South Atlantic Air Ferry Route in World War II - Overview

Overview

After the Fall of France in June 1940 and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Northern Europe after the Battle of Dunkirk, the next major land battle between the Axis powers and the United Kingdom erupted in North Africa in September with the Fascist Italian invasion of Egypt from Libya. The Italian offensive was halted and, in December 1940, the British made a counterattack. What started as a five-day raid turned into Operation Compass, resulting in massive losses for the Italian forces. The Italian's Axis partner, Nazi Germany, provided Afrika Korps, a contingent of ground and air forces, to prevent a total collapse, and Germany became the dominant partner.

The Italian-German threat to the security of the Suez Canal was critical to the British, and great efforts were made to collect sufficient transport ships to convey forces from Britain to Egypt to support the Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force. The British realized the strategic importance of maintaining control of the Suez Canal and Malta, while Hitler saw the war in North Africa as a diversion from his main goal of conquering the Soviet Union. With both Italian submarines and German U-Boats operating in the Mediterranean Sea, the only relatively secure method of transport was sailing south from Britain around the Cape of Good Hope and then north past Madagascar into the Red Sea.

At the August 1941 Atlantic Conference, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt for aid to support the Commonwealth forces engaged against the German Afrika Korps and set into motion a series of events that were to provide an American-pioneered, American-supplied and American-maintained trans-Atlantic air route between the United States and Africa. The air route was then extended across Central Africa and north to the Nile Delta in Egypt, providing a relatively fast method of resupply to the Commonwealth forces.

The job of getting Lend-Lease planes to the British was given the Air Corps, General Arnold found that neither military nor civilian crews with the necessary experience were immediately available. The few experienced Army crews could not be spared; and the country had long since been combed for civilian pilots and navigators for the North Atlantic ferrying service.

Rather than ship the planes by water, the ferrying job was turned over to Pan American Airways, whose experience in the development of commercial airlines through Latin American already had been turned to advantage in the effort to extend and strengthen Southern hemisphere defenses. As early as November 1940, Pan American had been made the agent of the United States government in carrying out the so-called Airport Development Program (ADP) for the construction and improvement of airports on foreign territory throughout the Caribbean area, Central America, and Brazil, as well as in Liberia. Ferrying operations over the South Atlantic route had begun in June 1941 when Atlantic Airways, Ltd., a Pan American Airways subsidiary corporation organized especially for the job, undertook to deliver twenty transport-type aircraft to the British in western Africa.

It was, however, just the beginning of a network of air routes that eventually encompassed two-thirds of the Earth.