A Little Help from Our Friends

By Richard Helbock

At the dawn of the age of air mail communications, the US Post Office Department forged new alliances with European air lines that would enable Americans to speed up delivery of their mail to and from distant places overseas. This is the story of those alliances told in a chronological way and copiously illustrated with full color maps and images of mail carried by US and foreign air carriers.
The book consists of seven chapters beginning with the first small tentative steps toward international air mail service in the early 1920s that saw routes established from London to continental Europe and on to North Africa. Chapter 2 takes up the story in 1928 when the US Post Office added instructions to its patrons that would allow them to take advantage of service by Air France and thus recognized Paris as a new gateway through which Americans could accelerate mail delivery.
Chapter 3 focuses of Britain’s Imperial Airways and the story of its pioneering air route to India by way of Egypt and the Middle East beginning in 1929. Amsterdam and the Dutch air line KLM joined British and French carriers in 1930 on the eyes of the US post office as potential carriers that could assist Americans in speeding their mail to far flung destinations. The story of KLM’s air link to the Dutch East Indies and the heated three-way competition that touched off for air mail business is the focus of Chapter 4.
Chapter 5 sees the story return to Britain’s Imperial Airways as it opened up a daring air route south from Cairo to its colonies in East and South Africa in 1931. In Chapter 6 the race to be the first European air carrier to offer service to and from China takes center stage as 1932 witnessed intense competition among the British, French and Dutch carriers to dominate this route. The final chapter describes the establishment of air mail service from Europe to Australia and New Zealand with regular service initiated in 1934.
Although arranged chronologically according to the date service was initiated, all of the chapters discuss evolution of air service up to 1939-1941 when the increasing hostilities that preceded World War II gradually curtailed much of the international air mail service around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Helbock
• Release date: May 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458017192

Richard Helbock

Richard W. “Bill” Helbock [B.S., USMA, West Point, 1960; M. A. & Ph.D (Geography), Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1973] has been an enthusiastic postal historial since the 1950s. He founded La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History in 1969, and has continued to publish it bimonthly for the past 40 years. In addition to La Posta, he served as editor of The Alaskan Philatelist and the Military Postal History Society Bulletin. Helbock has authored over twenty postal history books and monographs, and served as editor of the American Philatelic Congress Book from 1999-2005. In 1991 he was granted the Distinguished Philatelists Award by the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society, and the Northwest Federation of Stamp Clubs selected him as Distinguished Philatelist in 2003. Bill and his wife Cath currently reside on a rural property near Chatsworth Island, Australia.

Book preview

With a Little Help from Our Friends

Early Efforts by Americans to Accelerate Mail Delivery to Europe and Locations beyond Using Overseas Airmail Services

Richard W. Helbock, Ph.D.

Published by La Posta Publications at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Richard W. Helbock

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

The First Small Steps and London to the Continent, 1924-1927

Introduction

World War I taught the nations that fought in the fields of Europe several valuable lessons. One of these was that aircraft were an extremely effective means of conveying time-sensitive information between points on the ground. Before the war flying machines were experimental novelties—suitable for the aerial circus or staged public events where a small quantity of souvenir cards and letters might be carried on board between two points that were more easily accessed by road or rail.

Visionaries recognized the immense potential of these contemporary flying machines to grow into much larger aircraft capable of carrying cargo and passengers at significantly higher speeds over vast distances in the near future. The problem facing such dreamers—both in private industry and government—was how to attract sufficient public interest and investment in times of peace. Airmail—the transport of personal, governmental and commercial letter communications onboard aircraft—was seen as a valuable tool through which the public might participate in this communications revolution and thus provide popular support for the development of the new industry.

The United States, as one of the victorious nations in WWII, and a country with 3,000 miles separating its citizens on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts was eager to foster the development of the aircraft industry. A year before the Treaty of Versailles officially marked the end of WWI the U. S. Post Office working with the War Department launched an airmail service connecting Washington, Philadelphia and New York. President Woodrow Wilson and many high-ranking members of his administration participated in the inaugural flight event at the Potomac Park Polo Grounds on May 15, 1918¹.

All the early flights were flown by U.S. Army pilots, but by August 12, 1918, there were sufficient Post Office Department pilots and aircraft to take over from the Army. The first pathfinder flight from New York to Chicago was made on September 5-7, 1918. A series of additional test flights followed a crash landing on Long island during the return of the pathfinder flight. The results of these tests led POD officials to conclude that airmail service was insufficiently reliable to make regular deliveries throughout the year. As a result, all United States airmail was discontinued on July 18, 1919. First class mail was occasionally flown on a space-available basis, but it would be June 1924 before a reliable regular airmail service was launched between New York and Chicago. When it was, the New York to Chicago segment was but one of three links on a trans-Continental service connecting New York and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, other nations were examining the possibilities of promoting their own aircraft industries and using the phenomenon of airmail as a means of generating public interest and support. During the war British pilots carried military messages across the English Channel to their forces in Belgium beginning in 1915. In 1917 Italy began a regular airmail service connecting Rome and Turin, and the Germans launched a short-lived airmail route between Berlin and Cologne in 1918.

Britain’s8 first international public airmail service was inaugurated August 25, 1919, with a flight from London by the Aircraft Transport and Travel Company flying a de Havilland DH 16 to Paris. The service became daily in September 1919 as a strike by British railway workers paralysed the rail system. Four small separate British companies were soon competing for the London to Paris traffic and opening new routes in Western Europe. Unfortunately, none of them was seen as being sufficiently financially successful to survive without subsidies from the British government. In 1923 a government committee was appointed to recommend future actions to be taken in order to develop external British commercial air transport. The committee recommended merging the assets of the four existing companies—Handley Page Transport Ltd.; the Instone Air Line, Ltd.; the Daimler Airway; and British Marine Air Navigation Company, Ltd.—into one company.(figure 1)

Figure 1

Imperial Airways Limited was formed on March 31, 1924. It inherited 1,760 miles of cross-Channel routes and five serviceable aircraft. Landplane operations were conducted out of Croydon Airport which had opened March 25, 1920.

Imperial’s daily London-Paris route was opened April 26, 1924. This was followed by a London-Ostend-Brussels-Cologne route on May 3rd, and a summer-only service to Basle and Zürich in Switzerland (map 1).

Map 1 Imperial Airways 1924 routes from London

In its first year of operation Imperial Airways flew over 850,000 miles. It carried a total of 11,395 passengers and 212,380 letters².

In the southern French city of Toulouse in 1918 Pierre Latecoere had a dream of an airline that would stretch some 8,000 miles from Toulouse south through Africa, then across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil and onward to the southern tip of South America. Latecoere, a factory owner, launched the first flight of his Lignes Aeriennes Latecoere--nicknamed the Line-- in December 1918. In February 1919 the Line began carrying airmail letters to Spain and across the Mediterranean at Gibraltar to Rabat and Casablanca in the French colony of Morocco³.

In other European nations there were similar stirrings of interest in the commercial opportunities presented by international air service in the early 1920s. This was the dawn of a whole new industry that would within half a century come to dominate the movement of passengers and mail from place to place all over the world. Given the fact that the United States POD was already very actively involved in trying to build an airmail link between the east and west coasts of America, it is not surprising that they were closely watching developments in Europe with an eye toward providing American patrons with accelerated delivery of mail to overseas destinations. The purpose of this article is to examine the evolution of accelerated mail transport using non-American airmail services supported by the US POD to improve international service for American postal customers.

Scope & Organization

Robert Dalton Harris assembled an extremely valuable source of primary information on the subject of early United States relationships with international airmails. Published as International Air Mail in 1989, it was designated Volume 1 in the Postilion Series of Primary Sources. In this volume Harris extracted, organized and reproduced the original US POD announcements concerning international airmail arrangements for postal patrons in the United States that had appeared in the Monthly Supplements to the US Official Postal Guide from 1921 through 1945.

The announcements appear exactly as they were originally published and contain some errors, misstatements, corrections and adjusted details. Mild confusion results from the sheer volume of detail presented, but a patient reading reveals the story of American postal officials’ efforts to arrange accelerated service of US overseas mails with British, French, Dutch and a few other European governments.

The story presented in this article will rely heavily upon the US POD announcements from the Monthly Supplements reproduced by Harris. It will focus entirely on arrangements between the US and foreign governments intended to accelerate mail delivery in the eastern hemisphere—Europe, Africa and Asia. Early American efforts to establish international airmail links were entirely focused within the western hemisphere prior to the mid-1930s. Trans-Pacific Clipper service was inaugurated by Pan-American Airways to Manila in 1935, extended to China in 1937, and reached the South Pacific in 1940. The first trans-Atlantic Pan-Am Clipper service was begun in 1939. This story will examine how mail to and from the United States was given accelerated delivery by foreign airmail service in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Only airmail carried by foreign national airlines with published working arrangements with the US POD will be detailed in this article. Unfortunately this limitation somewhat obscures the complete picture of international transport of US mail by air in the eastern hemisphere since it was possible to send mail accelerated by air via national airlines without US POD arrangements to the United States.

Consider for example the German airline Deutsche Luft Hansa (DLH)—renamed Lufthansa in 1933. The company was formed in 1926 from two smaller companies and awarded a government subsidy to ensure economic success. With an effective monopoly on German air transport, DLH expanded rapidly and by 1928 it flew more miles and carried more passengers than all other European companies combined.⁴

Although the US POD announced several arrangements whereby US postal patrons could post mail to be carried on flights of German airships such as the Graf Zeppelin and via catapult mail from German passenger ships, there were no announced arrangements with DLH to carry US mails in Europe and Asia.

Figure 2 illustrates a cover mailed by an American through the U.S. Legation in Tehran. Addressed to Pacific Grove, California, the cover was postmarked Teheran on June 12, 1928, and endorsed Pour Avion via Baku-Moscow. This air route—shown on the inset map—started at Baku, a Soviet city on the Caspian Sea, and leap-frogged north to Moscow. The cover would have travelled by surface transport north to Baku. It reached Moscow on June 20th and Berlin on June 22nd. There are no