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, November 17.
As one of the ACHS Stuart Talks series, historian Von Hardesty will tell of this Pan Am Clipper’s perilous journey home, a tale he describes as the “stuff of a Jules Verne story.” The talk will be 7 p.m. Thursday, November 17, in the second floor lecture room of the R. R. Smith Center for History and Art. 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., a journey made more difficult by the fact that the plane could only land on water.
Hardesty encountered the story in his work as a curator of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, and through the book “The Long Way Home” by Ed Dover. The book tells this largely forgotten saga of early air travel, and describes the unique world of air travel in the 1940s. Hardesty, now retired from the Smithsonian, is the author of several books on early and wartime air adventures. He is also 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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