when Pan Am began Clipper service to and from the island. The Navy turned Midway into an important air- and seabase between 1940 and 1941. Although the island group was not heavily attacked on December 7, 1941, Midway became the locus of one of the greatest naval battles in history on June 4-7, 1942. The United States sank four of Japan’s best aircraft carriers and killed over 3,000 men, including the cream of Japanese Naval Aviation, losing only one carrier and 300 men in exchange. After the Battle of Midway, Japan’s Empire began an irreversible contraction

Those who did underwent an interesting and entirely covert vetting process. Anyone who had double-applied was quietly screened by Naval Intelligence before having their file turned over to the FBI which conducted its own background investigation on the sly before turning over the doubly-investigated applicants to Pan Am’s own Human Resources Department (they were vetted again by Pan Am security men, most of whom were johnny-come-lately resignees from Naval Intelligence). When the boys arrived at Midway they were organized into work gangs by Pan Am construction engineers, virtually all of whom were, like the corporate security staff, very recently retired Navy men. 

Midway is best known for its Gooney birds, but billions of birds of thousands of species occupy Midway. Visitors to the islands get used to the birds --- or don’t. The birds couldn’t care less

There were three Naval officers on Midway; they helped engineer the runways. They also helped with the landscaping, much of which concealed anti-aircraft gun emplacements.  According to a series of Treaties signed by the United States in the first years after World War I, the nation was not supposed to be militarizing its Pacific territories. But there was no rule against private industry arranging to protect a remote and valuable real estate investment. Even if the company was only renting it for one hundred dollars per year.     

Midway has several war memorials including the Navy Memorial --- complete with Gooney Bird