Articles
<< Back to Articles
Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bib |
Only one was made, dubbed “the Russian Clipper” having been purchased by the Russians prior to the beginning of hostilities. It was crated and shipped, but nothing has ever been learned of the fate of this unique flying boat. How a picture of this clipper made it into an aviation book intended for young children is unclear. The presence of the aircraft does point towards the sharing of aircraft the United States would soon have with the Russians as the two sides became Allies during World War II.
The clipper as agent for breaking the United States out of isolation and into world leadership was reinforced in other books as well. Sky Highways, Geography from the Air (1945) by Trevor Lloyd pretended to take a trip with an “Important Person” who was to “represent our Government” (15) in Chungking, then the capital of China. Clippers conveyed our passengers on what became a round-the-world trip from Washington, D.C., to Brazil to Nigeria to India to China to Siberia to Canada. The first chapter, “World Neighbors,” described how near the end of the war “there are no longer any foreigners” (4) thanks to airplanes. Just as the clipper eased youth into war preparations and was glorified during the war, towards war’s end it served as a tool for easing children into peace.
A number of popular books featuring the clipper sought to educate the nation’s youth in aircraft identification, a critical civilian and military skills needed to defend the country. For example, the title page of What Plane Is That? (1936) by C. A. Weymouth, Jr., pictured the China Clipper while it was still classified as experimental. Coloring books, scrap books, and stamp books served the same purpose. The Tydol Flying A Stamp Album of American Aviation was distributed free to youngsters at TYDOL-VEEDOL filling stations in the thirteen northeastern states in 1940. It showed the clipper as “the largest airplane in the world.” The Borden Company sold Thompson’s Chocolate Malted Milk with mail order offers to children for data, diagrams, and pictures of clippers. Although the 1943 Airplane Story Color Book, a combination stamp and coloring publication, began and ended with illustrations of a futuristic Flash Gordon-looking rocket, the clipper was positioned as an aircraft even more advanced than World War II military planes. One might have expected during time of war that books would extol more the virtues of fighters and bombers, but such was not the case, at least in books that combined both military and civilian aircraft. The same held true for The Spiral Scrap Book (No. 1083). Its covers depicted the China Clipper juxtaposed over the Queen Mary and the Zephyr locomotive. The clipper was shown as paramount here just as it was in the 1942 pictorial depiction of aviation history (283) in Your Wings by Assen Jordanoff (283). The history of flight was shown as beginning with the Wright brothers’ aircraft and ending with the clipper.
More conventional general textbooks sold the clipper image as well, again sometimes long after the clipper had ceased to fly. It made no difference where a student lived either. A student could be far from the ocean and still travel with the clipper. Years after World War II, the sixth grade geography class at Church School in Oliver County, North Dakota, used as standard text, the revised edition of Nations Beyond the Seas. On the cover? A rendering of the China Clipper flying over an atoll. And why not try to add a touch of technology and romance to what could be another dry school subject? After all, it was the clipper that had opened up these exotic atolls to our imaginations. The clipper had truly taken the place of its namesake, the earlier clipper ships that had sailed around the Horn, the path to the East and South Sea wonder. Its stories easily substituted for the earlier Caribbean and South Sea pirate-adventure genre.
Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bib |
<< Back to Articles