The round-the-world escape from Pearl Harbor – Signore Galilei

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The round-the-world escape from Pearl Harbor

December 7th, 1941: a date that will live in infamy, though not exclusively for the reason you think.

Imperial Japan didn’t just attack Pearl Harbor on the first day of the Pacific War. It was part of a coordinated assault across the Pacific. The Japanese bombed American territories in the Philippines, Midway, Wake Island, and Guam, and launched ground invasions of British Hong Kong and Malaya. They even briefly invaded Thailand, before the Thai government decided to join the Japanese side.

Caught in the middle of it all was a single civilian Boeing 314, the California Clipper, making its regularly scheduled flight between San Francisco and Auckland for Pan American World Airways.

The California Clipper

At the time, flying across the Pacific meant hopping from island to island on a seaplane, refueling while landed. After leaving San Francisco on December 2nd, Captain Robert Ford took the California Clipper to Hawaii, Canton Island (then under joint US-British control, now part of Kiribati), Fiji, and New Caledonia – a French colony controlled by the resistance.

On the final leg of the trip, between New Caledonia and Auckland, the crew received news by radio that war had broken out. Reading from a secret envelope and confirming by radio once in Auckland, Captain Ford was instructed to return to US territory, and not to let his plane fall into enemy hands.

But how? Returning via Hawaii was no longer an option, and the seas were filled with Japanese ships and submarines. And the dangers to a civilian aircraft were more than theoretical: the Philippine Clipper escaped Wake Island riddled with 96 bullet holes;1 the Hong Kong Clipper was destroyed by a Japanese bomb mere minutes after the crew escaped.2 There was only one way forward: fly the long way around the world, all the way back to the USA. The crew loaded on 2 spare engines, and took off under the cover of darkness.

The press was interested in the fate of the clippers, but the plane’s radio silence gave them little to work with. A few early news reports misreported the aircraft’s name as the Pacific Clipper; later, the plane was given this name officially.

But right then, the crew still had to accomplish their circumnavigation. After returning to New Caledonia to pick up remaining Pan Am staff and their families, the California Clipper set out westward with nothing to guide them but the stars and a library atlas of the world. Their first stop was Gladstone, Australia, where they received $500 from the ground manager – their only financial support for the entire trip. Next was Darwin, on Australia’s northern tip. At Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), they were forced to refuel with automobile gasoline rather than aviation fuel – the engines backfired but kept running.

On their way to Trincomalee, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the seaplane was spotted and fired upon by a Japanese submarine. The Clipper managed to ascend back into the sky to escape before landing safely at Trincomalee. They departed for Karachi on December 24th, but were forced to turn back after an engine fire from a broken piston, probably caused by the lower-quality fuel. They made the repairs in Karachi on Christmas Day, departing again on the 26th.

After a thankfully less eventful stop in Bahrain, the crew continued west to Khartoum, making a hazardous landing on the Nile. Taking off again on New Years Day, an engine’s exhaust stack dislodged and began to smoke, but the crew pressed on to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Belgian Congo. Here, the plane needed to take off in a very short stretch of the Congo River before reaching the enormous rapids known as Livingstone Falls. Pushing the engines to their limits, Captain Ford and the crew were able to clear the falls, beginning the longest leg of their journey – 20 hours over the South Atlantic to Natal, Brazil.

Now back in the Americas, the California Clipper was almost home safe. In Natal, the crew tried to repair the exhaust stack, but it broke once more on the way to Trinidad. There, they were finally able to make a lasting repair, right before the flight back to the USA.

On January 6th, 1942, the California Clipper radioed the operator at LaGuardia airport, announcing their arrival. This came as a shock to the operator – the flight was most definitely not on the schedule. After spending over a month circling the world, escaping enemy forces in one of history’s most famous attacks, the flight of the California Clipper concluded in the most mundane way possible: circling LaGuardia airport for an hour waiting for permission to land.

After touching down in Bowery Bay off the East River, the journey was complete. At 31,500 miles (50,700 km), this harrowing escape remains the longest commercial flight by distance in world history.3 Something to think about next time you’re...