On December 7, 1941, a Pan Am passenger plane winging over the central Pacific learned that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. The adventures of the plane and its crew as they worked to escape attack and get home safely make up a little-known but compelling tale to be described in a special presentation by the Augusta County Historical Society Thursday, January 28.
As one of the ACHS Stuart Talks series, author Von Hardesty will tell of this Pan Am Clipper’s perilous journey home, a story he describes as the “stuff of a Jules Verne story.” The talk will be 7 p.m. Thursday, January 28, in the second floor lecture room of the R. R. Smith Center for History and Art. In the event of snow, the lecture will take place Thursday, February 4. The event is free to ACHS members, $1 for students, and $5 for non-members.
The Pan Am Clipper was enroute from New Caledonia to Auckland when its radio operator learned of the Pearl Harbor attack. The plane detoured a little from its planned route and kept watch for Japanese warplanes as it flew on, eventually landing safely in New Zealand. But that was just the beginning of the story as the crew began a long and world-spanning effort to get their valuable plane back to the U.S.
Hardesty tells the tale of this plane, named the Pacific Clipper, in a new book “The Long Way Home.” The book tells this largely forgotten saga of early air travel, and describes the unique world of air travel in the 1940s. Hardesty is a retired curator from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum and is the author of several books on early and wartime air adventures. He is also currently a member of the ACHS Board of Directors.
The ACHS was founded in 1964 to study, collect, preserve, publish, educate about, and promote the history of Augusta County and its communities. More information is available online at www.augustacountyhs.org.
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