Around the World in 175 Days: The First Round-the-World Flight by Carroll V. Glines. Smithsonian Institution Press (http://www.si.edu/sipress), 750 Ninth Street NW, Suite 4300, Washington, D.C. 20560-2300, 2001, 208 pages, $29.95.

I had the very good fortune to meet both Col Carroll V. Glines and one of his subjects, Maj Gen Leigh Wade. Both had two great blessings in common: long, hands-on experience with flying and the longevity to have witnessed much of the first century of aviation. Additionally, Glines is blessed with a wonderful prose style that makes everything he writes both interesting and highly readable. General Wade was one of the pilots on the round-the-world flight, and my engaging afternoon with him in 1982 made me eager for even more of the story. Much has been written about that great adventure, and only a person with Glines’s vast expertise and writing competence could hope to add to that literature in a significant way.

More a historian of aviation than of military airpower (notwithstanding his full career as an Air Force pilot), Glines has also authored such books as Bernt Balchen: Polar Aviator; several works on Gen Jimmy Doolittle; Chennault’s Forgotten Warriors: The Saga of the 308th Bomb Group in China; Roscoe Turner: Aviation’s Master Showman; a work about global circumnavigation by air; and too many others to mention here. Around the World is an adventure story, to be sure, but it is thoroughly documented and meets high scholarly standards.

Readers of Aerospace Power Journal will want to add this book to their reading lists, perhaps more for the sake of recreation than for their education as air warriors/scholars. But in a general way, Around the World will add to their databases on the foundations of American airpower by adding insights into its development, even in the midst of the great Billy Mitchell controversies. The trip took place on the eve of Mitchell’s court-martial, when the conventional picture paints interservice relations at their very worst. Yet, the Navy’s freely given support for the great Air Service achievement was not only outstanding, but also essential to its success. Gen Mason Patrick, then at the helm of the Air Service, prominently recognized that support. Patrick’s flyers probably spent as many of the 175 nights aboard naval and Coast Guard vessels as they did ashore, and the refueling and maintenance services proved crucial. Too, when Maj Frederick Martin, the flight’s leader, and his mechanic crashed in the Alaskan wilds, major search-and-rescue efforts came from many sources.

Martin led the flight of four Douglas Air Cruisers westbound out of Seattle, notwithstanding the headwinds they would generally have to face. He dropped out soon after the departure, and for 10 days his fate was unknown. Capt Lowell Smith, who had participated in the world’s first air-to-air refueling only a year before, assumed command and received instructions from General Patrick to proceed with the mission, notwithstanding the loss. The remaining three Cruisers proceeded along the Aleutian Islands with frequent stops at the many ships deployed along the route. Although they flew in daylight, they had little help from instruments, often were out of sight of the surface below, and had no landmarks that would show them the way. Nonetheless, they made it across the Pacific.

Relations between the United States and Japan were not good, in part because of American legislation in 1924 that restricted immigration by Orientals. Though the worst was yet to come, the trip through the Japanese islands was difficult but ultimately successful. As the three surviving aircraft passed along the coast of Southeast Asia, one lost an engine and had to make a forced landing. The movement of the aircraft to a place where a new engine could be delivered and installed in the plane was a saga in itself.

Up to that point, the aircraft flew with pontoons for water landings, but those were replaced by wheels for the flight across the Asian subcontinent and thence to France and the United Kingdom. Three made it to the British Isles and were refitted with pontoons for the transatlantic voyage. Soon after going out over the ocean, though, the crew led by Leigh Wade (then a lieutenant) made a second forced landing. He got his plane, dubbed the Boston, down in relatively good shape. A British warship quickly found Wade and his crewmate, Henry H. Ogden, and made a futile attempt to tow the airplane back to land. After the flyers arrived on land, they hustled back across the Atlantic and met the remaining two aircraft in Nova Scotia. General Patrick had dispatched another Douglas Cruiser, Boston II, to that province so that Wade and Ogden could complete the trip to Seattle. Once back in North America, the adventure became a publicity tour that finally ended in Seattle.

Carroll Glines has done a superb job of researching and writing this new account of the famous flight. He has spent a lifetime studying the secondary sources about this event and has thoroughly explored the primary unpublished sources as well. I highly recommend Around the World to APJ readers who desire an evening of entertaining reading that will also yield insights into the nature of flying in the formative years of the 1920s.

Dr. David R. Mets
Maxwell AFB, Alabama