FDR feels about the same way. So Gippy had Amelia write the president for help and permission to refuel the Electra in-flight over Midway…which by the way I considered inadvisable unless it was completely unavoidable.”
Dizzy Dean, giving in to the crowd’s urging, strode from the dugout back onto the mound.
I had to wait for the applause to die down before I could say, “That sounds expensive, too.”
“Not if you can stick the government for it.
“And FDR okayed that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What does the government get out of it?”
Bartell singled to right; Whitehead scored, tying the game. The crowd roared in dismay.
“That’s where Howland Island comes in,” Mantz said. “And to answer your question, Howland Island is a desolate dab of nothing in the middle of nowhere, half a mile wide and one mile and a half long, covered with seagull shit.”
“Just what is Franklin Roosevelt’s interest in a bird-shit repository?”
He threw a hand in the air, rolled his eyes. “Hell, I don’t know the politics, or the military ramifications, not really. But Howland and a couple other little islands are just about the only land between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands.”
“So what?”
“The Marshall Islands belong to the Japanese. There’s talk of the Japs and military expansion in the Pacific. This is all over my head, Heller, but even for somebody who doesn’t read anything but the funny pages, it’s not hard to figure: Uncle Sam musta needed an excuse to build a runway on Howland.”
“And Amelia was it.”
Down on the field was a flurry of play, and the crowd groaned in agony. Runs on hits by Lou Chiozza and Joe Moore had the score Giants 3, Cards 1.
Mantz said, “I heard G. P. say the government shelled out over three hundred grand, sending the Coast Guard dragging five-ton tractors over reefs and shoals…just as a courtesy to this famous civilian aviatrix, to aid her on her world flight.”
I had to smile at what seemed like outrageous string-pulling and manipulation of the government on G. P.’s part. “That doesn’t sound like a sellout to me, Paul. Sounds like you scratch my back, I scratch your back.”
“It didn’t bother me, either, at the time. G. P. wasn’t even that secretive about it. Oh, he’d say, ‘Now this is confidential,’ but he got a kick out of telling how he’d conned the taxpayers into paying for Amelia’s landing strip.”
Hubbell was down there striking Cards out so quickly, it was hard to keep track.
“So,” I asked, “why does it bother you now?”
Mantz’s eyes narrowed. “This change of direction in flight plan—the first try was east to west; but now, all of a sudden, it’s west to east.”
“Yeah—Amelia told me it had to do with ‘changing weather conditions.’”
He smirked and shook his head. “That’s the story G. P.’s handing the press—‘a seasonal change in wind patterns.’ It’s baloney—hardly any ‘seasonal change’ happens in weather along the Equator, and zero change in wind direction. Prevailing wind’s always east to west, the opposite of wind in the northern and southern hemispheres…. Hell, that’s why she chose flying east to west, in the first place!”
I was barely following him. “I don’t know beans about flying, but it seems to me, bucking the prevailing wind is stupid.”
“That’s as good a word for it as any. And switching the flight plans to west to east meant everything from the previous attempt had to be scrapped—creating all kinds of problems, adding huge expense in a situation where scrimping would seem mandatory.”
“What kind of added expense and extra problems?”
“Fuel, oil, spare parts, and personnel, in place for the east-west flight, had to be moved—for example, a mechanic dispatched from London to Karachi had to be assigned to somewhere else, Rangoon maybe, or Singapore. Credentials had to be reacquired, charts replotted, creating hours of work for engineers and mechanics at Lockheed.”
“Well, what do you make of that?”
Dizzy Dean was back on the mound.
“I’m not sure. I never got a straight answer from either Gippy or Amelia on the reason for reversing the direction of the flight. The only way I can figure it is, it’s got to be a directive from the same government quarters that funded the second try.”
“Is that where the money came from? Uncle Sam?”
Dean hurled a fastball (what the papers called his fireball) at Lou Chiozza, or to be more exact, at Chiozza’s head. Narrowly missing a beanball was a disconcerting experience, and Chiozza picked himself up from the dust, chastened.
“Well,” Mantz said, “Gippy and Amelia sure as hell didn’t come up with the dough, at least not all of it, not nearly. And listen, from the start, the military’s been on this like ants at a picnic. You don’t fly across the Pacific— particularly not when part of the plan is to land on a flyspeck like Howland Island—without the cooperation of Navy tenders, seaplanes, and personnel.”
“You said it yourself—Amelia has the President and First Lady in her pocket. She could pull that off.”
