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.