Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper. By Brooke L. Blower

The premise of Brooke Blower’s Americans in a World at War is both brilliantly insightful and excitingly innovative, and it joins a growing body of work—including Emma Rothschild’s The Inner Life of Empires and Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History—that use ‘microhistories’ of individuals to probe the functioning of very large transnational organizations. Blower’s twist is that she has not one, but seven, stories to tell, belonging to some of the forty passengers and crew members packed into Pan-American Airlines’ Boeing B-314 seaplane Yankee Clipper for a flight from New York to Lisbon in February 1943. From the beginning, the story grips us: a transatlantic flight by a civil aircraft in the middle of a world war and an assortment of passengers all inevitably connected, openly or covertly, to the global conflict raging around them. These, Blower tells us with a wonderfully evocative phrase, were “in-between people,” and the dense networks of their travels tied the United States into the world’s “staging grounds and battlefields in ways that defied simplistic imaginaries like ‘war front’ and ‘home front’” (8). Adding another layer of narrative tension, the reader is aware that the Yankee Clipper’s transatlantic flight will end in disaster when the aircraft plows into the darkening waters of the Tagus river, killing twenty-four of those on board; what we don’t know is which of the seven will make it out alive.

Blower unpacks the backstories of her central characters in great detail, illuminating the tangled webs that led them to a seat on that particular flight. Tamara Drasin Swann, the only woman among the seven and a singer who preferred to be known simply by her first name, had fled to the United States to escape antisemitic pogroms in Ukraine. Struggling to carve out an artistic career during the Great Depression, Tamara kept up her connections with the radical world of Jewish politics in New York City. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, she became an enthusiastic supporter of the Allied war effort, and it was her participation in a pioneering United Service Organization tour to entertain Allied troops that led her to the Yankee Clipper.

Blower’s other characters are similarly revealing, and they highlight places and connections often overlooked in predominant narratives of ‘the war.’ The story of lawyer George Spiegelberg, commissioned into the U.S. Army and dispatched to London to help organize the pre-D-Day build-up of American forces, breathes life into the complexities of ‘reverse lend lease.’ Sent back to Washington to defend the program in Congress, his journey back to Britain in civilian garb led him to the Yankee Clipper. An employee of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Harry Seidel’s story illustrates his company’s close and controversial ties to the German firm I. G. Farben, a major supporter of the Nazi regime. As Blower points out, by 1939 half of Jersey Standard’s assets and sixty percent of its profits were derived overseas, helping to lay the global economic foundations of America’s coming hegemony. In a similar vein, of the story businessman-turned-radio-reporter Frank Cuhel shows just how far-reaching American business connections in prewar Southeast Asia were, and how entangled with European colonialism. Escaping from Java one step ahead of advancing Japanese troops, Cuhel was heading for a new reporting assignment in North Africa when he boarded the Clipper.

As these thumb-nail sketches demonstrate, these figures—along with her other major characters—all have interesting stories to tell. Unfortunately, however, Blower’s pursuit of these stories produces what is essentially a parallel series of detailed stand-alone narratives rather than an integrated and entangled history. Clearly, Blower can’t describe connections between the passengers that there is no evidence for, but she makes no real attempt to generalize from their experiences or to think about the ways in which their stories might work together. As a result, she doesn’t really deliver on the exciting promise of her notion of the “in-between” people: what conclusions, for example, can we draw about the importance of these types of people—and there were an awful lot of them—both to the prosecution of the war and to the construction of the emerging postwar order. In her concluding “Note on Method,” Blower notes persuasively that she has come to believe that “any clipper flight” would have yielded a similarly illuminating “cross-section of travelers,” but we don’t get even a brief discussion on the significance of this fact (364). How many travelers like this were there, and what journeys were they undertaking? Beyond the Yankee Clipper, how many nominally-civilian flying boats was Pan Am operating, and on what routes? So, for example, a tantalizing reference to Frank Cuhel booking a Clipper flight from Batavia to San Francisco in December 1941 remains a striking but isolated comment on transpacific civil aviation on the cusp of the global war rather than the jumping-off point for even a brief comment on Pan American’s role in the creation of new networks of lobal connectivity (205).

The consequence of Blower’s approach is that the big picture disappears under the accumulated weight of seven necessarily disjointed biographies, so that by the end of the book one is forced to conclude that whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Sadly, this parcelization means that Blower’s brilliant premise is only partially realized.