Ferry Command Article

Pembina’s brief moment of world attention, then, was part of the demise of American innocence. 

- "Earth Angels Rising", by Ted Beaudoin

It has been reported that the opening scenes of the 1941 Tyrone Power-Betty Grable movie, “A Yank in the RAF,” shows airplanes on the Pembina border being hauled into Canada. The narrator says, the way to get around neutrality restrictions is “Yankee ingenuity and a stout rope.” 

- Horse-drawn planes part of N.D. history (Bismarck Tribune, Jan. 16, 2011)

Emerson International Airport
by Bill Zuk (Nov 3, 2012)
Copyright © 2015 CAHS

Prince & Fred help make history! 

January 15, 1940 - It was miserably cold that morning when Joe Wilson hitched his team of horses to a wagon. He looked up in the sky to see two aircraft circling overhead. Joining a procession of cars and a truck laden down with fuel barrels, he lumbered his way to the front, coaxing his workhorses, Prince and Fred, forward along the wind-swept field. The assembled crowd began to gesture at the swooping twin-engine planes now clearly in view. Piling out of one of the lead cars was a film crew that hastily set up a tripod and movie camera.

Approaching the 'landing strip'
on Pembina side of the border.

Jimmy Mattern, the famous test pilot, peered out the side cockpit, astonished at the sight below. It was a wind sock planted in the middle of the prairies. After the long cross-country excursion from Burbank with numerous stops along the way, he was nearly at the end of his ferry flight. Lining up for an approach, he maneuvered the Lockheed Hudson bomber downwind for a landing short of the international border that straddled his landing site. Following closely behind was an identical Hudson bomber, also painted in a dark drab, with only civilian markings on the underside of the wings to identify it. The subsequent touchdown was hard, the second bomber swerving off the improvised runway and nearly tipping on its nose, before righting itself.

Pembina Ferry Command Video

Although mislabeled, the video below is indeed a very brief clip of a Ferry Command operation, towing planes across the US/Canadian border at Pembina ND/Emerson MB.  We didn't know it existed until recently.  A real treasure of a find!

The man in the long coat at the beginning of the film is Harry Wood, of Pembina ND, as identified by his granddaughter, Lori Wood Goertzen.

Ferry Command: Groundwork

Before there could be Ferry Command, the groundwork had to be laid...

The “Birdman” of Hamilton

'Birdman' Beachey,  putting on flying show at the Hamilton Fair

[Reprinted with permission]

When Orville and Wilbur Wright first took to the air in 1903, no one could imagine the future aviation would hold for the world. For people living on the flat prairies of North Dakota it would be seven more years before anyone would witness the daring exploits of a “birdman” when Archibald “Arch” Hoxsey gave the first demonstration flight in the state at the Grand Forks fairground July 19, 1910.

First North Dakota flight at Grand Forks Fair, 1910

Hoxsey had met Orville Wright in March of ’10, when Orville opened a school for aspiring aviators in Montgomery, Alabama. It was here Hoxsey learned to fly and joined other pilots in the Wright Exhibition Team, a troupe of flyers scheduled to give flying exhibitions around the country. These flyers would be the first to fly the new Wright Brothers Model B aircraft. Hoxsey’s Grand Forks flight was witnessed by an estimated 10,000 people as he flew 2,500 feet in the air during his 22-minute flight. Hoxsey’s flying career—and his life, at age 26—came to an end that same December during an exhibition flight in Los Angeles when his plane plummeted from a height of 7,000 feet. Hoxsey could not only claim being the first aviator to fly in North Dakota but to also carrying the first (former) United States president when he took Theodore Roosevelt airborne two months earlier in St. Louis.

Residents of Pembina County who had not been present at the Grand Forks exhibition would have to wait an additional three years before the first recorded airplane flight took place in the county. Hillary Beachey—billed as the “World’s Greatest Aviator”—was booked to make an appearance at the 1913 Hamilton Fair. Ads in the Cavalier Chronicle reading “see the dizzy, death-defying aeroplane flights by daredevil aviators every afternoon” drew large crowds to the fairgrounds. After the fair, the Chronicle reported “the program of attractions was perhaps larger and better by far than that of any previous fair held in the county. Perhaps the chief among these were the several flights of Hillary Beachey in his Aero Plane.”

Ferry Command Revisited III

Click to view larger...

I stumbled across the story at left today when going through archived newspapers.  It's on the backside of an article about my mother that appeared in a February 1940 issue of the Pembina New Era.

What's interesting about this article (although the term is never mentioned in the article itself), is that it's talking about Ferry Command.

I get a big chuckle out of how it's repeatedly stated that NO airplanes are being flown across the border.  That is literally true.  But what is not mentioned is that there had been planes towed across the border just the month before, thus not breaking the letter of the Neutrality Act of 1939...

Ferry Command Revisited II

A film was made about the Ferry Command operations...
I have written about Ferry Command several other times here on this blog. There is an important update on the books being written about it, and our area's important role within the operation.

As Ted Beaudoin - the author of an upcoming book on the subject - states below, we owe a LOT to the men and women who were part of this effort 70 years ago. My own mother witnessed the events that happened in Pembina/Emerson, two of the locations involved in this massive and critical operation during a dark time for the world. Our communities were two links in a very large and long chain that meant the difference. Ted does not overstate the importance of what this meant. I urge you to read this synopsis of what his book will be about - it's truly awe-inspiring!

Ferry Command Revisited

I was contacted again by Ted Beaudoin about his latest book, EARTH ANGELS RISING, which will be the second book in his aviation trilogy, Walking on Air. If you remember, this subject was covered in previous posts including this one. Ted wrote to share the latest on his book because he's heading into the homestretch on completing the manuscript, and is about to write up some details on Pembina's part in the story...