An American Saga by Robert Daley

Author:Robert Daley [Daley, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Daley
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV  War

38

China

War came first to China National Aviation Corporation. In the summer of 1937 savage fighting broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops in the north. On August 14 Japanese planes bombed Shanghai. Official casualties were 1,740 killed, 1,873 wounded —atrocities committed by bombing from the air were new, and the Shanghai disaster was the most awful the world had yet known. To cart away the bodies and the pieces of bodies, it took, reportedly, three dozen trucks.

CNAC pilot Charles L. Sharp, at the controls of an airliner loaded with Ministry of Finance bank notes, was en route that very day to Shanghai. When he landed at an intermediate stop for fuel, military officers commandeered the plane. They stowed bomb racks and machine guns aboard, and ordered Sharp to fly to Hangchow. CNAC was a commercial airline, Sharp said, and not subject to the orders of Chinese officers. He himself was an American citizen forbidden by American law from taking part in foreign military action. But guns came out—at gunpoint Sharp flew the cargo to Hangchow as ordered.

A Chinese Air Force colonel, Lem Wei-Shing, was installed as managing director of CNAC. He seized most of the remaining planes, fired the Americans and replaced them with Chinese Air Force pilots and crews.

In New York Trippe's reaction was to send for CNAC's William Langhorne Bond, who happened to be on home leave in Virginia at the time. Bond took a train to New York and they met in a restaurant for lunch. Since Bond was vice president, a director and operations manager of CNAC, Trippe asked what he thought Pan American's response in China should be.

Bond was then forty-four years old, six years older than Trippe. His friends called him Bondy. He had never intended to become an airline executive. At the time of Lindbergh's solo flight in 1927, Bond had been running a gravel plant in Miamitown, Ohio. He was thirty-four and had never been up in an airplane. Excited by the Lindbergh achievement, he had bought a ride with a barnstorming pilot, then had begun to take flying lessons. He had also changed jobs. George Westervelt, a relative by marriage, was general manager of a Curtiss-Wright subsidiary in Baltimore. Bond went to him for work and was hired. But when the stock market crashed, the Baltimore factory was stripped of machinery and abandoned. Bond was allowed to stay on at reduced pay as a kind of caretaker, and he expected to be fired any day.

Westervelt, meanwhile, was ordered to China to try to salvage China Airways Federal, Curtiss-Wright's floundering airline. Once in China one of Westervelt's first acts was to request that Bond be sent out to help him. Bond knew nothing about airline operations or China, but it was a job, it was $500 a month, and it was close to aviation.

He reached Shanghai on March 17, 1931. Morale, he found, was defeatist, and the airline was deteriorating fast. Bond called the Americans together and lectured them about their attitude.

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