THE FIGHT FOR SOUTHERN SKIES

Images of South American cities burst forth on movie screens across the United States in the 1930s, sun-kissed and glittering as in Flying Down to Rio or swank with hippodromes and landscaped parks as in Down Argentine Way — the kinds of places an American girl like Betty Grable might go on vacation. The far-off cities, alive with the music of samba and tango or the blithesome voice of Carmen Miranda, materialized before audiences as exciting and inviting. The picture was romantic, and in many ways true.

In Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, cash did flow. Cars, buses, and trucks shuttled people and goods from the ports and around the streets in effervescent movement. The Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, the continent's third-largest metropolis with European-looking buildings set among shady streets, prospered too, commanding commerce on the Rio de la Plata — the Plate River, named for silver, plata — upstream from Paraguay all the way down to where the wide river feeds the Antarctic seas.

Drive an hour or two outside these waterfront centers, however, and the isolation of most South American towns hit home with the first flat tire on a rutted dirt road or the first experience of a highway that had become an impassable river of mud. Rail travel was uncomfortable, with schedules undependable. Everyone wanted to fly. In the grand finale of the immensely popular Flying Down to Rio film, dancers perform on the wings of aircraft swooping high over city and shore while enthusiastic crowds watch from below. What the Hollywood movies did not show was how thoroughly German planes were masters of the air above South America. It was easier for passengers from the southern continent to travel to the heart of the Reich than to the heartland of the United States. Most routes were flown by German- or Italian-owned companies, or local companies using German pilots, or pilots who were naturalized German- born citizens. In 1934, when Brazilian generals wanted to map the country's remote interior, they contracted the new aerial photography unit of a German-controlled airline to record its every square mile. Whether the initiative for the mapping came from the Brazilians or in some way from the Germans is not clear.

Germans, and thousands of Japanese immigrants in agricultural settlements, lived in six countries on the Amazonian littoral: Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia. Few North Americans inhabited the resource-rich region, however, especially after Fordlandia, an Amazonian rubber-growing enterprise of Henry Ford, largely collapsed. An Associated Press editor sent his correspondent from New York on assignment to "tell us whether the South Americans are really our friends." The reporter, John Lear, survived a 1942 plane crash in the Peruvian desert to report that at regular distances, "over an area larger than the United States, the Amazon was lined with airports cut from the wilderness by German technicians."

The United States was well into the war by the time Lear wrote that "at least several times a week, sometimes each day, German planes piloted by German flyers came down on these airports on a fixed schedule." He noted that U.S. intelligence officers called the ubiquitous German pilots a threat to defense of the Panama Canal, only a short flying distance away. "Taking these planes from German hands would not deprive the Germans of their maps or flying knowledge of this almost unknown terrain," Lear wrote.

How did Germans come to be the virtual owners of South American skies? The answer lies partly in an unforeseen consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I after Germany's military defeat. Signed in June 1919, Versailles, among its punishing terms, forbade Germany to have an air force. That ended the careers of many military pilots and eliminated an otherwise natural career path for German youth attracted to aviation. From their devastated homeland, German aviators joined thousands of entrepreneurs of all stripes in turning their eyes across the Atlantic to South America, with its reputation as a frontier region that offered fresh starts, especially where German colonies already existed.

A GOSPEL OF FLIGHT

Airlines, German-owned or not, grew in South America within a global atmosphere of enthusiasm for the potential of human conquest of the skies. The dreams began in 1903 with the Wright brothers' first short flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Poignantly, it seems now, some early designers and pilots saw aircraft as a technology that would knit the world together and make war obsolete. The Pomeranian Otto Lilienthal, considered the founder of the science of wing aerodynamics and an inspiration to the Wright brothers, represented this "gospel of aviation." In January 1884, Lilienthal wrote a letter to the Prussian naval officer Moritz von Egidy, a current of excitement rippling through his words.

Numerous technicians in every nation are doing their utmost to achieve the dream of free, unlimited flight and it is precisely here where changes can be made that would have a radical effect on our whole way of life. The borders between countries would lose their significance ... national defence would cease to devour the best resources of nations ... the necessity of resolving disagreements in some other way than by bloody battles would, in its turn, lead us to eternal peace.

In the United States men and women took to the air with what author Gore Vidal called a "quasi-religious" fervor. Vidal's father Gene, an intimate of Amelia Earhart and President Roosevelt's director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, served as an executive of three commercial airlines. Just as Henry Ford envisioned putting every family on the road with his Model T, Gene Vidal saw a day when the simple "Everyman's Plane" would put everyone on the skyways. "Flight would make men near- angels," wrote Gore Vidal, "and a peaceful world one."

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Brazil's own air pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont, spent many evenings gazing at the starry skies above the coffee plantation where he grew up. Born in 1873, he read voraciously as a boy, especially Jules Verne. "With Phileas Fogg I went round the world in eighty days." Santos-Dumont moved to France, where he joined the...