pacific · United States
Canton Island — the Pacific ferry stop, 15 November 1944
A mile-long sand atoll in the Phoenix Islands of the central Pacific, 1,100 miles southwest of Honolulu — Robert Earl Wildermuth's first ferry-leg stop on the way to the war in November 1944. The airstrip ran water's-edge to water's-edge across the atoll's narrow width. The Van Valen crew's first overnight stop after the Honolulu hop; a grizzled sergeant met them at the nose compartment asking if they had any whiskey aboard ($50 a bottle on these atolls). Operated as a U.S. wartime air-ferry refueling stop and now a remote Kiribati-administered atoll.
Why this place matters
The smallest place Robert Earl ever landed an airplane. The atoll's single-tree weather station and $50 whiskey bottles capture the loneliness of the Pacific ferry route in November 1944 — the half-step between the United States and the war.
Canton Island (also called Kanton or Abariringa) is a mile-long sand atoll in the Phoenix Islands of the central Pacific, about 1,100 miles southwest of Honolulu and 1,800 miles northeast of Fiji. It sits today within the Republic of Kiribati. During the Second World War it served as one of the U.S. Air Transport Command’s Pacific ferry-route refueling stops between Hawaii and the New Guinea/Philippine theaters. The wartime airstrip ran water’s-edge to water’s-edge across the narrow center of the atoll.
What happened here in November 1944
Robert Earl Wildermuth and the Van Valen crew landed at Canton late on 15 November 1944 — the day after their fourteen-and-a-half-hour Travis-to-Honolulu Pacific hop. The Honolulu-to-Canton leg was 1,100 miles southwest with nothing but ocean and one mile-wide target at the end. “Finding this tiny island would test our navigational skills,” Robert Earl wrote forty-five years later in The Big One. “No landmark, railroad track or highway to follow, only the vast Pacific Ocean. Not an alternate runway or airfield to go in case we had an airplane malfunction.”
“This island had only one tree on it and daily at meal time all my the [sic] aircraft maintenance men permanently stationed there would gather under that one tree to eat. Upon landing and after opening all of the exit hatches, a grizzled, sun tanned sergeant stuck his head up in our nose compartment and asked if we had any whiskey aboard. Bottles of whiskey were highly prized on these desolate isolated islands in the Pacific. Many aircrews transiting through these islands frequently brought along from the United States, cartons of whiskey and sold the bottles for as much as $50 per bottle.”
The Van Valen crew did have one bottle of year-old Scotch with them. From Canton the route continued through more atoll-to-atoll legs to Biak Island in the Netherlands East Indies, where the 400th Bombardment Squadron was based at Mokmer Drome.
Why this place
Canton is the smallest place Robert Earl ever landed an airplane. The single tree, the lone maintenance sergeant, the bottle of whiskey changing hands — this is the half-step between the United States and the war. Forty-five years later it was still vivid enough to lead the first day of his combat memoir.
Source: The Big One, Phase 1 ferry leg, 15 November 1944.