The Chosen Instrument
As the sole American airline with prewar operations overseas, Pan American became an important asset of the United States during World War II. Pan American operated flying boats, in part, because of the lack of airfields. But Pan Am also had experience in building airfields in remote areas. Roosevelt had secured rights to bases on many of the islands of the Caribbean from the British under the “Destroyers for Bases Agreement.” He now called upon Pan American to build airfields on these islands as a part of a larger plan to supply the war effort against Germany. Airports would be built down through the Caribbean to South America and along its east coast, for ferrying equipment and supplies across the Atlantic narrows to Africa. The British were engaging the Germans in North Africa, and North Africa would be the location of America’s first military engagements in World War II. Although the United States paid for all of the airport construction (over $90 million), Pan American held title to these facilities initially for appearance purposes since the United States was diplomatically neutral prior to its entry into the war. After the war, negotiations caused these improvements to revert to the United States, but with limitations on their use by airlines other than Pan Am.
The Airlines at War
At the beginning of the war, there were only some 365 commercial transport aircraft in the United States. The airplane manufacturing community would shortly begin to produce 50,000 aircraft a year, the largest manufacturing activity in the United States during the war, and at war’s end over 300,000 airplanes would have been produced. America’s main contribution was in production, not development, for the existing fighter and transport aircraft designs were considered sufficient, at least in the short run, to win the war if only there were enough of them. The P-51 Mustang was the only new development in airplane technology supplied by the United States after the onset of war.
The main production effort was, of course, directed toward fighter and bomber aircraft, although over 10,000 DC-3s, designated for the military as C-47s, were built, along with over
1,0 DC-4s (as C-54s). America needed every bit of transport potential it could muster during the years 1941-1945, including railroads as well as air carriers, and while the railroads enjoyed a resurgence of their former glory during these years, the air carriers came into their own for the first time. Aircrews flew everywhere, either as military or civilian to military or civilian airports, on domestic and overseas routes. Flying transoceanic routes became routine.
TWA, the only airline with land-based four – engine aircraft at the beginning of the war, set up a training center at government direction in New Mexico for instructing American and British pilots how to fly the four engine bombers, the B-24 and the B-17. (TWA had purchased the new Boeing Stratoliner, the 307, in 1940.) Pan American also contributed to four engine training, sharing its pilots’ experience in long-range ocean and celestial navigation. (See Figure 17-1.)
Domestically, the airlines discovered after the onset of hostilities that they had only 165 airplanes to service their routes. The armed forces had commandeered the rest for military purposes. Travel space on the relatively few air carrier aircraft was allocated according to a government imposed “priority system”:
• Priority One was for persons traveling under the authority of the president.
• Priority Two got military pilots a seat.
• Priority Three was other military personnel or civilians on essential wartime business.
• Priority Four was military cargo.
The remaining seats, of which there were precious few, went to everyone else. The lexicon of future airline travel was being established too. “Standbys” were those who hoped a priority above them would become a “no-show” so that a seat would become available. To be “bumped” was to have a higher priority passenger show up to take your seat.
American air carriers began to make money for the first time since 1934, and although the high load factor of domestic commercial operations contributed to profitability, the main effort of the airlines during the war was as contract carriers for the military.
The government allocated the airlines’ responsibility during the war in logical fashion. Northeast Airlines was given the North Atlantic route as far as Greenland and then Reykjavik, Iceland. Northwest was assigned to the Alaska route, Eastern to the Caribbean and Brazil. American flew to South America and, in the process, caused a radio range to be built along its route from the United States. TWA had its five Boeing 307s, the only four-engine land-based transoceanic aircraft available at the time, commandeered by the military and was given the transatlantic route to Egypt, the most significant long distance route of any airline except Pan
American. TWA set up its transcontinental division immediately at the beginning of the war, no doubt with an eye on the postwar period. At first, TWA flew to Africa via the South American route, and later, after Portugal granted landing rights, via the much shorter North Atlantic route by way of Prestwick, Scotland. TWA flew military supplies and equipment, like the other airlines, but it was the preferred carrier for VIPs and, in fact, TWA carried President Roosevelt to the three wartime conferences with Churchill in Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta.
It is not surprising that Pan American, as the only overseas carrier in existence before the war, was counted on as the major civilian arm of the military during the war. Yet, it is noteworthy that Pan American’s five divisions, the Alaskan, Pacific, North Atlantic, Caribbean, and Africa-Orient, flew half of all contract miles flown by all airlines for the U. S. military. In the process, Pan American began flying landplanes instead of the flying boats that had been its trademark during its early years, thus marking the end of the romantic and adventurous era of the Pan American Clipper. The range and speed of the DC-4 and the airplanes to follow, the availability of the airports that Pan American and others had built around the
world, and the relative high maintenance costs and requirements of amphibious planes over landplanes sounded the death knell of the flying boat airliner, and Pan American never ordered another one.
Most of the flying done during World War II was not by the personnel of the commercial airlines but by the military forces created and trained by the government. The exigencies of war, shown once again to be a mighty motivating force, had caused a great technological leap forward in aircraft, engines, and systems. The feats of the non-combat pilots of the military lift branches, some 25,000 of them, during the four-year duration of the war testify to the great advance in air transportation over that short span of time. Feats only imagined a mere four years before were now commonplace. Distances had been covered and heights had been overcome for the first time in the airborne delivery of personnel and goods that would henceforth be considered routine. There was a confidence born not only of victory, but also of studied accomplishment.
Contrasted to the unspeakable devastation visited on the landscapes and structures of Europe that had been created by the world’s most advanced civilization for the better part of two millennia, the homeland of the United States emerged from the war unscathed, and with the robust industrial complex that had supplied the weapons and material of war intact. America had:
• The pilots
• The planes
• The know-how
• The international presence on the ground
• The financial structure and stability to lead the world into the postwar realms of commercial aviation.
And the United States was ready to use all
of it.
Endnotes
1. Gann, Ernest K., Fate is the Hunter, Simon and Shuster, New York, NY, 1961.
2. Simon and Shuster, 1961.