To the Four Far Corners

by W. L. WHITE

1

SO YOU wonder how big it is?” grinned the young major in the Air Corps Ferry Command. Behind him was a map of the world, covering the whole wall, spider-webbed with colored yarns on pins which showed the routes.

“Take every intercontinental airline in the world, at their peak in 1938, and put ‘em in one pile. This airline of ours is already bigger - and growing last. Every minute of the day or night, we’ve got planes in the air over every continent except the Antarctic, and over most of the oceans.

“The Army runs it with some mileage under contract with private carriers. Harry L. George is commanding general. Then there are men like Colonel C. R. Smith — a few months back he was president of American Airlines; now he’s executive officer of the command. Or Larry Fritz —he was vice-president of TWA; now he’s a lieutenant colonel in charge of operations and training. Or James G. Flynn, who was in charge of American Airlines’ transcontinental operations; now he’s a lieutenant colonel and communications officer for the command. They’re taking measly Army salaries and liking it, because it’s the biggest air job in the world. All you have to teach ‘em is how to salute and to keep their coats buttoned — they already know the rest. Except not on this scale.

“The factories are pouring out planes, and it’s our job to see that they get to the battle fronts. The big bombers can already make it to Moscow or Melbourne or Madagascar under their own power — spanning a continent in a day and an ocean that night. And already we’re flying the little fighters most of the way, saving thousands of tons of shipping. They arrive uncrated, ready for battle. Maybe tomorrow they’ll be going the whole trip under their own power.

“We take them out, then we collect our pilots and bring them home packed twenty or more in big transports — ready to pick more planes off the assembly lines.

“Of course we had to blaze the trails, establish weather posts, hangars, gasoline dumps, blasting runways sometimes out of coral and sometimes even through frozen granite.

“The British had a kind of trail across Africa — but it wasn’t big enough. For instance, one of our pilots put a four-motor bomber down on one of their runways.

“ ‘Got to have gas,’ he explains.

“‘How much?’

“‘Twenty-one hundred gallons.’

“The English officer is stunned. ‘Now see here, old chap,’ he finally says. ‘ Do you really have to have that much?’

“‘Haven’t you got it?’

“‘I think I have,’ says the Englishman, mopping his forehead, ‘but do you chaps realize we bring all our petrol in here eight hundred miles in four-gallon tins by camel back? Then there’s a 25 per cent loss because the tins are always breaking when they fall off the bloody camels along the trail; and when we get the stuff we have to bury it so bombs can’t set it on fire — do you chaps realize all that?’

“They spent all of an afternoon digging up more than five hundred cans to fuel that plane by hand — it was like carrying water to an elephant. Today at that station we can pump gas into any reasonable number of four-motor jobs that may be pushed over that route — and we’re planning to push plenty.

“But let the general tell you about things, before we go down to the pilots’ mess and talk to them.”

“It’s as simple as this,” says Brigadier General George. “Air power in this country means little; we must get it overseas — and quick!

“in addition to delivering airplanes all over the world, we run a passenger service that’s really something. Maybe a general here wants six hours’ talk with his opposite number in London — to settle problems that would take months by cable. We take him over and he’s back here at his desk in four days.

“Then freight — out on the Libyan Desert a little gear in a new American light bomber is chewing itself to pieces because of sand. A cable to the factory — we bring out a technician, he squats in the sand examining that gear, makes rough drawings of a tiny shield to protect it; we take him home, and in two weeks we stop again at his factory to pick up two thousand of those shields, which we take to Libya.

“But most of all, our new four-lane skyways are making possible tactical movements undreamed of before. It’s going to be a fast war. We can smash any place in the world by shuttling our planes where we need them.”

But then came a buzzer — it was urgent: an army on another continent needed two tons of a special drug quick. The Medical Corps said it could be picked up from a Chicago warehouse. The general seized a phone and the major led me away to the pilots’ mess.

2

A lean-faced major with quick black eyes finished his beer and loaned forward, elbows on table. “Tell you about one trip. I didn’t know what I was getting into when the general said, ‘You’re leaving at seven tomorrow for Moscow via London. Oumansky, the Russian Ambassador here, was going along, and in London we’d pick up Harry Hopkins and Lord Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman. About a hundred miles out I came down out of the soup - there was a 500-foot ceiling - and found I was right smack over a convoy. I don’t know who was the most scared. They scattered in every direction, afraid I was a dive bomber, and I scrambled back into the soup to avoid their fire.

“We didn’t stay long in London — just long enough for my radio man to pick up the Russian signals; their alphabet has a few extra letters. Then we were off. But we ran into a whopping big cold front. I went high to avoid it and the temperature dropped to 25° below zero. Then something went wacky with the heater. They had rigged benches in the bomb bay for the passengers. I guess it was pretty dismal, huddled down in there like the Black Hole of Calcutta, with no windows, and so cold they were miserable. That was one trip when nobody came up front to lean over the pilot’s shoulder or maybe ask to sit in the co-pilot’s seat for a while.

“Russian planes were to meet us six hundred miles out and escort us, and so far as we knew, we were right on schedule. But there was some mix-up, because at every airdrome Russian fighters came swarming up, and they meant business too. I was good and seared, so I just opened her wide and got out of there. We finally got her down on a Russian field.”

“Say, George,” said a blond pilot with very blue eyes. “ That cold front over the sea — did you report it?”

“Sure. Why?”

“They just ought to have a record of it. Weather’s a kind of specialty of mine. When all this was first getting started they had me picking northern routes. We found icing conditions no one had ever heard of. In those days no two flights were alike.

“Never forget the first time I saw the Northern Lights. From a plane it’s pretty gorgeous. But the spookiest thing is St. Elmo’s fire. Sure, I know the professors tell you it’s harmless. But they can have all of it. First a couple of purple sparks begin wiggling across your windshield like the ghosts of crazy angleworms not six inches from your nose. Then the stuff begins to gather into fiery doughnuts a foot thick at the tips of your propeller blades. Finally the nose of your plane is pushing along the purple and orange ghost of a medicine ball, and then you want to know who’s saying it isn’t dangerous — you up there alone, or some fellow in a swivel chair.

“But ice is the big hazard. You can pick up two or three tons before you know it. Also it can choke up your carburetor intake and you feel your engines strangling for air. You’ve got to fly for your life, saying to yourself, ‘Dear God, why did I ever leave Texas?’ Then pretty soon you find warm rain at low level and hear that nice sound the ice makes smacking back against your fuselage as it peels off the nose and wings, and you’re glad you’re a pilot again.

“ It’s all routine now. In the last year it’s all been charted. We know what to expect anywhere any time of year. We’ve got the smartest weathermen on the job, and they’re uncanny. If the weather man predicts high cirrus clouds two thousand miles out they’ll be just where he says.”

“What are your weather problems in the tropics?”

“Very few. What ice you ever find is so high you can always come down and wash it off. But watch out for tornadoes. I remember my first. All of a sudden — crackety-bam! A terrific burst of lightning, and the ship began to surge and fall in long billows of rough air. I didn’t know what was up, but I got her off automatic pilot quick. It got rougher and rougher. Suddenly she zoomed from eight thousand feet to more than twelve thousand in less than a minute — a mile a minute elevator ride straight up — and immediately fell like a rock down to five thousand.

“I had a load of home-coming pilots. They should have been praying. Matter of fact they were all in a squirming pile, each one trying to get his parachute on. I don’t know whether we were upside down or not — I was too busy trying to snatch at the controls. When we landed we found it had been a tornado with a ninety miles an hour ground wind. I figured if that couldn’t blow a B-24 to pieces nothing could. So after that I called that ship my ‘kissin’ cousin.’ I’d take her anywhere.”

“Tornadoes can be nasty,” said the third pilot. “I tangled with one over the Java Sea. Started out to take Bill Bullitt to Cairo when Pearl Harbor changed everything — got orders to leave him in the Middle East and get the hell on out to the Far East with three thousand pounds of machine-gun ammunition which they needed bad. And on the way I was to pick up an American general. At Rangoon I got my first look at the AVG crowd.

“The AVG’s had been doing some tough fighting. The day the first Jap bomb smacked that field, every native servant vanished. You could see they didn’t think it was their war. Both the British and AVG pilots were making their own beds, when they bothered to. Dinner consisted of knocking open a can of beans with a hand axe, and washing them down with warm beer. Everything was piled high with dirty dishes.

“That afternoon the Japs came over, and the AVG’s went up and showed me how. It was ten Jap bombers, and it was as sweet and gentle as picking daisies. They’d got nine and just couldn’t see how they’d been so careless as to let the tenth get away they weren’t kidding, either.

“They told us to take the plane on down the Australian coast along with a lot of other American stuff they were assembling there. So I did, and next day the Japs came over and bagged the whole pile.

“When I had to tell the general they’d got his plane along with the rest, I expected we’d catch hell. But all he said was, after a minute, ‘ Well, the old girl had done her job.’ I guess she had, too. Everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the Equator.”

“Speaking of the Equator,” said the first pilot, “you know that little weather post at that new airfield that’s down under the Sahara? It’s a good gang there, a couple of dozen, maybe, almost nuts for something to do. I promised ’em I’d see the next plane would bring ‘em some baseball equipment.”

“If you want to make a hit with a post in India,” said the second pilot, “hide a few gallons of coca-cola syrup in your bomb bays. I took them five gallons, but it was hardly a smell. They turned it over to the chaplain and it was just enough to last the hospital a week. But they loved it.”

“Reminds me of what happened in Egypt,” said the third pilot. “They got a hankering for home-cooked food, so they taught a native to bake bread just the size of a hamburger roil. Then they bought an old water buffalo and ground it up, and they insist you couldn’t tell ‘em from hamburgers.”

“I was in Iceland last week,”said the fourth pilot, “and those guys are sure bucked up. They’d just got their movie projector. Pretty soon they’ll have one on every weather post all around the world, and we’ll be rushing cans of film from field to field — but Iceland got going first. They were bragging that the world premiere of Tarzan in New York was held, not on Broadway or in Hollywood, but in Reykjavik. It’s little things like that keeps their dobbers up.”

“This whole ferry command is just like a damned movie,” said the first pilot. “We get a peek at all the wars, but then we’re sent back home for another load. It’s like watching a program of preview trailers and never getting to sit through the picture. That’s the whole trouble with this job; none of us ever gets to see anything!”

He said it almost bitterly.