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Air-Mail Service

Flurries of wet snow camouflaged the runway of Cleveland airport in the early winter darkness. of Monday, February 19, 1934. Attended by a small group of chilled spectators and outlined by explosions of light from news cameras, a bulky figure in fleecelined flying suit, leather helmet, heavy boots, and furry gloves clambered into the open cockpit of a Boeing P-12 pursuit biplane. Lieutenant Charles R. Springer pulled down his goggles, fastened his seal belt, waved, and prepared to carry out his orders. By direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt the United States Army Air Corps that stormy Monday had started to transport the nation’s air mail. Lieutenant Springer was to fly a leg of its first delivery.

What followed at Cleveland looked more like a Keystone Kops comedy than history in the making. The P-12’s engine sputtered and died. Lieutenant Springer and his mail sacks were hurriedly transferred to a second P-12. But a pin on its starter shaft broke, and a third plane was rushed onto the runway. Lieutenant Springer waved and roared off into the snow-filled sky, only to land again a few minutes later. “Get me a flashlight so I can find my way out of this damned town!” he yelled. The light bulb on his instrument panel had just burned out. Equipped with a new bulb, Lieutenant Springer waved a final anticlimactic farewell and without further incident flew the Army’s first mail run from Cleveland to Louisville.

In New Jersey the next day Lieutenant Donald Wackwitz, two hours overdue, brought a big B-6A Keystone bomber and ninety pounds of mail into snowbound Newark airport. Although he and Sergeant Paul Gibson wore leather face masks and new electrically heated flying suits, they had to be helped from the open cockpit. On the mountainous route from Cleveland, known in flying lore as Hell’s Stretch, Lieutenant Wackwitz found his radio dead and his airtemperature gauge at twelve degrees below zero. For a time his entire instrument panel was frosted over. Lost in the clouds, he descended to five hundred feet and wandered above Jersey rooftops until he found Newark.

In Alabama, Lieutenant John R. Sutherland, his compass thirty degrees off course, plopped his P-12 safely down near a town he mistook for Selma. To his surprise he found himself in Demopolis, fifty miles away. Citizens of Demopolis were understandably perplexed at the sight of an Army plane taxiing down their main street to the gas station. Next morning Lieutenant Sutherland took off, using a gravel road as a runway. When he landed in a plowed field outside Selma, his plane slowly nosed over, burying its propeller in the soft Alabama earth. A friendly gang of black prisoners, working nearby, helped Sutherland set it upright.

Launched into its sudden assignment with only ten days’ notice, the Air Corps had the misfortune to encounter a heavy storm right at the start. Throughout the first week of operations reports of faulty radios, overheated engines, forced landings, and narrow escapes clacked into regional headquarters. On Wednesday weather claimed its first fatality when Lieutenant Durwood O. Lowry, thirty miles off course in a Curtiss 0-39 observation plane, crashed onto a rain-soaked Ohio field.

On Thursday, Lieutenant H. L. Dietz, piloting a Curtiss 0-1G; from Camden, New Jersey, to Washington, D.C., was luckier. Early in the flight he watched helplessly as his map blew from its holder and vanished. Lost in a thick fog, his noisy radio almost unintelligible, he circled the small town of Marion Station, Maryland, while worried citizens below illuminated an emergency field with car headlights. His plane hit a tree, and Dietz, unconscious but destined to survive, was rushed to a hospital.

The week closed in a crescendo of disasters. On Friday a plane carrying Air Corps pilots to a Virginia base lost engine power and landed in icywater off the Jersey coast. Before rescuers arrived, five hours later, one pilot slid off the wing and drowned. In Texas another Army flier, forced by rain to make an emergency landing, died when his plane cartwheeled into a ditch.

Grieved and humiliated, the Air Corps counted its dead. Three fliers, practicing for their new assignments, had plunged to their deaths in mountain snowstorms and fog before actual operations began. Now three more had died in the first week of their airmail duties. Mystified citizens poured angry protests upon Congress, precipitating a Saturday-afternoon floor debate in the House that lasted six hours. In California a woman telephoned Air Corps Captain Ira C. Eaker: “You bloody butcher, you are killing these young boys!”

The heaviest burden of blame fell upon the five-foot five-inch chief of the Air Corps, Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, who had learned to fly in 1910 by corresponding with Wilbur and Orville Wright and became the first military aviator to pilot an Army plane. Now Foulois sent urgent orders to his three zone commanders, Major Byron Q. Jones in the east, Lieutenant Colonel Horace M. Hickam in the central zone, and Lieutenant Colonel Henry H. “Hap” Arnold in the west. Pilots were to make no night flights unless their radios and instruments were fully checked out; no mail was to be flown when the weather was bad; and planes were to be meticulously gone over before takeoff. Even so accidents did not end. On the night of March 9 four more members of the Air Corps died when planes plummeted to earth in Ohio, Florida, and Wyoming.

An exasperated Roosevelt, stung by public disfavor for the first time since entering the White House, tried to extricate himself by delivering a bluntly worded directive to MacArthur, Foulois, and Secretary of War George H. Bern. The Air Corps must end the fatal accidents, the President ordered, or stop flying the mails. Next day Foulois suspended all flights and set out to inspect his bases, leaving Roosevelt to reflect upon the galling fact that his own impulsiveness was partly to blame for the Air Corps’ plight.

The Army Air Corps, which had briefly pioneered air-mail service in 1918. On February 9, 1934, Roosevelt, his mind made up, instructed a reluctant Parley to cancel all existing air-mail contracts as of February 19. That same morning Benny Foulois and Harllee Branch, Second Assistant Postmaster General, had discussed the possibility of this new assignment. Could the Air Corps handle it? Branch asked. Through Foulois’ mind Hashed the problems: Army pilots had little instrument- or night-flying experience; they would be flying unfamiliar routes; bombers, observation planes, and pursuit planes must carry the mail. But a dramatic call to duty might focus national attention upon an Air Corps so starved for money by a cavalry-minded general staff that its equipment had not even kept pace with commercial aviation. “Yes sir,” Foulois told Branch, “if you want us to carry the mail, we’ll do it.”

Returning to his office, Foulois ordered his staff to begin preparing a contingency plan for use if and when the President cancelled the contracts. Moments later the Army’s chief of staff, his face flushed with excitement, accosted Foulois. The President, MacArthur told his astounded Air Corps chief, had ordered Army fliers to duty in ten days’ time. Perhaps suspecting that his subordinate had really sought the assignment to dramatize the needs of the Air Corps, MacArthur told Foulois gruffly: “It’s your ball game.”

Three weeks and ten fatalities later Benny Foulois faced hostility from every side—Congress, press, public, and, so it seemed, nature herself. Attempting to obey what he considered the impossible order of his commander in chief that “deaths in the Army Air dorps must stop,” he pledged Roosevelt that mail would not be flown if the slightest question arose as to equipment safety or weather conditions. With the President’s approval mail flights were ordered to resume in March on drastically curtailed routes. But Foulois, a grimly realistic pioneer of the air, knew there would be fatalities as long as man persisted in flying. In sad testimony to Foulois’ philosophy Lieutenant H. C. Richardson, a one-time airlines pilot called to active duty with the Air Corps, died March 17 when his Douglas 0-38 observation biplane crashed on a training flight near Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Messages from his bases further reinforced Foulois’ pessimism. Pilots in open-cockpit planes reported temperatures of twenty to forty-five degrees below zero, blinding snowstorms, fog and squalls, frostbitten fingers, ears, and noses. Airfields froze, then thawed to become quagmires of mud. One pilot, flying an unfamiliar route in a P-12 laden with mail and gas, lost radio contact and found his compass gyrating uselessly. His only guides were a set of railroad maps that showed no airway beacons, radio stations, or emergency landing fields. “I climbed out of that cockpit … an old man,” reported Lieutenant Beirne Lay, Jr.

Piloting a B-6A from Cleveland to Chicago one bitterly cold night, Lieutenant Norman Sillin briefly lost consciousness. When he revived, he was horrified to see a rotating airway beacon just ahead of his plane’s nose. Realizing he was in a vertical dive, Lieutenant Sillin managed to level his plane three hundred feet from disaster.

Flying Hell’s Stretch in an O-39, Lieutenant H. M. McCoy noticed his engine belching black smoke. His antifreeze had escaped, and he was forced to land near Bishtown, Pennsylvania. A local miner, he claimed later, rushed up to advise: “Mister, you ought to try burning some of our coal instead of that there soft coal. It don’t smoke so much.” Lieutenant McCoy made it to Middletown Air Depot, where a new engine was installed, but it refused to turn over in the below-zero temperature. Mechanics swaddled the plane in a heavy tarpaulin and warmed it by a coal stove from a chicken brooder, torches, and improvised oil stoves. After ten hours they turned the crank, and the engine started.

Gunnery and rear seats had to be hastily stripped from small Armyplanes to make room for mail sacks. Stuffing one P-12 with a hundred and seventeen pounds of mail, mechanics found they could get all but a single sack aboard. “Start it up,” the pilot ordered. “I’ll carry the other sack in my lap.” One converted plane went into an unexpected spin shortly after takeoff. When its pilot managed to land safely, investigators found that empty cartridges from the guns had lodged in the tail and fouled the rubber cables and pulleys. Another pilot reported his seat was so loose that he flew most of the way from Macon, Georgia, to Jacksonville, Florida, clinging to the cockpit with his left arm. So frenzied was the conversion process that an Air Corps officer, visiting a nearby base, almost lost his new O-1G to the mail service. While he chatted with friends in the operations office mechanics swarmed over his plane, removed its cowling and observer’s seat, and were busily installing a radio set and mail compartments when the frantic officer rushed to its rescue.

Though brave and eager, Air Corps pilots were novice mailmen. One took off without his mail and had to be recalled by a sarcastic radio operator. Another, twenty miles into his route and loaded with four hundred pounds of letters, radioed back: “Please find out from control officer where in hell this mail goes—my manifest is locked in mail compartment.” A third took the wrong leg of a radio beacon and reported ruefully: “Landed in Buffalo with the Cleveland mail.” A control officer, worried because he had no plane for a southern run, hurriedly met an arriving plane from the south, loaded the mail in a truck, and was halfway to the train station before he realized that he could use the same plane that had just come in. But a fast train could often make better time than a heavy-laden bomber fighting a strong head wind.

As a whole, however, the public was sympathetic. When a pilot made a forced landing near a small Nebraska community, the mayor himself came out to assist at takeoff, bringing road machines to clear a makeshift runway. Eyeing a tall tree, the mayor ordered, “Cut it down.” Only a large red barn then obstructed the takeoff. “Can you clear that, lieutenant?” asked the mayor. “I don’t know,” the pilot replied. “Then,” ruled His Honor with a grandiose sweep of his arms, “burn her down!” Grateful for such friendly gestures, many pilots autographed airmail letters for stamp collectors. In return for this favor one avid collector offered to send “some beautiful crash pictures.”

At the White House, trying to save face, Roosevelt stonily refused to comment on the Air Corps’ troubles, leaving Parley to take the lightning. The loyal Postmaster General recalled later that he was accustomed to abuse and criticism, but when he was called a murderer, he had looked to Roosevelt for help. “No help came,” Parley said sadly.

The American public was not only alarmed over accidents but dissatisfied with Air Corps postal service. Small Army planes could only hold a hundred and fifty pounds of mail at best, while two-ton commercial ships could handle eighteen hundred to two thousand pounds. It often took six or more Army flights to equal the normal load of one airliner. Lacking sufficient hangars, Army mechanics sometimes spent three hours revving up the engine of a cold plane that had been staked down in an open field. Service became so uncertain that many business firms, in violation of postal standards, began wrapping bundles of letters as parcels to be shipped by air express aboard commercial flights.

Lieutenant Thurmond A. Wood, flying from Chicago to Omaha with twenty-three sacks of mail, hit a heavy thunderstorm and died in a crash. He was the twelfth—and final—fatality of the Air Corps’ disastrous tussle with the mail. On June 1, to the general relief of the Roosevelt administration, the Air Corps carried its last load of mail. In seventy-eight days of service it had experienced fifty-seven accidents and twelve fatalities. Altogether it completed 65 per cent of scheduled flights, aborting or cancelling the remainder because of weather, accidents, or other factors. There was small consolation in the statistic that Air Corps planes had carried 777,389 pounds of mail without losing a single pound. Only five pilots had died while actually carrying the mail. Efficient Army rescue teams had salvaged every letter.

Despite its humiliation the Air Corps, too, eventually profited. The Air Corps had been handicapped since the World War by stingy appropriations and lack of training in instrument, night, radio-beacon, cross-country, and bad-weather flying. The President himself asked Congress to authorize an additional ten million dollars, a bonanza sum in times of economic depression, to be spent for new planes and equipment. From that time on there was a steady build-up of Air Corps strength and efficiency.

Benny Foulois, his long career scarred by public controversy over the performance of his corps during the stormy winter of 1934, retired from the Air Corps on December 31, 1935, after piloting his 0-38 on a last sentimental solo above the snow-covered Virginia countryside. He lived until 1967 and died believing that his twelve pilots were sacrificed for a higher cause than delivering the mail—for a powerful United States Air Force capable of responding to the challenges of Hitler and Pearl Harbor.

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