East to the Dawn (74 page)

Every country over which Amelia was going to fly and/or in which she would land had to grant permission. Here the crucial person was Gene's assistant, J. Carrol Cone, in charge of regulations. George gave Cone the proposed route of the flight, and Cone set up the permitting procedures. The original proposed route was San Francisco—Honolulu; Honolulu-Manila; Manila—Allahabad; Allahabad—Karachi; Karachi—Aden; Aden—Khartoum ; Khartoum—Dakar; Dakar—Natal; Natal—New York. Cone informed George that he had passed the information on to the Department of State, and that department would seek the necessary permits. He also, almost apologetically, informed George that Amelia's license had lapsed,
and that the department wouldn't concern itself about it but that she should renew it.

The next request to Gene: would the Bureau of Air Commerce ask the navy for relevant weather data over the Pacific? Forthwith. Six days later the information—“Climactic Features of the Pacific Island Region”—and the relevant hydrographic charts were in the hands of the bureau, even though the navy was not too happy about it and asked that it be returned when Amelia was finished with it....

The job of seeking international permissions devolved onto the chief of protocol, Richard Southgate. Lest Southgate have any thought of shrugging off the gargantuan task, George, probably at Amelia's suggestion but quite possibly on his own, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking for her help. Eleanor had her secretary, Malvina Schneider, write a superbly manipulative letter to the chief of protocol: “Mrs Roosevelt, upon her return to Washington the other day, found Mr. George Palmer Putnam's letter to her and learned that you had kindly consented to take care of the things he wished done in the State Department.... She is sure you will be very nice to him.”

Every single country over which Amelia planned to fly had to be contacted by the State Department—and notified that the installation of the necessary fuel tanks meant that the weight of the plane, when fully fueled, would exceed by several thousand pounds the approved gross weight for commercial aircraft of this type, and that as a result a certificate of airworthiness could not be granted, although the bureau “considers the plane to be satisfactory for the purposes of this flight.” As 1936 turned into 1937, the letters turned into day letters and telegrams, which were so numerous and so expensive, the State Department opened a charge account for George; just these costs alone mounted into hundreds of dollars. The arrangements dragged on interminably. The State Department file, declassified in 1972, is three inches thick. Every single country to be overflown had to signify its assent. Every single one did—except the Sultan of Muscat. “There is no hope of permission being obtained from the Sultan at present for private flights over that territory,” George was informed, so the route had to be changed.

George was so deep into handling Amelia's correspondence that he now took on the job of telling Amy what was happening. “Dear Mrs. Earhart,” he wrote in January, “Amelia is feeling grand. Her plane and her plans are developing splendidly. Incidentally, so is our house. In the final stages now.”

In its later version, the proposed route, in its first leg, was from Oakland to Honolulu, then to New Guinea and Port Darwin in northern Australia (instead of Manila); the second leg extended from Australia to the west coast of Africa by way of Arabia; the third leg was the South Atlantic; the fourth was from Brazil north to home.

The biggest problem that Amelia had to solve was how to fly the long stretch of the Pacific Ocean. The absolute maximum range of the Electra was 4,000 miles; but Honolulu to Tokyo was 3,900 miles; and Honolulu to Manila was 5,800 miles. No matter what route she took, Amelia would have to refuel along the way. Pan American had established fueling stations at Wake, Guam, and Midway, but these were fueling stations for seaplanes, useless to Amelia in the Electra. The best solution seemed to be to do an aerial refueling over Midway Island. That would involve the navy. So George went to work to enlist its cooperation. He started at the top, with the secretary of the navy, to whom he proposed the project. The navy, according to internal memos, had done this once, in San Diego in 1930, when “a fleet patrol plane in flight was fuelled successfully, both by day and by night.” Just once—but then, Amelia was not an ordinary personage. If the navy had done it once, that was enough, thought Admiral Cook, and he decided that subject to successful completion of preliminary preparations and trials, the navy could refuel Amelia's plane; A PBY-1 seaplane could be used. No modifications of the plane would be necessary; all that was required would be to make up the necessary hoses and a suitable reel, similar to a target reel, to raise and lower the hose. Cook bumped his report up to Admiral Standley, chief of U.S. Naval Operations. And there it sat.

Amelia anxiously awaited word; then, taking no chances, she wrote the president, who had been an assistant secretary of the navy and knew intimately its byzantine workings. Obviously possessed of insider information as to the status of the request as well as having more detailed information about the state of naval aviation than the navy appeared to have, she wrote President Roosevelt an artful letter. It helped that she and Roosevelt were such good friends and that she had told the president about the flight when they spent the night at the White House the previous spring.

Within days Admiral Standley agreed to refuel the Electra: the navy agreed to pay most of the costs of deploying the tender and the two airplanes involved; and Amelia's expenses were limited to reimbursing the navy for the gas and oil they would transfer to her plane.

But Amelia lacked expertise in aerial refueling: as the admiral in charge of the fleet aircraft informed his superior, there remained the problem of “airmanship”—“The ability of the pilot of the receiving plane has not been demonstrated.” Amelia would require “considerable” special training, according to the admiral, to learn the procedures involved in the approach and departure phases of refueling, to avoid fouling the hose in the propellers of her plane. He did not think the navy should bear the expense of this, “either in cost of time of pilots and airplanes.”

Here Gene stepped back into the picture with another idea. Sitting in Washington, D.C., Gene had been so anxious about Amelia as she flew up from Mexico City the year before, so worried that something might happen to her, that he had gone to the airport and had gotten on the radio and pleaded with her to quit and land in Washington—after she had been in the air for only thirteen hours. What was he to think of this scheme of Amelia's to refuel her plane—but not get any rest herself? To fly four thousand miles nonstop over water—a twenty-six-hour flight if everything went perfectly, and longer if it didn't. It was certainly fraught with danger. Why not find a place where she could land, refuel, and rest? Suddenly the Bureau of Air Commerce instituted a new policy.

Starting in 1935, the U.S. government, in response to a military buildup by the Japanese, began taking steps to protect its West Coast and “prove up” its sovereignty in the Pacific in as low key a way as possible against Japanese encroachments. The army had developed plans to build the largest military air base on the Pacific Coast at Tacoma, Washington.
Coincidentally, Pan American was asking for stepping-stones across the Pacific for its seaplane Clipper service to the Orient, which was planned to carry U.S. mail as well as passengers. The two plans fitted in so perfectly together that the Bureau of Air Commerce gave permission to Pan Am to erect supply bases on Guam, Midway, and Wake Island with alacrity. Pan Am immediately sent supply ships to the islands, began to construct the hangars and other buildings that would be needed for its seaplanes to refuel, and set up communications facilities. The navy went out of its way to help. At Guam the navy unloaded all supplies, and ferried Pan Am personnel from ship to shore when necessary; the naval governor of Guam invited top Pan Am personnel to dinner. Within six months all was ready. The first China Clipper left Alameda airport on a Friday at the end of November 1935, with Captain Edward Musick as chief pilot and Fred Noonan as chief navigator, and landed in Honolulu 21 hours and 3 minutes later. The Clipper continued on to Midway, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines, landing in Manila the following Friday.

At roughly the same time, Gene was suggesting that Jarvis, Baker, and Howland, the so-called Line Islands south and west of Hawaii, should be claimed by the United States for use as bases for land planes flying to Australia and New Zealand. Baker was forty miles to the south of Howland, half a degree north of the equator, while Jarvis lay more than a thousand miles to the east. These islands needed to be clearly staked out as “American,” because of the Japanese but also because Gene was sure that the future of air travel across the Pacific surely belonged to land planes rather than to the lumbering seaplanes then favored. The islands, tiny but big enough for landing fields, had been claimed by the British, in the guano-digging days of the last century and subsequently abandoned. When he informed the State Department of their strategic importance, he was told that they already belonged to the United States, although England “might” raise a conflicting claim, and that “whoever first moved to colonize them would gain undisputed possession under the provisions of international law.”

So Gene proceeded to colonize them. He picked Bureau of Air Commerce aide William Miller, an ex-navy pilot whom he used for special projects, and put him to the task in January 1935. Operating at first with the utmost secrecy, Miller chose twenty young men of Hawaiian blood from the famous Kamehameha school in Hawaii as colonists. In March the Coast Guard cutter
Itasca,
with Miller, the young men, tents, food supplies, steel drums of fresh water, and other equipment set out for the islands. The young Hawaiian men stayed on the islands, usually four to an island, for nine or ten months, went home for a few months, and then returned. After a year the State Department decided to make the colonization
clearly permanant and to install meteorological equipment. Supervision was turned over to the Division of Territories and Island Possessions of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Miller returned to Washington, Richard B. Black of the Department of the Interior took over, and the project was given much local publicity. A prefabricated house consisting of a living room, a radio room, a bedroom, and a kitchen with a large front porch opening off the living room was put up on each island.

The next step Gene undertook was to build a landing field on one of the islands, where land planes could refuel in midocean—in time for Amelia's trip. Howland Island, eighteen hundred miles from Hawaii, was the most suitable. Carl Allen would write that “there is gallantry even in government and Miss Earhart was the first flyer to suggest putting the country's new ‘conquest' of these islands to practical use.” But of course the only way Amelia would have known about the size and suitability of Howland Island would have been if Gene had told her. It was a Gene Vidal production from start to finish.

“During the late part of 1936,” recalled Richard Black, “I received a Trans-pacific telephone call and later a score or so of letters from my Division Headquarters in Washington requesting that I set up a project to build a scratch-grade runway. First they considered Jarvis Island and later Howland Island. It was revealed to me, and it was considered more or less confidential at the time, that this station was to be used by the famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart for her round-the-world flight in what was called a ‘flying laboratory.'

Gene sent Robert L. Campbell, another Bureau of Air Commerce aide, to help Black do the job (having more or less assigned Miller to Amelia), and Campbell and Black and eight additional young Hawaiians, some World War I tractors, graders, scrapers, and rollers, left Hawaii on January 12 to begin construction, with the assistance of the regular colonists, of three scratch-grade runways on the treeless mile-and-a-half-by-half-mile island. Eventually, a cache of some eighteen drums of 87 octane gasoline were deposited on the island for her.