CLXIX
With
the issue of landing rights at Hong Kong squared away in September of 1936, and
the Philippine Clipper and Hawaii Clipper entering service, Juan
Trippe finally inaugurated air passenger service to the Far East on October 21,
1936. The first passenger flight was an all-VIP flight. Trippe himself made the
flight in company with his lifelong friend Sonny Whitney, who was Pan Am’s CEO
(Betty Trippe went to Hawaii on the Lurline).
Other passengers were Senator William McAdoo (R-California) and William Roth
and Wallace Alexander, the two Presidents of the Matson Line. Roy Howard of the
Scripps-Howard newspaper chain flew aboard the Philippine Clipper that day as well, in company with other media
moguls.
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Senator
William McAdoo was an invited guest on the first official passenger flight of
the M-130
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His
marriage to journalist Martha Gellhorn, like all of Ernest Hemingway’s
marriages, was short, dramatic, inebriate, and tempestuous. Gellhorn traveled
everywhere --- including wastelands and war zones, with Ernest and without ---
to get a good story. She, like “Papa,” was addicted to adventure
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Lady
Grace Drummond-Hay and Karl Von Wiegand were Hemingway and Gellhorn’s European
counterparts. Although they preferred Hugo Eckener’s zeppelins to cross the
Atlantic they flew Juan Trippe’s Clippers across the Pacific
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Egocentric
to the point of pathology, and theatrical to a fault, General Douglas MacArthur was the Generalissimo of The Philippines
when the China Clippers entered service. Even before they entered official
passenger service the Clippers transported MacArthur to and from the U.S.
mainland, and he treated them --- as he did many other things --- as for his personal use. He became one of the rare Five Star U.S. Generals and was one of the most famous
military commanders of World War II, despite an arguable debacle in the Philippines on the first day of the war when he failed to put his troops on alert after receiving word of Pearl Harbor
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Derided by MacArthur as a showboater, the
rugged General Claire Lee Chennault had been tossed out of the U.S. Army Air
Corps before World War II. A true Air Pirate, he traveled to China to create a
modern Chinese Air Force based around the American Volunteer Group (A.V.G.) or Flying
Tigers. With only 100 pilots they were able to inflict intense damage on the Japanese Air Force. Although he was considered disrespectful of authority even by many
airmen, Chennault eventually became a General when the Flying Tigers joined the
U.S.A.A.C. in 1942
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The
Flying Tigers took their name from the sharktooth livery on their planes.
Officially part of the Chinese Air Force, the A.V.G. was secretly recruited and
funded by the United States government. A.V.G. pilots were all American boys.
To transport them quickly and quietly to China in the face of Isolationists in
Congress, F.D.R. provided them all manner of false identities as everything from
folksingers to ministers and piano tuners to chemists, and, by agreement with
Pan American, flew them across the Pacific on the China Clippers. The
government paid their airfares, which topped $950 per seat in 1940
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The
China Clipper and her sisters became
central to Pacific diplomacy between 1936 and 1941. The U.S. Government used
them to surveille Japanese positions in the Pacific, and they were often used
by overt and covert operatives who needed to move quickly and discreetly
between the Far East and the United States. Their air of intrigue was not just
a Public Relations ploy; not for nothing was the route called the “Orient
Express”
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Nobody
famous: A young Bruce Gordon, his
brother, and his mother (apparently wearing a mortarboard) celebrating aboard
the Philippine Clipper
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A
China Clipper at Alameda dock: Although
a tremendous number of famous people flew the China Clippers, especially to
Hawaii, the paparazzi of the day were few and far between and respected their
privacy. Pictures of notable passengers aboard ship are rare
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In
succeeding months, the three China Clippers carried a veritable Who’s Who of
American business, industry and entertainment leaders. Ernest Hemingway and
Martha Gellhorn were frequent passengers. Karl Wiegand and Lady Drummond-Hay,
despite their preference for airships, flew the China Clippers as well to
report on the new luxury manner of making a Pacific passage. Douglas MacArthur
flew the Clippers in both his official and unofficial capacities. Colonel
Claire Chennault, the founder of the Flying Tigers, regularly crossed the Pacific
on the M-130 and made certain that all members of the American Volunteer Group
he headed had at least one chance to transit on the Clippers; spies, movie
stars, wannabes, corporate officers, military men, and even a few everyday
people managed to travel East on any one of the big, renowned flying boats.
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Maxim
Litvinov had been Foreign Minister of the U.S.S.R. when the United States and
the Soviet Union recognized each other in 1933. In late 1941, Josef Stalin sent
Litvinov to the U.S. as Soviet Ambassador. Due to German wartime control of
Europe’s skies, Litvinov had to trek across Siberia and Nationalist-held China
to reach Hong Kong, where he boarded a Clipper to Manila and then flew on to
the U.S. He wore the same rumpled outfit
the whole way. Catching a train in San Francisco, he barely had time to buy a natty
new off-the-rack suit to wear in order to formally present his credentials to
the President in Washington. When he finally met with FDR on December 7th,
the attack on Pearl Harbor had already taken place. Roosevelt greeted him with,
“Well, we’re all in this together. Hey! Did you get that suit in Moscow?”
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The
universally-liked Saburo Kurusu was sent to Washington D.C. aboard a China
Clipper in October 1941 to negotiate a peace agreement between Japan and the
U.S., each increasingly hostile to one another. Kurusu did not know that
Japanese militarists had already set the Pearl Harbor sneak attack in motion
for December. Educated in the United States, a fluent English speaker, married
to an American girl, and with American-born and resident children, Kurusu was
deeply shamed by the Pearl Harbor attack. He spent the war years interned in
America
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In
November 1941, Saburo Kurusu, the Japanese Peace Envoy to the United States,
traveled to Washington via Clipper to attempt to head off the impending Pacific
War. And on the last regularly scheduled Clipper flight, Maxim Litvinov, the new
Soviet Ambassador to the United States, traveled the long way from Moscow by Clipper,
finally arriving at the White House just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
receiving word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The
Clippers had become instruments of diplomacy; soon, too soon, they would be
weapons of war.
