Pan American Airways Day

CLXIII

It began with a typhoon horn.

Typhoon wreckage

In the years before weather satellites, residents of Pacific coastal areas --- and the entire Philippine archipelago was a coastal area --- were warned of oncoming typhoons --- called hurricanes in the Atlantic --- by the huge piercing screams of horns set up along the beaches. Typhoon horns typically gave people on the beach little warning --- by the time they could see a typhoon coming ashore it was literally ashore --- but the sound, picked up by other typhoon horns, was carried inland and might give people in the larger cities an hour or two to batten down everything and hold on tight. Just as there was no true early warning system for typhoons, there was no way to measure their force, no Beaufort Scale, that could tell a man on Mindanao how nasty the storm barging ashore on Luzon might be.

A collector’s edition of the first log of the China Clipper. Pan Am marketed such items to stoke continued public interest in the plane

 

On November 29, 1935, a lone typhoon horn sounded along the coast. No one ran in fear. The sound was expected, and welcome. The China Clipper had been sighted off the Philippine coast.

A billboard at the Pan Am flying boat base in Manila

The flight from Guam to Manila had been a pleasure cruise. The China Clipper flew through a brilliant blue sky with cottonpuffs of clouds drifting lazily above her. The warm tropical air allowed the crew to keep the cabin windows open. There was a nice, strong signal from the Adcock that matched up to a T with Fred Noonan’s calculations --- maybe the gizmo worked after all ---  and the nine-and-one-half-hour 1,596-mile flight marked the end of 59 hours and 48 minutes elapsed flying time for the China Clipper and her crew.   

The China Clipper coming in to Subic Bay. Note the Navy vessels in the background

Ed Musick ordered everyone to change into the fresh uniforms that hung bagged in the crew compartment, and Rod Sullivan brought forward a package stamped and addressed to President Quezon from President Roosevelt, hailing him as one democratically-elected leader to another. It, like every other piece of mail on board, had been franked with the FIRST FLIGHT cachet.

Two letters with U.S. Postage (top) and Philippine postage (bottom)

The crew of the China Clipper expected a carnival in Manila, but they didn’t expect quite what they found as they passed over the city. The scream of typhoon horns, the blare of truck and car horns, the cheering of the crowds --- over 100,000 people were crammed down in the harbor near the China Clipper’s berth alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands more in the city who were celebrating “Pan American Airways Day” in the restaurants, bars and on the streets. U.S. and Philippine Commonwealth flags snapped gaily side by side.

The China Clipper reaches Manila. Note the crowd on the quay. A close look at the buildings reveals crowds of onlookers on rooves and terraces

Ed Musick groaned. He could see the reviewing stand, bands, drum majorettes, floats, and crowds everywhere. It was going to be another long day of speeches, of glad-handing, of all the nonsense he hated. Hell, he still had to land the plane, and he could see people literally jumping up and down with excitement. To give himself and his crew a few more minutes he circled over the city. Rooftops were black with little figures waving. He could hear a roar of voices even over his engines.

The China Clipper passing over the breakwater in Manila as seen in a Philippine newspaper

No sooner had the China Clipper tied up to her mooring than she was surrounded by a flotilla of harbor boats. Ed worried. If one of those yahoos hit the plane . . . 

But they didn’t. A government launch shouldered its way through the crowd of boats and took Ed and his crew off safely. At Ed’s insistence, they brought Pan Am ground crew to stand watch aboard the China Clipper and protect it from souvenir hunters, just the same way Lindbergh had asked Parisian gendarmes to guard The Spirit of St. Louis. In fact, nothing like this day had been seen since Lindbergh had reached Le Bourget.

Harbor boats crowd the China Clipper at Manila

Catherine “Kay” Cotterman Hoskins, a Philippine native whose both sets of grandparents had moved to the Philippines after the Spanish-America War, remembers: 

There would be "Musick" in the air that November afternoon in 1935, and thousands of people had gathered on the Luneta and surrounding roof gardens overlooking Manila Bay to watch and hear it happen. My family and I were atop the University Club Building keeping an eye on the time and listening for the first sounds. Then, suddenly there was an unfamiliar steady humming of engines as a beautiful, silver bodied, 25-ton aircraft appeared out of a puffy white cloud! The crowd roared with cheers and screams as everyone witnessed the arrival of the very first airplane to bridge the waters of the Pacific Ocean --- 8,000 miles from Alameda, California to Manila, Philippines! The China Clipper of Pan American Airways made history that day, and the Skipper was a man named E.C. Musick.

I was a 14-year-old kid at that magical moment and I remember telling myself that someday I would be onboard a Clipper flying high in the sky. I did not know when or why or how my dream would happen --- but it did come to pass.

The China Clipper coming to the dock in Manila

Brought to the dock, Ed was pressed for a few words, and he gave the crowd exactly that. Asked how the flight was, he said, “Without Incident” and that was it. He and the crew were whisked away to Malacañang Palace, there to deliver President Roosevelt’s letter to President Quezon, who accepted it with happy tears in his eyes and kissed Ed Musick on both cheeks.

The China Clipper at the dock in Manila

There was a State Dinner that night, laudatory speeches, parades, and fireworks. The rejoicing went on all night. On its first holiday as a self-governing nation, the Philippines celebrated its ties to the United States.

The China Clipper at Subic Bay. Another view

It was a meaningful time to do so. Even though the Philippines were self-governing, much of the work of governing the Commonwealth of The Philippines was still in the hands of U.S. citizens. Most of its newspapers were published by mainlanders, its military was under U.S. supervision, and President Quezon depended heavily on U.S. advisors to manage his Administration. Atop the Manila Hotel, Douglas MacArthur reigned in imperious isolation, being for all intents and purposes Quezon’s puppetmaster.

An outline map of East Asia. In 1935, China (A) was being dominated by Japan (E), which held Korea (C, D) and Formosa (F) as territories. The medium-sized north-south chain of islands south of Formosa is The Philippines, and the large east-west chain south of The Philippines is the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. The north coast of Australia is to the southeast. India is to the west

 

The U.S, military was not happy with the Roosevelt Administration’s decision to grant the islands autonomy. Under the Congressional decree granting self-government, the U.S. was expected to close its major bases, like Subic Bay and Clark Field as soon as practicable, and turn over responsibility for Philippine defense to the Filipinos. Full independence was slated for no later than 1944. As it turned out, World War II and a Japanese invasion delrailed these plans for two years, and the bases remained open. 

The China Clipper was news in papers of every size

There had already been some incidences of hostility between Filipino authorities and Americans. The U.S. leadership was becoming concerned --- as was President Quezon’s Administration --- that insular independence might give the Japanese an open door to Manila as anti-American sentiments, long held in check among certain elements, were expressed. Japanese newspapers had already touted the idea that Japan and The Philippines were sister nations, both East Asian archipelagoes, from which Western imperialists should be driven.

A mainlander working for PAA stands happily on the passenger dock at Manila

Geopolitically, the Philippines cover a huge area. The archipelago’s northernmost Batan Islands (not to be confused with the Bataan Peninsula) are just 150 miles or so from the island of Formosa (Taiwan), historically Chinese, but held in 1935 by the Japanese, a large pendant dangling from the long chain of the Ryukyu Islands. To the south, the Philippines meld into the archipelago of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). China proper lies just to the west across the South China Sea. American control of the Philippines was  tantamount to American control of access to the rich croplands of China and the oil of the Indies, both resources Japan wanted.

Both The Philippines and the United States issued “First Day” stamps for the China Clipper in 1935, and again on the 50^th anniversary of the flight

Any airplane that could cut the transpacific voyage from 16 days to six was not any airplane the Japanese wanted in Philippine skies. But the Filipinos, guarding their newly-minted independence carefully, assuredly did. In the eyes of most Filipinos, Ed Musick was a new national hero, a white knight, and the China Clipper a valiant flying steed.

Bustling Manila, November 1935

And Ed Musick was the Man of The Hour everywhere else. Suddenly, this quiet man who saw no glory in his work was as famous as Lindbergh. His face was plastered on the front page of every newspaper and magazine cover of the day. Ed did not give any interviews despite being lionized. He felt that the credit for the flight belonged to the plane, its designers, and to the crew as a whole. But, no matter what he thought, he was for a brief while, the most famous man in the world.