The Turtle and the Dreamboat: The Cold War Flights That Forever Changed the Course of Global Aviation by Jim Leeke

Abstract

In the fall of 1946, the U.S. military conducted a pair of hemisphere-spanning nonstop distance flights. In purely aeronautical terms, the flights of the Truculent Turtle, a Navy P2V patrol plane and the PACUSAN Dreamboat, an Army Air Forces B-29 bomber, were of little technical significance. But as a harbinger of Cold War power projection, the flights carried much greater importance. They showcased an increasingly ambitious U.S. capability to project power further than both allies and opponents, without having to rely on the basing that allies and partners had provided on a global scale during World War II. The Navy flight from Perth, Australia, to Columbus, Ohio, implicitly demonstrated that the island-hopping campaigns of World War II were no longer necessary to put much of the world in range of land-based nuclearcapable patrol planes. The Army Air Forces’ nonstop voyage from Oahu to Cairo via the North Pole signaled an even more ambitious intent. The same type of aircraft that had dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could now reach most of Europe and Asia from U.S. territory. Jim Leeke’s The Turtle and the Dreamboat: The Cold War Flights That Forever Changed the Course of Global Aviation is a highly readable and engaging narrative of the experience of these flights. In the words of the U.S. War Department, such efforts were to “‘demonstrate the aeronautical smallness of the world and what can be accomplished with today’s conventional bombers’” (p. 4). Most Cold War scholarship on U.S. airpower development in the late 1940s has focused on the Berlin Airlift or on the interservice rivalry between the newly independent Air Force and the Navy that led to the “revolt of the Admirals.” Hence, Leeke’s book is a useful addition to the oftenneglected historiography of the transition from World War II to the national security state of the late 1940s amid escalating tensions with the Soviet Union. Cold War scholars will also find it frustrating for its lack of analysis or insight into the geopolitical and strategic implications of the flights. This shortcoming reflects the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic presented for scholarly research. Leeke’s monograph shows both the opportunities and the limits of digital scholarship. Leeke, a U.S. Navy veteran and former journalist whose prior monographs focused on World War I, draws mainly on newspaper databases to provide a chronological retelling of the crews’ struggles to complete their flights, which the press tended to portray as a race between the services. He supplements this with context drawn from secondary sources. Presumably, with the National Archives closed during much of the pandemic, the papers of Navy and Army Air Forces headquarters and leadership that might define the intent and vision for these flights were unavailable. This absence mitigates the significance of the book. Leeke tells an interesting story but makes little substantive contribution to early Cold War studies.