The day was November 22, 1935. The place was San Francisco. A revolutionary Glenn L. Martin-designed four-engine flying boat recently christened China Clipper strained at her moorings. Before a host of national dignitaries, the Pan American Airways president, Juan T. Trippe, turned to Capt. Edwin C. Musick, the China’s first skipper. “Captain Musick, proceed to Manila,” he ordered.
And a historic order it was, especially for the several thousand United States citizens living in the Philippine Islands. A few thousand miles of Pacific Ocean separated them from home, and their one contact with the mainland was mail carried by ship, a voyage that could take three weeks or more. At that time the arrival of an ocean liner in Manila’s harbor was a major event. Bands played, crowds cheered, and families were reunited with their loved ones. Letters from home were always welcome, as was the cargo of goods essential to comfortable living in a tropical and sometimes hostile environment. No wonder, then, that the news of the Clipper’s pending arrival caused so much excitement.
The day was perfect for the occasion. A few puffy white clouds dotted the bright blue tropical sky. Thousands of spectators crowded onto Manila’s docks, piers, and breakwaters, and the harbor was filled with vessels of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions.
As the fifteen-year-old son of an Army officer stationed in the Philippines, I, together with a young Filipino lad, was in a native dugout canoe, searching for a place in the crowd of assorted vessels struggling to get as close to the landing area as possible.
After an hour or so of waiting, we finally heard the sound of airplane engines, and, straining our eyes to the east, we saw her, at first only a tiny silver dot on the horizon but, at long last, clearly the China Clipper.
After circling the harbor, Captain Musick brought the Clipper in for a perfect landing, and at that moment pandemonium broke loose. The sound of thousands of cheering spectators was drowned out by the cacophony of hundreds of boat whistles and horns.
Armed with a wooden paddle and my Kodak box camera, I strained mightily to get close enough to this beautiful airplane to take a few meaningful photographs. But in my enthusiasm 1 used up an entire roll of film that, when developed, revealed little more than a silver speck in the harbor.
Two lessons were learned on that historic afternoon in Manila Bay, when travel to the Far East was changed forever. Lesson number one: History—real history—can happen anytime, anyplace, to anybody. And while few are actually privileged to be present at a truly historic event, fewer still are alert enough to recognize such a happening for what it really is. In my case I was just plain lucky. Lesson number two: Always carry an extra roll of film!
—John F. R. Scott, Jr., a retired aviator, Hues in Baltimore, Maryland.
Trailing von Trott
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland, and World War II began. The United States immediately became security conscious. German nationals living here came under increasing FBI scrutiny. One such German, suspected of being a Nazi agent, was thirty-year-old Adam von Trott zu SoIz, who arrived in New York City by boat in late September. In early November he came to Washington, D.C., where he checked into the Mayflower Hotel.
As a young FBI agent assigned to the Washington field office, I received instructions to discover whether von Trott was engaged in any type of subversive activity. This involved physical surveillance and other investigative techniques. With other agents I proceeded to tail von Trott all over Washington—to the German Embassy, to the State Department, to Capitol Hill, to the National Press Club building, and even to the Washington Monument and Mount Vernon. We also followed him to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he attended a convention of a peace organization.
One day, while I was conducting a “tight tail,” von Trott stopped suddenly about two blocks from the German Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and looked around as if to get his bearings. When I came close he asked me—with a knowing smile on his face—how to get to the embassy. I told him it was straight ahead.
Von Trott returned to New York City early in December. Our investigation produced no evidence indicating that he had engaged in subversive activity while in Washington. In short he was clean—for the very good reason that he was a dedicated anti-Nazi and an avowed enemy of Adolf Hitler, a fact that I learned only long after the war.
Von Trott was the son of a Prussian minister of education. His maternal grandmother was American and a descendant of John Jay. Von Trott studied at three German universities, earned a law degree, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and later served in a succession of public and private legal posts in Germany.
Once, while I was trailing him, von Trott stopped, turned to me with a knowing smile, and asked how to get to the German embassy.
With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, von Trott foresaw the catastrophe into which Hitler would drag Germany. He became a member of the key anti-Nazi resistance group composed of old-line aristocrats, German army officers, public officials, clergymen, and young intellectuals called the Kreisau Circle, named for Kreisau, the estate of the principal organizer, Count Helmuth von Moltke.
During the 1930s and early 1940s von Trott traveled abroad extensively and made many friends and contacts in high places, especially in England and in Sweden and the United States. He was thereby able to act as liaison between the German resistance and sympathizers in other countries.
Luck finally ran out on von Trott in the summer of 1944. In the blood bath that followed the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, almost five thousand Germans were rounded up by the Gestapo and executed summarily. Von Trott was one of them. He was hanged on August 26, 1944.
