Long Voyage Home

Pacific Clipper, inbound from Auckland, New Zealand. Captain Ford reporting, due to arrive Pan American Marine Terminal seven minutes.

This radio message made the control-tower officer at New York's LaGuardia Airport jump. He was not expecting an Atlantic Clipper, to say nothing of a Pacific Clipper. But he cleared the big ship into a landing and stood by to hear how come. What he heard was not just a flight report: it was an epic.

On Dec. 7, the Pacific Clipper was outward bound from San Francisco, flying from New Caledonia to Auckland, when a coded message told them of the Japanese war. The skipper, Captain Robert Ford, signaled Auckland for "all clear"; then silenced the ship's transmitter, changed course and altitude, made new tracks for Auckland.

Eight days later he took off again. With no lights, no ship-to-shore radio, no forewarning signals of arrivals, Captain Ford took the Clipper westward 31,500 miles through twelve countries to New York. The Army's G-2 considered the course secret enough to forbid the crew's talking about it last week on their arrival. Probable route was New Caledonia, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, Arabia, Africa, the South Atlantic, and up from South America.

At the beginning, the Clipper passed within several hundred miles of an area where Japanese were operating; but nothing happened. Chief danger was from the British and Dutch patrols. At an unidentified port, the Clipper faced destruction at the hands of the Dutch. As Ford was bringing the giant ship in to land, a fighter suddenly appeared on his tail. Ford heard the conversation between the pilot and the ground control officer.

Ground: "What is she?"

Pilot: "I don't know, but she's a big one. She might be German or might be Japanese. Wait a minute. There's part of an American flag painted on her side."

Ground: "That doesn't mean a thing. Anyone can paint on an American flag."

Pilot: "You'd better send up some help." (Four more planes appeared around the Clipper.) "What'll I do?"

Ground: "Stay on her tail. If she gets even a little off the normal course for landing, shoot her down."

Captain Ford, not knowing the radio frequency for sending, could not break into this interesting conversation. He gingerly brought the Clipper in on its straight course and landed safely. But this was not the roughest part of the trip. The crew of the Clipper had the worst time on its last hop. Coming up from South America the weather was so bad that most of them were airsick for the first time in their lives.

Most of the navigation was done by the Clipper's own charts and navigation handbooks. Though it was an "emergency operation," chances are that a new Pan-American route will evolve from the Clipper's long voyage home. This week Pan American had already established a new and secret route to China, taking one week.

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