In winter the North Atlantic airway to Europe is no "milk run." Hurricane winds blow over desolate wastes of water. The bases are often closed in by sudden storms. Moisture-laden air can sheathe a plane in ice. With magnificent understatement, airmen used to say the route was "unreliable."
But this week the Air Transport Command's North Atlantic division, in ceremonies at bases from Maine to Iceland, will mark the opening of its second winter of regularly scheduled operations. A flight to Europe, winter or summer, is now as routine an operation as a hop from New York to San Francisco.
He Proved His Point. The man who runs this airway is tough, gruff Brigadier General Lawrence G. Fritz, onetime operations vice president for the T.W.A. When he was A.T.C.'s operations chief in Washington, he used to assert: "The North Atlantic . . . can be flown both east and west on regular schedule in winter as well as summer."
One day in the fall of 1942 he stepped into a B24, flew it out into the North Atlantic seeking the worst weather "front" that he could find. His plane picked up a load of ice, lost flying speed and dropped into a spin. Fritz, a veteran airline pilot, straightened her out just a few hundred feet from the water. He came back still convinced that he was right. He was handed the job of proving his point as C.O. of the North Atlantic Division.
In the winter of 1943-44 the division flew more traffic over the Atlantic than in the whole summer of 1942. Traffic is up to more than 40 crossings a day. Last month more passengers, cargo and mail moved over the Army's North Atlantic run than during any month last summer (except during the period immediately before and after the invasion).
The Lonely Men. Larry Fritz was too old and too precise a hand to try to beat the North Atlantic by pounding across by guess and by God.
The weather hazard was beaten by establishing a huge network with alternate fields for emergencies. Weather stations were set up—53 of them—and radio communications were installed to get their observations to the forecasters. The network is operated by officers who learned their job in the operations end of the U.S. airlines. The stations are manned by thousands of G.I.s.
Their reports, radioed from barren rocks and cliffside perches, now enable the "weather busters" of the A.T.C. to forecast the weather across the North Atlantic mile by mile, almost hour by hour. The communications network, radio ranges and home beacons shepherd the transports and the bombers across. The great bases at Labrador, Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland and the Azores provide refueling, maintenance and sometimes havens.
Crossroads of the Atlantic. On the North Atlantic division the A.T.C. is doing two jobs: 1) maintaining and flying the transport route to Europe for high priority passengers, mail and freight; 2) guiding the fleets of bombers direct into the European theater.