1998 non-fiction. A Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper was en route from Noumea
to Auckland when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. They
were instructed to make their way back to the USA as best they could.
This was the first (near-)circumnavigation of the world by a
flying-boat, via Australia, Trincomalee, Bahrain, Khartoum,
Léopoldville (Kinshasa), and across the South Atlantic to Natal in
Brazil, then north to New York. For most of the way they were beyond
the reach of Pan Am, and reliant on the goodwill of British
facilities.
Clearly there was a lot of excitement, but this book, written based on
Dover's own experience working on Clippers, interviews with two
surviving members of the flight crew, and whatever documentary
evidence could be amassed, is much more about competent people doing
things competently without making a fuss about it. Have to run the
engines on 90-octane gasoline rather than the 100-octane they were
built for? Yeah, we can do that, and we have some idea of when we can
get away with backing off the power and when we can't. Exhaust stack
broke off? Well, the wing might catch fire from being in the exhaust
stream, but we can't get parts to fix it this side of the Atlantic…
There was a large crew, but most of them don't come over as having
much in the way of personality; this is after all an account of actual
events turned into a narrative, rather than a story, and even if
people were nervous or uncertain at the time that didn't make it into
the story that got told fifty years later. For my taste there isn't
enough technical detail, but my taste is quite unusual.
It's a surprisingly thin book, only about 56,000 words; I'm sure one
could make more of a narrative out of it. With my role-playing head
on, I'd love to run this situation as a series of adventures (it fits
quite neatly into a setup on which I've already done some of the
work); there's no direct conflict, which makes it more complicated,
but there's tension, taking chances with what the manual says you can
get away with, and moderately heroic engineering.
This is great fun, but I couldn't help thinking that it felt like the
notes from which someone could write a really interesting piece of
fiction more than a great document in itself.
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