Pacific Shakedown

CLII

A life preserver of the China Clipper

By the time the China Clipper rolled out of her construction shed at the Martin plant in October 1935, Juan Trippe’s transpacific air service plan was already nearly six long months behind schedule. 

Life magazine participated in what eventually became a “Clipper craze”

 

The idea had originally been to survey the transpacific route using not the modified S-42B Pan American Clipper but by using the China Clipper, the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper to traverse each stage of the Pacific crossing successively. This would have given the airline plenty of time to shake the inevitable bugs out of each M-130 and out of the M-130 design as a whole prior to instituting actual carrier service. Everyone was a little nervous flying the new planes without a long orientation process, especially since the Martins were bound to be quite different in all respects from the sequence of Sikorsky flying boats everyone had become accustomed to. Now, that carefully laid plan had been knocked well-and-good into a cocked hat. 

Night flight

It was Andre Priester who announced (but Ed Musick who first suggested) that the first year of Pacific clipper service be made up strictly of mail and cargo flights. Passenger service was disallowed, except for Pan Am personnel. If anything went catastrophically wrong with a Clipper at least the airline wouldn’t lose members of the public, minimizing its liability and bad press. When the plan was announced it came in for criticism. Without passengers the new fancy (and obviously expensive) clippers would rely wholly on their mail fees to operate, and some newspapers, especially in the Midwest, took to calling them the “Taxpayer Clippers.”

Arrival at Wake

Construction delays and the lack of a real shakedown process were only part of the delay in beginning service. Another major issue was the remaining fallout from the Black Committee Hearings. Postmaster General James Farley had done everything he could to delay the award of FAM 19 to the airline. For most of the months that Pan Am was busy building its immense new clippers and the Pacific island facilities to operate them there was no guarantee that Pan American Airways would be hauling the mail. No guarantee --- except that Pan Am had, as usual, swallowed up its competition, Matson’s Inter-Island Air and Douglas’ South Pacific Air, and that the Navy wanted Pan Am to carry out covert military surveillance in the Pacific basin under its civilian cloak. It wasn’t until two days before the initial roll-out that FAM 19 was formally awarded to Pan Am.

 

The first-day cover of the China Clipper, 1935

Jim Farley was apoplectic at the terms. Not only did his investigation of Pan Am yield little and his threat to punish Pan Am for collusion come to naught, but his carefully worked-out arrangement to cut Pan Am’s airmail fees from $2.00 per mile to $1.75 a mile was ignored. The airline got the longest FAM route in the world from San Francisco, U.S.A. to Canton, China, over 8,000 miles of island-hopping, for the old rate of $2.00 per mile.

Although Pan Am had U.S. Government sanction to fly into Canton, the airline faced problems getting China to issue landing rights. China was a sickly political mess --- the northern tier of the country was a Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo. Outer Mongolia had declared its independence, as had Tibet and Tannu Tuva. Vast areas of the insular western hinterlands were controlled by warlords. The Uighurs in Sinkiang acknowledged no authority but their own clan chiefs. The region around Peiping, the old imperial capital, was held by a democratically-minded warlord called the Young Marshal, while other swaths of China were held by the Communist Party. The “official” Chinese Republic, under the increasingly corrupt and totalitarian Chiang Kai-shek, held most of the southern and southeastern littoral, including most of the important Chinese cities. Chiang refused to have any but Chinese airlines flying in China. He feared, and rightfully, that awarding foreigners landing rights would lead to a repetition of the fracturous Treaty Port system of the 19^th Century, and he especially feared the Japanese, who were slowly advancing on Chinese territory. To sidestep the problem, Trippe had purchased the Chinese airline C.N.A.C., but untangling the snarl that was C.N.A.C. would take years and would never be complete.  

 

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approves the Philippine Constitution, 1934

 

So the original “China Service” went for the time being only as far as Manila in the Philippines. When first conceived, flying into the Philippines was considered merely a technical challenge. But as time passed, it became, increasingly, a political challenge.

The three Martin Ocean Transports were named for the major stops along the route, and in order: Hawaii Clipper, Philippine Clipper, and China Clipper

The Philippines, an archipelago consisting of 7,650 islands, was colonized by Spain in 1521 when it was reached by the circumnavigating expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese who sailed for Spain. Magellan was killed by Filipino natives on Mactan Island on April 27^th of that year.

The Philippines, 1935

Spanish colonialism remained in place until the Spanish-American War of 1898. For most of those 377 years, the Philippines' chief trading partner was Spanish-controlled Latin America, and a regular fleet of ships traversed the Pacific from Veracruz, Mexico to Manila and back again.

Malacañang Palace, the official residence of the President of the Philippine Republic. The Philippines have experienced difficulties with democracy; for a time, President Ferdinand Marcos ruled as a dictator, and more recently, widespread violence, including the assassination of candidates, has marred Philippine politics

After the moribund Spanish Empire surrendered the Philippines in defeat, the United States engaged in brutal suppression of Philippine independence movements. By the mid-1930s, however, the Roosevelt Administration decided to institute a transition-of-power process in the Philippines, moving from a colonial form of imposed government to a republican form of self-government.

Manuel Quezon (1878-1944) was the first President of the Commonwealth of The Philippines

General Douglas MacArthur U.S. (1880-1964)  was Generalissimo and Field Marshal of the Philippine military from 1935 to 1941. In some respects more a dictator than an advisor, the shamelessly egocentric MacArthur lived in baronial splendor atop the Manila Hotel from whence he issued orders in much the vein of Zeus upon Olympus. He rarely bothered to find out what was actually going on in the real world he supposedly ruled so cavalierly, and was caught flatfooted when the Japanese attacked Manila in 1941. Japan quickly seized the Philippines. Both President Quezon and General MacArthur went into exile while ordinary Filipinos were brutalized under the occupation. But America needed heroes in the dark days after Pearl Harbor and so the hypertheatrical MacArthur was allowed to fill the bill. Most American military leaders in World War II secretly thought the famously corncob smoking General was a self-deluding fool. It was not until he risked an all-out atomic war with China in 1952 that he was cashiered by President Harry S Truman 

Under this arrangement, the United States was to be responsible for the Philippines’ foreign affairs and the bulk of its defense. The Philippines had an insular army, but its Generalissimo was an American, General Douglas MacArthur. The U.S. military retained autonomous control over its own bases, including the huge naval base at Subic Bay. Pan American Airways planned to establish its flying boat base at Subic Bay, using space rented from the U.S. Navy.   

Cutaway view of the M-130

It had been Juan Trippe’s hope to acquire the air route to Manila before the Philippines achieved its insular independence. Due to the delays in receipt of the M-130s and the U.S. Post Office’s foot-dragging on the Foreign Airmail route, the mechanisms of the Guam-to-Manila hop were not in place until after the election of Manuel Quezon as President of the Philippine Republic and the accession of an Insular Congress on November 15, 1935.

 

A not-atypical Manila Hotel soiree thrown by a family from the States at the height of America’s colonial power in the 1920s

Pan Am found itself with a unique once-in-history problem. Getting landing rights at Subic Bay was not truly an issue, since the U.S. Navy controlled Subic Bay as an extraterritorial enclave of the United States and was ready to allow Pan Am to land there. But though Subic Bay was technically beyond Philippine jurisdiction, the base still lay on Philippine soil, so Philippine approval was sought if not strictly required. And the airline needed rights to traverse Philippine airspace to even reach Subic Bay. Realistically, nobody, not even the most rock-ribbed Philippine nationalist, wanted to forego an international air connection in Manila. Plus, Quezon had to contend with not-so subtle pressure from Washington to grant Pan Am access to Subic Bay. It was very clear that Pan Am would get the overflight rights.

The palatial lobby of the Manila Hotel in 1935. General Douglas MacArthur lived on the top floor --- the entire top floor ---  of the hotel, and the lobby space doubled as Pan American’s ticket counter, waiting room, and operations office for the Philippines

But the approval process bogged down. Perhaps all the technical chatter about landing rights and overflights would have been the work of ten minutes legislative droning at any other time, but the Pan American Clipper issue was the first-ever issue addressed by the Philippine Congress. Impressed with their own unsullied authority, the Congressmen frustrated the rest of the world when they delayed the outbound flight of the China Clipper by spending several days making dramatic and windy speeches at each other about Filipino patriotism, trade and commerce, foreign investment and sovereignty, and the country's stand on international relations. Finally, finally they voted, overwhelmingly, to allow Pan American to operate out of Manila.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “If it’s a good story, it must be like the Manila Hotel.” Hemingway and his wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn, always regulars at the bar, were in Manila that November 1935 to cover the China Clipper’s arrival

The airline had the plane. It had the destination. It remained only to go there. And, inevitably, the posh Manila Hotel ultimately became the preeminent gathering place for the elite that chased the sun.       

The China Clipper arriving in Manila, November 29, 1935