Evacuating Shanghai, August 1937
Fleeing Shanghai, August 1937: first in a series of posts about how the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) and its people escaped the outbreak of the Ba...
Tag: Outtakes from China’s Wings
Stories that didn’t quite make it into the book China’s Wings, by Gregory Crouch, which celebrates the life and times of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC)
“Goddamn it, I promised the wife I wouldn’t do this any more.”
it was a chicken or the egg conundrum as to who had arrived first, the pilots or the prostitutes...
“All right… but Mickey, why a limey?”
Her and Charles Boxer hadn’t made any announcement, but the the whole world must have noticed, because in the summer of 1941, Mickey's condition was obvious. Ho...
Emily Hahn, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, China’s Wings, and The Boxer Uprising
Another hilarious Emily "Mikey" Hahn flavored outtake from the China's Wings rough draft featuring Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, and some of the CNAC piilo...
Emily Hahn and CNAC, aka The Hardest Cut, Part III
This is the third part of this story, and they ought to be read in order. Here’s Part I and Part II. The putrid ape smell didn’t fade from the apartment f...
Emily Hahn and CNAC, aka The Hardest Cut, Part II
(Continued from yesterday…) On the ground, Mickey Hahn crossed the harbor and took a room at the Gloucester Hotel on Peddar Street in Central Hong Kong, b...
Emily Hahn and CNAC, aka The Hardest Cut, Part I
My favorite outtake from the China's Wings manuscript
Another adventure in the Consolidated Commodore
None of his passengers got so much as a scratch, and CNAC’s sole surviving Loening Air Yacht retrieved them in relays to Hankow. Recovering the stranded Commo...
CNAC and the Consolidated Commodore
CNAC desperately needed airplanes in late 1937, and Bond tipped Colonel Lam to the existence of two Pan Am Commodores languishing in Manila. Beginning in early ...
The lone flush toilet in Chungking
The toilet had no door, it faced the stairway, and Harold Bixby considered it “about as private as the information booth at Grand Central Station.”