The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1
off from Bolling Field, Washington, D.C., bound for Scotland by
way of Montreal and Newfoundland. Between that date and mid-Oc-
tober, when the service was forced to close down by the approach of
winter, an average of six round trips a month had been flown. Modi-
fied B-24’s were used on all the trips, the passengers sitting in the
bomb bays.’*
The “Arnold Line,” as the British termed it ia tribute to the Chief
of the Army Air Forces, regularly operated over a route that ran
from Bolling Field to Montreal to Gander Lake, Newfoundland,
thence across the Atlantic to Ayr, Scotland, and return. There were
three special trips, however, that departed considerably from the
regular run. One of these carried Capt. Elliott Roosevelt during the
summer on an aerial survey of the east coast of Greenland in a search
for a suitable site for an airdrome on the far-northern ferry route to
Britain. Capt. James H. Rothrock, a veteran of the North Atlantic
run, piloted the p1ane.l’ In September, two B-24’s of the service were
employed in transporting a portion of the Harriman mission to Mos-
cow by way of Great Britain. On the Scotland-to-Moscow leg of the
journey the two planes, piloted by Maj. Alva L. Harvey and Lt. Louis
T. Reichers, took a circular route north of the Scandinavian peninsula
and flew a nonstop distance of 3,150 miles before reaching the Soviet
capital. From Moscow, Major Harvey proceeded on a globe-encircling
homeward flight by way of the Middle East, India, Singapore, Darwin,
Port Moresby, and Wake Island to Hawaii and Washington.2oLieu-
tenant Reichers took a route by way of Cairo across central Africa,
the South Atlantic, and up through Brazil to the United States.z1Both
of these exploratory flights involved hazardous landings a t undevel-
oped airfields barely able to accommodate the heavy bombers and
take-offs into all kinds of weather without briefing, weather informa-
tion, adequate communications, or maps. Their importance was gen-
erally overlooked in the excitement of the greater events of the war;
but the recorded experiences and observations of the two pilots were
of the utmost value to the AAF in planning for the development of two
of its major overseas air lanes-the Pacific and the South Atlantic
routes.
The aircraft ferried over the North Atlantic route to Britain prior
to American involvement in the war were, with few exceptions, pur-
chased for cash on orders placed in 1939 and 1940. Of the approxi-
mately 2,400 planes of American manufacture delivered by air or by
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