The Turtle and the Dreamboat
Nonstop flights across the Pacific and shortcuts across the Arctic are standard offerings from the aviation industry nowadays, but they once were rare, dangerous undertakings. The precedent was set by a pair of military flights in 1946, as rival services vied for public and Congressional attention in the runup to establishing a consolidated Defense Department.
In that year a Navy Neptune patrol plane, dubbed the Truculent Turtle, flew 11,000 miles nonstop from Australia to Ohio, while an Army B-29, nicknamed the Pacusan Dreamboat, went from Honolulu to Cairo via the Arctic. Jim Leeke follows the flight plans and the thinking behind them in The Turtle and the Dreamboat. Much of the discussion concerned which branch of service would control airpower in the postwar world. The author compares those pioneering long-range Army and Navy flights to “an especially brutal army-navy football game, albeit one played on a much bigger field with far greater stakes.”
