In an issue of LIFE magazine from October 30, 1939 that I have is a great cutaway drawing of Admiral Byrd’s snow cruiser. Admiral Byrd was a naval officer who was the first person to reach the North and South Poles by air.
At 55 feet 8 inches long and 16 feet high, Byrd’s Snow Cruiser was intended to ply the snowy wastes of Antarctica at 30 mph max. Snow crevasses would be surmounted by retracting the massive Goodyear front tires, sliding the front over the crevasse as if the cruiser were a sled (back wheels pushing). Once the front was fully across, the back tires would retract and the front tires would pull the cruiser ahead.
Above, detail of cutaway of Byrd’s Snow Cruiser, showing operating room, engine room, and chart room.
Above, mounting snow chains to the approximately 10 foot diameter Goodyear tires.
It’s strange enough that a boat-plane with $3,000,000 in cash would go missing. It’s also strange that it would be so underreported.
PanAm Clippers were flying passenger boats that flew from mainland U.S. to China. Because of the Clippers’ limited range, the Clippers hopped from island base to island base, much like a toad hopping rocks: Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, Philippines, Macao, and China mainland.
On July 28, 1938, the Hawaii Clipper took off from Guam with six passengers and nine crew. Destination: Manila.
The Clipper Vanishes
At 12:11pm, the Clipper navigator reported to Manila that they were about 2 hours away. Everything was going smoothly, and weather was fine. At 12:12pm, Panay Island (just south of Manila) tried to contact the Clipper, but there was no response.
Panay sent several other messages, but with the same result.
No rescue team was sent out immediately because the Clippers knew these waters well, and were equipped for safety. After all, these were flying boats. At the worst, they could always put down on the water.
Trim and seaworthy, she could ride out rough weather as easily as a small yacht. She had four watertight bulkheads. She carried rubber inflatable boats, a stock of small balloons to drop behind her in hare-hounds fashion to show her course, kites for an emergency radio aerial, a shotgun and fishing tackle in case she piled up on a coral reef, enough food for 15 people for a month.
Yet the Hawaii Clipper has simply vanished. Nothing was found. No debris. No oil. Nothing.
The $3,000,000 Twist
What few people knew at the time: the Hawaii Clipper was transporting $3M in U.S. currency, serious money for 1938 (about $45,000,000 in 2010).
A New Jersey Chinese-born restaurateur, Wah Sun Choy, was carrying this cash in his position as President of the Chinese War Relief Committee. This was money that had come from fundraising in the U.S., to be given over to the Chinese government.
One theory was that Japanese agents had skyjacked the Clipper and forced it to fly the 100 miles to Japanese-held Tinian. But that’s complete pie-in-the-sky theory; no evidence at all to back this up.
The Mystery of the Mystery: Little Credible Information
The odd thing is that this event has been lost to history. After the flurry of contemporary newspaper accounts, little has been written about the Hawaii Clipper.
There is a book by Charles Hill titled Fix on the Rising Sun: the Clipper Hi-jacking of 1938—and the Ultimate M.I.A.’s. Hill’s is a book with fun but potboiler details of conspiracies and reverse-engineering of airplane engines. Hill–is he even alive anymore?–cares so little about the subject anymore that his site, HawaiiClipper.com, has overgrown with spam. It’s now called My-Home-Gold. Nice.
Not at all a primary source, a site called Historic Mysteries has an article called “The Hawaii Clipper Disappearance” that is interesting only because it wraps up everything in a few short paragraphs and has a newspaper link.
Update
Since my article was first published, a new and authoritative site has come along: Lost Clipper. Find images of crew members, passengers (including the elusive Wah Sun Choy), and of the Clipper itself. Lost Clipper also reprints the CAA investigation into the crash.
This cutaway drawing shows the PanAm Yankee Clipper (B-314), which was built by Boeing on the base of an XB-15 bomber fuselage. On December 21, 1937, Boeing delivered the first Yankee Clipper to PanAm.
The Yankee Clipper was the result of over 6,000 engineering drawings, 50,000 parts, and one-million rivets. But with such complexity came problems. First, it was the spark plugs. Then Boeing discovered that when the plane was loaded light, it was no match for the admittedly weak winds blowing across South Lake Washington (Seattle, WA).
And when the test pilots got the B-314 up in the air, then had yet another problem. As pilot Eddie Allen succinctly put it, “The plane won’t turn.”
But Boeing ironed out these wrinkles and eventually the Yankee Clipper became a graceful, reliable craft. Each Clipper cost $668,908; needed 3,200 of clear waterway to take off; and weighed 84,000 pounds gross.
One of the best, and cheapest, books that I have ever had about the Hindenburg is called Hindenburg: an Illustrated History, by Rick Archbold, with paintings by Ken Marschall. The art is too beautiful to even talk about in this space. But because one interest of Invisible Themepark is cutaways, let’s look at one cutaway drawing of the “A” Deck of the Hindenburg.
The Hindenburg’s Cabins
On the “A” Deck were 25 passenger cabins that had two beds apiece, in bunk-like fashion. The walls between the cabins were fairly thin, just foam and a layer of fabric. The cabins could be quite noisy if you had a loud tenant in the adjoining room. Unlike the outer cabins in a cruise ship, none of these cabins in the Hindenburg had windows. The cabins were not a space where you spent a lot of time. Most time was spent in the more spacious public rooms.
Public Spaces: Promenade, Dining, Lounge, and Reading Room
On either side of the “A” Deck were promenades where passengers could sit or stand while looking out at the angled windows to the ground or clouds moving below. On one side was the large six-table dining room, hardly the cramped, all-purpose public area found earlier in the Graf Zeppelin.
On the other side was another big lounge complete with an aluminum piano. Two men could easily move the piano because it was made of pigskin-covered aluminum and weighed less than 400 pounds. For a greater sense of quiet and peace, the reading and writing room provided a small library, two writing desks, a mailbox, and stationary.
The main thing that distinguished the Hindenburg’s public places from that of other airship: space.
Bruce McCall is the patron saint of secret infrastructure. His book, Zany Afternoons, is one of my most highly valued books. For some odd reason, most of my favorite books were on sale in the bargain bin at bookstores. This one was a mere ten bucks at Barnes & Noble.
While there are too many great Bruce McCall drawings/comics to list, one of my favorite series of drawings is called “New York, Once Upon a Time”. He talks about a parallel universe of New York architecture that never was and never could have been.
There is the Ironing Board Building, instead of the very-real Flatiron Building. There is the Fifth Avenue Line Subway, 1901, which I believe has some vague connection to reality. And then of course there was the time that a portion of Central Park was turned into Jimmy Walker Metropolitan Airfield, back in 1931. Or how about Canal Street, 1934, which had a real canal in front, complete with ferry-trolleys plying the waterways. Of course, Canal Street did have to be drained in 1939 as a precaution against Nazi subs.
The Moto Ritz Towers in 1937 is one of my favorite. As McCall puts it:
Theater people had most of the top floors. They partied continuously. Coming up late at night was hell, you knew some of them were up there somewhere, on the way down. Woe betide the tenant whose driver was yellow. We had nothing but bad luck with ours. One of them–an ex-aviator, if you can imagine–would get halfway up, stop and vomit. Even when it wasn’t foggy. You often just left your car down on the street and took a taxi; those people would do anything for money. The ghoulish publicity after that first bad ice storm virtually forced the city to tear the roadway out. As a compromise there was talk at the time about guard rails. We didn’t want guard rails. The absence of guard rails, wasn’t that the whole and entire point?
