The Loening Air Yacht, the height of airline technology in use in China in 1931 (cnac.org)
Aloft, it cruised at about one hundred miles per hour, and the pilots said it had had a built-in headwind, but despite its lethargy, the Loening Air Yacht was rugged and durable and economical to operate, crucial characteristics for an airline to consider if it hoped to operate successfully, and for a profit, in China. It was the most useful commercial airplane in the Middle Kingdom when William Bond arrived in China on St. Patrick’s Day, 1931, the opening scene of my book, China’s Wings.
the Yangtze Gorges looking over the tail of one of CNAC’s Loening Air Yachts, early 1930s (cnac.org)
Today’s a revising day (new chapters back from New York), and since I’m working on the part about the Yangtze Gorges, here’s a picture of flying up them in the early 1930s, shortly after the airline opened service from Hankow to Chungking.
The airline that is the milieu of my book China’s Wings is the China National Aviation Corporation, CNAC, a civilian airline that flew and fought in China from 1929-1949, and for most of its history, the company was a partnership between Pan American Airways and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese Government.
Founded in 1929 to develop China’s domestic aviation, the airline made significant progress until the summer of 1937, when Japan invaded China. That August, a colossal battle erupted in Shanghai, the airline’s hub. It was a desperate, horrible affair in which hundreds of thousands died, and it very nearly destroyed the airline – and the partnership. The United States’ “legislated neutrality” and Pan Am’s desire to run a commercial airline free of political and military entanglements caused most of the airline’s American personnel to leave China. The Chinese, who’d spent eight years developing CNAC into one of their most valued strategic assets, felt deserted at their hour of greatest need. Only the superhuman efforts of airline executive William Langhorne Bond, walking a tightrope between the suddenly at-odds interests of China and Pan Am, managed to rescue Pan Am’s financial investment from the brink of extinction, lure some of the American personnel back to China, salvage the partnership, and save the airline. (Bond served Pan Am, and China, for 19 years, 1931-1949, and he’s China’s Wings main character.)
Ejected from its peacetime hub by the Shanghai fighting, which ended as a catastrophic Chinese defeat, the airline retreated up the Yangtze River to Hankow, and then further inland to Chungking, 1,400 miles from the East China Sea, and from the ashes of its near-destruction, CNAC again rose to become one of China’s most vital assets. Between 1938 and December, 1941, its air route between Chungking and Hongkong was “Free China’s” most efficient line of communications to the outside world, the speedy link that allowed the Nationalist Government to function on the world stage – and made CNAC’s airplane’s hunted targets of the Japanese invaders.
The “chung” painted on the fuselages of CNAC airplanes (J.L. Johnson collection)
After four dramatic nights of evacuation flights from Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded the colony on 8 December 1941, the airline’s finest hours came in 1942 and early 1943, when its veteran fliers supplied Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group (the AVG, popularly known as “The Flying Tigers”) and pioneered the Hump Airlift between India and China and proved to the United States Army Air Corps that the airlift could be prosecuted despite high mountains, horrible weather, and marauding Japanese fighters. Alongside the Air Corps, CNAC flew the Hump until the war’s end, always setting the standards for efficiency, safety, and performance.
After the Japanese surrender, dreams of peace continued to elude the airline – it was soon embroiled in the Chinese civil war. Its fortunes waned along with those of the Nationalist Chinese, and after Mao’s Communists forced the Nationalists to abandon Mainland China for Taiwan, the airline finally winked out of existence on the last day of 1949.
It had been one of the greatest commercial adventures of the 20th Century, and it was, beyond question, the most successful Sino-American partnership of all time.
“CNAC is the China National Aviation Corporation. It is one of those peculiar enterprises whose capital value in dollars and cents might barely equal that of a large American department store, but whose actual value in the war for the control of Asia can only be weighed by history.”
Theodore “Teddy” White, “China’s Last Lifeline,” Fortune, May, 1943
The people in this story knew as much about tomorrow as we do today. Which is to say, very little. The future revealed itself to them the same way it reveals itself to us, minute by minute. They faced it with human tools: courage, imagination, intelligence, humor, fear, and anxiety, and they lived, ate, drank, slept, fought, made love, and worked just like we do today, in near utter ignorance of what tomorrow might bring. The lucky ones were able to laugh about it. A man can only know what he knows, when he knows it. There are no predetermined outcomes. There is no fate. Much could have occurred. Only one thing did. That is history: that does not make it inevitable. Only hindsight makes it seem so. Otherwise, history is like life, a chaotic matrix of alternate possible outcomes, of choices people make, actions they take, distilling into the moment we inherit.
This is a story, a flying story, a story about an airline and the people who built it during the crux decades of the Twentieth Century. It also happens to be true.
The maiden flight of CNAC’s first DC-2 over the Shanghai Bund, 1935 (Edward P. Howard collection)
Out in New Jersey the next day, Shirley Wilke Mosley, ever beautiful and gracious, made me tea. In her living room, we perused two black & white photo albums her father took in China between 1929 and 1940 while she talked about what it had been like to be a part of what was, at the time, the world’s most exciting undertaking – flying – in the world’s most exciting city – Shanghai.
Shirley was a little girl at the time, and I grew increasingly fascinated as she reminisced about the characters, personalities, and adventures that populated the CNAC universe in the years before Pearl Harbor. The Shanghai social whirl was delightful for a young girl taught to make cocktails for the pilots and their wives at parties hosted by her parents (manhattans, old fashioneds, whisky sours, and gin martinis, very dry, thank you very much), and she remembered attending a company-sponsored gala at Lunghwa Airport, five or six miles south of Shanghai’s foreign settlements, to celebrate the arrival of the airline’s first DC-2, where, wearing her prettiest dress to welcome the new plane, she marveled that she could stand upright under the wing of an airplane so enormous.
CNAC’s hangar at Lunghwa Airport, on the banks of the Whangpoo River with the big buildings of Shanghai’s International Settlement just visible in the distance. 2 S-43s, 2 DC-2s, and a Ford Tri-motor on the hardstand facing a Stinson Detroiter and a Loening Air Yacht. (Shirley Wilke Mosley collection)
Apart from photos of so many of the people I’d be writing about, O.C. Wilke’s albums were full of airplanes: the S-38 and S-43 amphibians, the Loening Air Yacht, Consolidated Commodore, and Martin M-130, all flying boats, and landplanes like the Stinson Detroiter, the Ford tri-motor (the “Tin Goose”), the Douglas DC-2, and the Douglas DC-3, the greatest airplane of all time. The romance of those beautiful airplanes flying against the backdrop of 1930s China set a hook in my heart. Shirley’s stories and her father’s photos cracked open the world of expatriate China, and Shanghai, in the decade before Pearl Harbor.
I longed to write about it, but to write convincingly, a non-fiction guy is utterly dependent on the quality of the sources he’s able to locate. Before committing myself, I’d have to investigate the primary sources. Seduced by Shanghai (shanghaied by Shanghai?), it was time to read some books about the city and its history, see what quantity of period documents and letters I could collect – and judge their usefulness – and spend some time with the only man alive who’d flown for the airline before the Japanese invaded China – Moon Fun Chin.
Three company porters (in white) and the crew of CNAC’s first DC-2: Hewitt Mitchell and Moon Fun Chin, 1935 (Edward P. Howard collection)
I had one of my life’s best 24-hour pushes in New York: at Bantam, I lunched with John Flicker, my acquiring editor (thanks, John!), and Nita Taublib , who might be the most well-read person I’ve ever met, gave one of my best-ever Enduring Patagonia slide shows at the Explorer’s Club, dined and swilled fabulous Italian wine with my agent, Ronald, Farley Chase, and three other friends, guzzled beers at McSorley’s in the East Village, danced until dawn on the tables of a club in Alphabet City, walked and subwayed back to mid-town, and signed my name on the China’s Wings contract, still wearing my suit from the night before. It was glorious.
Shirley Wilke Mosley and Moon Fun Chin at the 2004 CNAC reunion (cnac.org)
I thought I’d sold a book that would very much focus on CNAC’s crucial and pioneering role in World War II’s Hump Airlift – the massive airlift the Allies prosecuted from India to China, 1942-1945. For the proposal, I’d focused nearly all of my research on the Hump, and I anticipated dealing with the airline’s pre-Pearl Harbor adventures with one or two flashback chapters. The first hint that those early years might prove much more substantial came the following day, when I borrowed a friend’s car and drove out to suburban New Jersey to spend an afternoon perusing black and white photo albums with Shirley Wilke Mosley, daughter of O.C. Wilke, who’d been CNAC’s chief mechanic from 1929-1940, when the airline was based in Shanghai, Hankow, Chungking, and Hong Kong.
Shirley’s father, O.C. Wilke, who was the airline’s chief mechanic from 1929-1940 & from 1945-1949 (Shirley Wilke Mosley)
