The original schedule called for the world fliers to reach Shanghai on 5 May. Yet it was not until 5 June that the Boston and New Orleans were en route on the long flight across the junction of the Yellow and China seas to make that first stop in China. After wagging their wings to show that they understood Smith’s desire that they continue without him, Nelson and Wade headed southwest in the best weather on the longest sea journey of the trip so far. The engine was purring soundly so Nelson let his mind “browse” while Harding took the wheel. He commented to historian Lowell Thomas that he “seemed to see dozens of giant planes passing me in the sky with passengers making weekend trips between Shanghai and San Francisco, just as they now do between Paris and London. It seemed to me that the airplane was destined to be the agency that would bring the races of the world into such intimate contact with each other that they would no more feel inclined to wage wars than the people of Oregon feel like fighting the inhabitants of Florida.
“If our flight helps in any way to hasten this era, we shall be repaid a million times over for our efforts. Just what significance it will have to our fellow countrymen, we do not know. But there is one thing we do know, that it has done much to stimulate enthusiasm for aviation in Japan!”1
The two planes droned on in the best weather they had experienced since leaving Seattle. A serious problem developed for Nelson and Harding. As they reached the flight’s midpoint over the sea, the exhaust stack on the right side of the engine of the New Orleans became so hot that it began to burn the rubber off the ignition wires. Nelson throttled back to try to cool the metal and the engine kept purring satisfactorily. He later admitted, though, that if they had more than about two hours to go, they would have had to ditch.2
The Boston and New Orleans passed the USS Ford about seventy miles off the Chinese shore; it was the first of the several destroyers assigned to monitor their progress southward. They knew they were approaching the entrance to one of the great rivers of the world when the sea below changed from deep blue to green and then a muddy gold, the latter caused by the eroding silt upstream. It was the Yangtze-Kiang River, China’s chief commercial artery and the longest river in Asia. Millions of people live along its shores.
As the two crews flew across the mouth of the river, they saw thousands of junks, sampans, river boats, and large steamships, all trying to avoid each other. Anticipating their arrival, the harbormaster at Shanghai had cleared several miles of waterfront for their landing space. The river’s drop from the sea’s entrance is so slight that the ocean tide is very swift and runs upriver for two hundred miles. This rapid tide made it difficult for both crews to tie their planes to the buoys.
When they finally completed the tie-ups, they boarded an excursion boat containing hundreds of Americans and Europeans who had rented the boat to give them a historic reception. A delegation led by a General Lee, chief of the Chinese Air Force, and other high officials welcomed them to China and congratulated them for their achievement. Their arrival marked the first time that aircraft had linked America and China by air.
After meeting and shaking hands with the welcoming crowd, the four fliers excused themselves and rowed back to their planes rather than go ashore to meet a huge throng and a large force of uniformed militia that were clamoring to welcome them. They apologized to the hosts on the boat but hoped they would understand that their work on their flying machines came first.
Nelson felt strongly that the long exhaust manifolds on all the planes’ engines should be replaced with short, straight stacks to avoid overheating the engines as he had experienced. Since none was available in the advance supplies placed there, he arranged for a machine shop in downtown Shanghai to make three sets of stacks out of boiler tubing.
It was dark when they finished their work and were taken to the luxurious Hotel Astor in downtown Shanghai. They bathed, put on their wrinkled uniforms, and were taken by limousine to the home of a merchant prince. To their surprise, they were ushered into a huge ballroom where a large crowd with women in evening gowns and men in formal dress and others in military uniforms greeted them. The fliers made their way along a reception line while an orchestra played American music. Little girls walked ahead of them singing and spreading roses.
Smith and Arnold arrived the next day and experienced the same problem tying up to their buoy as the others had. They also were given the same kind of welcoming ceremonies on the excursion boat but returned to work on the Chicago by lantern light until long after dark. Smith was not interested in seeing the sights and met with Lt. Malcolm Lawton, the advance officer, and American naval officers to plan the safest way to take off from the crowded river and to position the destroyers for the upcoming flight to Amoy (later Xiamen). He decided that they would not take on sufficient fuel and oil for the 600-mile flight but a lighter load of each in order to take off in a shorter distance and avoid hitting any of the hundreds of sampans that were always scurrying on their self-absorbed excursions. Smith worked out a plan with the U.S. Navy destroyer captains to proceed down the coast and refuel at Tchinkoen Bay, three hundred and fifty miles from Shanghai. They took on sufficient fuel for only five hours of flight. Nelson found meanwhile that the pontoons on the Chicago were out of alignment and may have contributed to Smith’s difficulty in getting off the water at Kagoshima. He helped Smith and Arnold straighten them.
All was ready on 7 June and the takeoffs were as dangerous as the pilots had feared. The harbormaster was not able to clear a wide path and the river traffic was worse than when they had landed. All three planes nearly collided with some unheeding sampans and had to abort their first takeoff attempts. The water was also very rough because of swells from the ocean. But Smith and Wade were finally able to see a clear lane, scoot among several small junks, and depart. Nelson in the New Orleans had to quickly zoom right to evade a junk and went plunging up the river at a high speed, barely dodging the traffic. A large sampan suddenly loomed in front of him and he yanked back on the wheel with all his strength. He had enough speed, fortunately, to lift off and topped the mast of the wayward craft by a scant few inches.
It took four hours, thirty minutes, for the three planes to reach the destroyer off the China coast and refuel. They left at 2:45 P.M. to continue the flight along the coast to Amoy and arrived at 5:35. En route they flew very low to look at the hundreds of villages along the shore and the thousands of sampans filled with families and animals. Feeling exhilarated because the weather was excellent and the planes were responding perfectly, they played leapfrog over the junks.
At Amoy the destroyer Preble was waiting. It was under the command of Captain Glassford, commanding officer of the destroyer division escorting the flight through Indochina. They found that excellent arrangements for fueling and mooring had been made by the Standard Oil Company. Curious Chinese in their junks crowded around closely as soon as the fliers tied up and tried to refuel and check their engines. Much time was spent pushing them away from the pontoons. The boats with sails could not be easily controlled and repeatedly drifted into the planes. The launch from the Preble tried to keep them at bay and the officer in charge, frustrated by their refusal to back off, decided that the only way to drive them away was to sink a few. He headed toward a few sampans at high speed and swerved to capsize them. From then on the boatmen kept at a respectful distance.
Amoy, located in the south Fujian Province of China, sits on an island at the mouth of the Jiulong River. It was one of the earliest seats of European commerce in China. Amoy has a storied past as the major base of pirates and buccaneers who plundered the coastal villages and raided passing ships. The fliers had no desire to visit the city and stayed aboard the Preble for the night. The crews wanted to leave at daybreak next morning but had more difficulty preparing for departure. The curious Chinese again crowded their boats around the planes and refused to allow a clear takeoff path. Again the Navy helped, yet it took an inordinate amount of time and they were not able to take off until 10:30 A.M.
They were warned before takeoff that they might run into a typhoon on the 310-mile flight down the coast and around China Point to Hong Kong. As they plunged ahead, the skies darkened ominously with lightning streaking at frequent intervals. A strong wind with extreme turbulence estimated at about a hundred miles an hour hit them from the rear and increased their ground speed to 150 mph. It did not last long, fortunately, and they emerged over a calm sea. But they soon ran into fog and a driving rain that forced them down low, barely topping hundreds of boats of all descriptions. The increasing number of them proved that they were nearing Hong Kong, the crown colony that was ceded by the British to China in 1842, with one of the busiest seaports in the world. It prospered before and since as an east-west trading center and commercial gateway to South China.
Hundreds of boats of all descriptions and sizes filled the harbor with a faithful American destroyer anchored among them. Smith and the others circled over the scene looking for the yellow buoys that were supposed to have been anchored in a clear area. They could not find them. The instructions telling them where to tie up had not been received before they left Amoy. Smith flew low over the destroyer and was waved over to the other side of the bay. The planes finally landed at 1:35 P.M. and taxied to a small cove near the Standard Oil Company dock.
All that day and the next were spent refueling and working on the propellers of the three planes in the Standard Oil machine shop. A leaking cylinder jacket on the Chicago’s engine was welded with the help of the company employees. One pontoon on the Chicago was still causing problems and was leaking badly. J. W. Shaw, the oil company agent, arranged for a portable crane on a barge to lift the plane onto the dock. Here they installed a new pontoon that had been brought previously to Hong Kong by one of the Navy destroyers.
The morning of 10 June was extremely hot as the fliers prepared to leave for Haiphong, French Indochina (now Vietnam). The shortest distance would take the planes over a peninsula between the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin, variously shown on their maps as Leih-Chew, Quant-Chaw-Wau, and Luichow where “there are more tigers and leopards than anywhere else in China,” according to Smith. It would be a risky flight for a seaplane because if any of the Cruisers had engine trouble, a crash was inevitable in the rugged jungle.
“Evidently, the natives of Luichow Peninsula had never seen airplanes before,” he added. “We flew only five hundred feet off the ground, and as we came roaring into view we could see the Chinese running in every direction. When we caught up with them, they would swing off either to the left or to the right to avoid the dragons that seemed about to gobble them up.”3
Leigh Wade remembers that particular flight from a different perspective. “From Hong Kong to Haiphong, we passed over a group of islands that rival our Thousand Islands if not surpassing them in beauty,” he wrote years later. “Some were mere rocks of various colors, while others were covered with a jungle forest. We were pleased to have had clear weather for a fog or storm undoubtedly would have meant disaster as the islands were so close together.”4
The trio of planes reached the mouth of the Red River at sundown and were moored again near a Standard Oil Company pier. Several motor launches eased up to the planes and a group of French men and women wanted them to come aboard one of them for a welcoming reception. They did not seem to understand why the men had to service their planes. One particularly aggressive Frenchman tried several times to step aboard one of the pontoons of the Chicago to deliver a welcoming speech but Smith pushed his boat off each time. It was dark when the fliers were ready to go ashore and the man was still there. Smith was embarrassed to find out that he was the French governor-general who was trying to invite them to a formal reception. He apologized for his unintentional discourtesy and accepted the invitation for the group.
But they had a problem. Since they had discarded their clothes before the flight from Japan to China, they could not attend formal functions in their greasy flying suits. On several occasions, they borrowed suitable clothing from the officers on board the escorting destroyers. Smith explained that they would “size up” the officers they met on board and borrow white trousers and shirts, shoes, socks, ties, and sun helmets. “This would enable us to board the waiting rickshas and sally forth to the evening’s festivities as snappily groomed as any cake-eater of the China coast.”5
At the reception that night, the fliers learned that the Portuguese fliers, Brito Pais and Sarmiento Beires, had arrived in Rangoon, Burma. They had crashed in India but the British Royal Air Force had given them a new plane and they were determined to continue their quest to win the honor of being first around the globe. At the same time, MacLaren, the British pilot, was still at Akyab waiting for the American destroyer to bring him his replacement Vickers amphibian from Japan.
“This news of the progress of the Portuguese was like a tonic to us,” Smith reported later. “Excusing ourselves from the reception, we hurried back to the destroyer, got a good night’s sleep, and were up at dawn the next morning, June 11, hoping to reach Saigon, or at least to get halfway down the coast of French Indochina that day.”6
The trio of planes had the same difficulty getting off the Haiphong River’s smooth surface as they had experienced on previous takeoffs from quiet waters. All three planes refused to break the water’s suction despite the pilots pushing the Liberty engines to full throttle and rocking back and forth on the wheel. The ubiquitous junks and sampans also seemed determined to impede their takeoffs and forced the planes to zigzag as best they could to avoid collisions. All of the planes eventually got off but it took Wade twelve miles at full throttle for him to break his pontoons loose, even though his airspeed indicator showed the normal takeoff speed of 55 miles an hour.
Once airborne, the flight to Tourane, French Indochina (later named Da Nang, South Vietnam), a seaport halfway between Haiphong and Saigon, seemed destined to be an easy one but fate intervened for Smith. They crossed a narrow peninsula and cruised low over rice fields where hundreds of men, women, and water buffaloes labored in the bleaching sun. The rice fields gave way to thick jungle and then the Gulf of Tonkin. Thirty miles off the coast, the Chicago’s engine began to overheat, causing Smith to look quickly for a quiet lagoon. He turned west toward the shore, found one, and landed. Arnold leaped out, grabbed a bucket, filled it with water, and handed it to Smith who poured it in the radiator. Seeing what the problem was, Wade and Nelson circled until Smith was airborne again and rejoined them.
The problem was not solved for long. Twenty minutes later, the engine temperature had risen and the engine began to pound ominously. Both men began to look for a lagoon and found one about three miles inland. Smith throttled back and glided toward it while the engine seemed to be going to pieces. Smith landed immediately and Arnold leaped out of the rear cockpit, extinguisher in hand, ready to put out a fire if necessary. A connecting rod had broken and was projecting through the crank case. Water had been lost through a cracked cylinder and an auxiliary water valve. The engine didn’t erupt into flames but they were now stranded on a small lake without food or water, far from any visible habitation, with an engine that could not be repaired.
Nelson and Wade had watched the Chicago glide down and land safely in the lagoon. After they saw Smith and Arnold get out on the pontoons and signal that the engine was beyond their ability to repair, both landed to help out. They gave them all the drinking water and food they were carrying and promised to get a new engine to them as soon as possible. They then took off for Tourane, leaving the two stranded airmen to assess the primitive area in which they landed. The lagoon was full of fish traps, so there must have been people nearby to service these. Many tropical birds soared overhead. What caused them to exercise caution as they inspected the engine damage were the crocodiles that occasionally surfaced, looked at the strange object that had entered their domain, and slowly slithered away.
After about an hour, a dugout emerged from the jungle covering along the shore. Steering it cautiously was a nearly naked native who seemed concerned that these large birds had tied up to the bamboo stakes marking his traps. Smith and Arnold understood his concern and got out their anchor and ropes and allowed the plane to drift to another part of the lagoon before throwing the anchor overboard.
Seeing that the lone fisherman was not harmed by the white men, others paddled out to look them over. They became so chummy that they climbed on the pontoons and their weight threatened to sink them. Smith and Arnold spent the rest of the day in the hot sun shooing them off. They thought they would try to persuade one of the boatmen to take them to shore but hesitated when a man in a white robe who looked neither native-born nor European rowed out from shore and spoke in French. Although apparently a priest, he seemed to want only to buy cigarettes from them. When they were able to make him understand in their pidgin French they had no cigarettes, he refused to get them water or food and paddled off. Arnold found an empty bottle in the plane’s storage compartment and followed him in a borrowed dugout hoping to get some fresh water. He had seen what looked like a small mission church hidden in the jungle foliage and found a spring behind it to fill the bottle.
The water didn’t last long between the two men and their thirst became more intense. In late afternoon, a sampan arrived with three more French missionaries dressed in white robes. They seemed more sympathetic and warned both men not to drink any water offered by the natives from their dugout canoes. While Smith stayed with the plane, Arnold went ashore to the home of the priests and was treated to a welcome glass of wine. They gave him a bottle of it, some boiled rice wrapped in leaves, and several baked yams to take to Smith. It was pitch dark when he returned to the plane. He did not realize that he had been gone for more than three hours.
Smith meantime had been having difficulty keeping the natives and their dugouts away from the pontoons in the darkness; in desperation he fired a few rounds from the Very pistol over their heads to scare them off. After doing this several times, he then aimed his flashlight directly at them. They thought this meant he was going to fire at them again and they backed off. Smith had become desperately thirsty under the broiling sun while waiting for Arnold and had gulped down a few swallows of water offered from one of the dugouts. He knew better because they had all been warned before they left the States about the dangers of drinking water in the tropics, yet the urge to drink had overwhelmed him.
While Smith and Arnold were having their difficulties, Nelson and Wade had arrived at Tourane and began immediately to make arrangements to obtain a new engine. They hurriedly boarded the destroyer Noah that was waiting for them and met Lt. Malcolm Lawton, the advance officer who had arranged the supply bases and mooring points along the China coast. It was decided among them that Nelson would return to the lagoon while the USS Noah would bring a new engine from Saigon. The destroyer had been positioned there for just such an emergency and would now arrange to get a new engine as near as possible to the Chicago.
Also aboard the Noah was M. Chevalier, the Standard Oil Company representative Lawton had appointed as an agent. He took the men to his home to study a map of French Indochina in order to locate the lagoon and plan the best route to reach it. It was found that the Chicago was down nearest the city of Hue, capital of the Province of Annam (later incorporated into Vietnam), which could be reached by a good road in an automobile. Nelson and Chevalier would confer with French officials there and proceed then by the best means through the jungle. Wade, Ogden, and Harding meanwhile would perform maintenance on the New Orleans and Boston and wait.
It took three hours for Nelson to reach Hue. Although the road was reasonably smooth, they had to go through wild jungle country and be ferried across several streams by barges. When they arrived at Hue, they were told that it was impossible to reach the lagoon by automobile and they would have to go part of the way by barge or sampan. Nelson tells about his experience:
“At the little hotel in Hue we bought sandwiches, milk, soda water, and other things to take along for the boys, engaged a man who spoke a little French to guide us, and at 11 P.M. that night we were off in the automobile. There are many waterways through this part of Annam so we decided to make first for a place owned by a friend of Chevalier’s. He owned a rice plantation on the river that ran into the lagoon we were looking for. We got within two miles of the plantation in the automobile; then we had to load our food and other supplies into a sampan and continue upriver.
“It was pitch dark, not even a star. How the natives could find their way around the bends in that stream on such an inky night was beyond me, but evidently their eyes are better trained for penetrating darkness than ours. This is a great tiger country, and the Annamites live in mortal terror of ‘Master Stripes.’ They also have a wholesome respect for crocodiles. Before we got into their sampan they threw a little cooked rice into the river and offered up a prayer to the spirits of the night, imploring them to protect us.”7
They arrived at the plantation of Chevalier’s friend and were advised to proceed overland through the jungle for a few miles to the home of a native-born priest who could advise them on the best way to get to the lagoon. The friend persuaded a few men to carry the food and guide them through the jungle.
“Just how far we hiked I do not know,” Nelson said. “We proceeded single file, and what impressed me the most was the multitude of little shrines all along the way where the men said their prayers and left offerings for the tigers and their other forest friends. Every traveler who goes this way leaves a banana or a bit of rice on these altars. There were shrines every five minutes, and occasionally we passed a good-sized temple. On both sides of the trail there was dense jungle that could only be penetrated by cutting your way through with an ax.
“At last we arrived at the thatched house of the priest. While the local men remained outside, he invited us in, told us he had neither seen nor heard any airplanes, but would send for some of the men who had been out fishing that day. At the same time he ordered one of his servants to notify the mandarin who lived a mile or so away. The fishermen were unable to help us, but they did say they had seen two monsters flying through the air that afternoon.
“The mandarin came to the priest’s bungalow dolled up in a gorgeous silk costume and followed by quite a retinue. He was most polite and offered to place sampans and men at our disposal. So we set off downriver again. Exhausted, I stretched out in the bottom of the sampan while Chevalier inspected the banks with the two flashlights we had brought along. When we passed a village, then the night would be rent by the cries of the people onshore and those paddling us who answered shout for shout.
“An hour or more went by before anyone could give us encouraging news. At last a man told us that there was an airplane in a lagoon not far away. Eureka! We knew we were on the right track. From then on, we kept the flashlight going continuously, and called out every few minutes. At last we heard an answering shout.”8
Smith and Arnold had spent the night on the plane after drinking the wine and eating the rice and bananas. Exhausted from the heat and humidity, Smith crawled into the plane’s tool compartment with his head sticking outside the opening while Arnold stretched out on the wing. It was about 3 A.M. when both men happily returned the shouts from the rescue party. The reunion was especially memorable for Erik Nelson as it was 12 June 1924, his thirty-sixth birthday. The three fliers and Chevalier partied until daylight celebrating with the food and beer Nelson had brought along for the occasion.
There was much work to be done. The three went ashore and arranged for men in the nearest village to attach three sampans in tandem to the plane and tow it twenty-five miles upriver to Hue, the old capital city of what was later South Vietnam. There they would await the arrival of the new engine. The parade of boats was led by a chieftain reclining in his royal chair under a huge umbrella, while his concubines lit his cigarettes and served him drinks. A tribesman beat a tom-tom for cadence while families and friends trailed behind in their houseboats. About halfway, Nelson and Chevalier debarked near where they had left the automobile the night before and the Chicago continued its spectacular tow to Hue. Arnold, stretched out on one of the plane’s pontoons, kept shouting, “I’m going to quit the Army, come back here, and start a super race!”
“Our French friend had sent a courier ahead to warn the inhabitants of Hue that we were coming,” Smith recounted. “So when we arrived the whole population was out to meet us. Erik and Chevalier, who had arrived ahead of us, had rounded up a company of Annamite soldiers to guard the plane, which we beached close to a bridge that looked as if it would be a good place for changing engines. And so it was; for it was much simpler to use the bridge for raising the engines than to attempt to rig up a derrick.”9
At dawn next day, Nelson and Chevalier left for Tourane while Smith and Arnold disconnected the engine from the plane. By midmorning the heat had become so intense that both men nearly fainted. M. Bruel, a professor at a local college, had been observing them at work and invited them to his home. He had his servants give them a bath by throwing buckets of cold water on them and then loaned them clothes while their dirty coveralls were laundered. They were entertained during the evening with songs and dances by students and staff of the local college and spent that night at a small French hotel.
The spare engine had been rushed by the USS Noah from Saigon to Tourane where Wade had remained to watch over the New Orleans and Boston. When the engine arrived, Nelson, Harding, and Chevalier left for Hue by automobile, while Ogden and four volunteer sailors from the destroyer accompanied the crated engine in a motor lorry.
Ogden would never forget that ride as they left Tourane in the dark. “It was so dark I couldn’t tell what sort of country we were going through or what pace we were making, but it must have been fully thirty miles an hour,” he said later. “Traveling at that rate in a truck over a jungle road is enough to shake your toenails to your throat.”
Up and up and up we went. It seemed as though we must be ascending Pikes Peak or Mount Everest. Occasionally I saw two balls of fire gleaming through the trees, and knew that it must be some wild animal. Finally we came to the top of the mountain range and started to coast down the other side. If we were making a mile an hour, we were doing between forty and fifty.…
Suddenly the bumping ceased and I felt as though I were riding in an airplane again. Sure enough, we were flying, and a moment later we flew into some trees. Mr. Annamite had buzzed right off the road into the jungle. It took us thirty minutes to disentangle the truck from the underbrush and get it back on the road. But even this experience taught him nothing. On we went, as if kicked by an army mule. Fifteen minutes later, we jumped off the highway again and crashed into a pile of rocks. Next day, on the return journey, I had a look at this place and noticed that on the far side of those rocks there was a thousand-foot precipice, so the good Lord was watching over us on this trip.
When we got to the bottom of the mountain, there was a place where the road went diagonally across a railroad track. Instead of continuing on the road, the fool Annamite swerved off and went bumping over the ties. It took us another half hour to drag the truck back to the road.
We crossed a second range of mountains, and on our way down the grade this time, the brake band broke. I had climbed into the seat next to my neck-or-nothing chauffeur, hoping that my presence might tend to sober him somewhat. It was lucky I had, for he had just brain enough to do what I signaled, to throw the engine in low speed. In doing so, however, he let go of the steering wheel, so we left the road again. If it hadn’t been for some trees, I am sure we should be going yet, because there was a deep valley right under us. My heart stopped beating at least ten times that night.10
Ogden’s risky adventure was still not over. They reached a lagoon when they entered the next valley and had to be transported across it on a barge poled by fishermen. When halfway, the barge began to leak and the men panicked. They immediately poled back to the beach they had left and got there just in time to off-load the truck. The crew of the sinking barge hollered for friends on the other side of the lagoon who came over with their barge. Ogden, the sailors, and the truck with the engine finally made it to Hue as dawn was breaking.
With the help of Smith and Arnold, the old engine was lifted out of the plane and the new one was dropped into place. All the engine lifelines were connected and the plane was ready to go in less than four hours in what Ogden, an experienced hand at engine changes, said was record time. Smith started it up and taxi-tested the plane before taking off for Tourane, sixty miles away.
The episode had been an extraordinary example of cooperation between the U.S. Navy, the French agent, sailors, priests, boatmen, and the fliers themselves. The entire episode had taken only seventy-one hours from the time Smith and Arnold had landed on the remote lagoon until they flew the plane away with its new engine.
Nelson and the others returned to Tourane with the truck and arrived before nightfall on 15 June. Next morning the crews arose early and the three planes were airborne for Saigon shortly after 5 A.M. The weather was favorable but the Boston had its troubles during the flight when the generator stopped working. The cause could not be determined. When they found that no spare generator was available, Nelson, a master at innovation, later installed an extra storage battery with a switch so that one battery could be used for a short while, then the other.
After flying over more jungle, rice paddies, and quiet lagoons, the trio of planes arrived over the entrance to the Mekong River at 1:30 P.M. The three planes landed at the French Army Hydroplane Station on the Saigon River north of the city. They had arrived at what was then called the “Paris of the Orient,” the most southern point they would reach nearest the equator.