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breathtaking 180 mph, was fast. American at one point promoted the speed of DC-3 service with a magazine ad depicting a woman in her nightgown swooning, “He still loves me! He’ll be home tonight, via American Airlines.”
    By 1938 there were 250 commercial airplanes plying the skies of the United States, and their paying passengers, thanks to Smith’s DC-3, provided as much business as the mail sacks.
    A new airplane was also enabling Juan Trippe and Charles Lindbergh to conduct the second phase of their three-way global thrust, this the most far-reaching of all. Pan Am was headed for China.
    As soon as they brought home their first baby in 1930 (very possibly conceived during the South American trip), Charles and Anne Lindbergh began elaborate preparations to blaze thebest route to the Orient. They chose “the great circle route,” from the U.S. mainland to Alaska, to Russia, and south to Japan and then China—a route mostly over land. Flying in thermal suits under the midnight sun, the Lindberghs took weeks getting to China. Treacherous fog shrouded the killer mountain peaks along the way. The route, they judged, was impractical.
    Pan Am would have to fly to Asia by the South Pacific instead. The distance might as well have been to the moon.
    From San Francisco, China lay nearly 9,000 miles away, with only some sandbars, coral reefs, and volcanic outcroppings along the way. The longest ocean air route in the world at the time was being flown by a predecessor of Air France over the South Atlantic from French West Africa to Brazil, and that route was one quarter the distance facing Trippe and Lindbergh. Lindbergh threw himself into the design of a new airplane capable of the flight; when Lindbergh’s son was tragically kidnapped, Trippe’s engineers completed the job. What emerged was a massive water plane with four great engines, pontoons the size of fishing boats, and ample room for airmail and passengers alike. Trippe christened the new model the China Clipper, introducing the nautical theme in commercial aviation. From that point forward, chief pilots were captains and copilots were secondofficers, trading in their helmets and leather jackets for officers’ hats and greatcoats bearing stripes at the end of each sleeve. Humphrey Bogart would soon star in a movie called China Clipper . And the plane itself would become a symbol for the inexorable spread of Yankee interests across the globe.
    The long-range airplane solved only part of the problem. How would the clippers refuel en route? Where would the crews sleep, to say nothing of any passengers who might eventually be brought along? How would they eat? Where would they get fresh water?
    In 1935, withno mail contract yet in hand,Trippe chartered a mammoth merchant ship in San Francisco and loaded it with the people and supplies necessary to create a chain of fully functioning colonies along the atolls of the Pacific. There were 74 construction workers, 44 airplane technicians, a quarter-million gallons of airplane fuel, food and fresh water to last for months, and five entire air bases, assembly required. Blasting away the reefs at Wake Island consumed five tons of dynamite. Tons of topsoil were brought to the barren outposts for vegetable gardens. A second expedition delivered pillows, lightbulbs, lounge furniture, beach umbrellas, teaspoons, and everything else needed for the new layover stations that Trippe was constructing; these outposts were the beginning of the Inter-Continental Hotels chain.
    The postal contracts on which Trippe had gambled were soon forthcoming; the threat of Japanese hegemony in the Pacific made the United States government eager to foster the development of such strategically located islands as Midway and Wake. At the same moment in 1935 that C. R. Smith was preparing to roll out the first DC-3 at American Airlines, Juan Trippe watched a China Clipper soar past the half-completed Golden Gate on its maiden flight to China. In the