Tokyo Express

At 8:21 one morning last week, a long silver DC-6 with the blue and white markings of United Air Lines settled on the runway of the Air Force's Fairfield-Suisun Base, 50 miles north of San Francisco. Out came the passengers--18 women, 24 children, 4 soldiers--muscles stiff from the long 7,000-mile ride from Tokyo. In the airfield's noisy, sprawling, glass-walled building, the children found a haven under the protection of Operation Recess; volunteer nurses popped the smallest in cribs, kept the bigger ones busy with comic books. A few of the women belonged to Operation Raven, the Air Force's sardonic tag for the widows of men killed in Korea.

On the field, soldiers sweated to load planes which had flown in earlier with evacuees, and send them winging back to Tokyo. This is the Pacific airlift. Every day it flies some 100 tons of men and vitally needed munitions, medicines, etc. from Fairfield-Suisun, Tacoma and San Jose to Tokyo to support the Korean fighting. Every week its 53 commercial liners and 98 Military Air Transport Service planes fly a quarter of the way around the world and back, carrying more ton-miles of cargo than all the U.S. domestic airlines combined.

Emergency Meeting. The seven-week-old Pacific lift is a miracle of improvisation. The man who did most to make the miracle is MATS' deputy operations commander, Major General William H. Tunner, who bossed the 1948 Berlin airlift and was a wartime director of the hazardous air shuttle over the Hump.

When the war began on June 25, Tunner found he had only 60 planes in the Pacific area. He called an emergency meeting of airlines in Washington, asked them for all the four-engine planes they could spare. The lines offered 71 planes. Tunner said he wanted 100 more. When the lines protested that another 100 would cripple domestic air traffic, Tunner withdrew his request--for the time being. Instead he put on more MATS planes, and ordered others out of mothballs.

Singapore Trader. Without waiting for a contract, Pan American World Airways called in Douglas DC-4 Clippers from London and Buenos Aires, summoned experienced crews from Calcutta and Rio de Janeiro, rehired 104 pilots it had laid off in January. Seaboard & Western, a nonscheduled cargo line, loaded 25 Lockheed Aircraft Service maintenance men in its DC-4 Singapore Trader, flew them to California. July 3, eight days after the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel, the Singapore Trader took off from Fairfield-Suisun on the Tokyo lift's first official flight. At the controls was Captain Francis A. Warner, 32, who had flown the same ship across the Atlantic two years before in support of the Berlin lift.

Up the West Coast of the U.S. flew the Singapore Trader, stopping briefly at Anchorage, Alaska, and at the Shemya airport in the Aleutians. Shemya was fogbound, but a MATS ground crew talked the ship down with GCA equipment, guided it to a perfect landing between the double white lines on the 10,000-foot runway. Then the Trader swung over the great circle route to Tokyo's Haneda airport. Northwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and six ships lent by the Royal Canadian Air Force later followed this northern route to Japan. Pan American, whose ten places make up the biggest private-line fleet in the service, led the way across the mid-Pacific via Hawaii. Eight other U.S. lines soon followed, plus one of Belgium's Sabena airliners lent as a contribution of the U.N.

Tank Killers. At first, the planes carried key military personnel, brought back evacuees. But when the G.I.s in Korea sent back an emergency call for weapons to stop the Russian T-34 tanks, the lift loaded up with 3.5-inch super-bazookas, followed with tank-killing 90-mm. "shaped charge" ammunition (TIME, Aug. 14). It also hustled out new fighter plane engines, hauled back others for overhaul in U.S. factories.

To keep the airlift going, some U.S. airlines have slashed their domestic freight business. Eastern Air Lines has abandoned its cargo-liner service, now carries its freight in passenger planes and in pods attached to Constellations. Capital Airlines has "skeletonized" its camp service. American Airlines has dropped four cities off its cargo routes. Other lines are getting by with makeshift schedules, but these will not hold up if MATS decides it needs more planes on the Pacific lift. This week, General Tunner plans to make a flying inspection of the lift, and a firsthand estimate of its future needs.

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