Blundo: How a 'Turtle' — and a kangaroo — came to make historic landing in Columbus
The airplane was called the “Truculent Turtle,” it had a kangaroo on board and its unplanned landing after a record-setting flight briefly made Columbus the focus of international attention in 1946.
Local author Jim Leeke tells the story in a new book, “The Turtle and the Dreamboat: The Cold War Flights That Forever Changed the Course of Global Aviation" (Potomac, 248 pages, $29.95).
The Turtle, a twin-engine P2V Neptune built by Lockheed as a land-based patrol bomber for the Navy, lumbered off a runway in Perth, Australia, on Sept. 29, 1946. It was piloted by Commander Thomas Davies, a Cleveland native.
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Overloaded with more than 8,000 gallons of fuel, a four-man crew and the kangaroo (included largely as a publicity stunt), there were fears it wouldn’t even get off the ground, let alone establish a nonstop record by flying 11,236 miles to Ohio.
“They were aiming for Washington D.C., and didn’t have quite enough gas,” Leeke said in an interview. “The Turtle pilot said he stopped (in Columbus) because he didn’t want to land in a pasture in West Virginia.”
Although not officially a competition, the Turtle was in a kind of contest with the Army’s “Pacusan Dreamboat,” a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber of the type that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan.
The Turtle and the Dreamboat were both seeking to establish new frontiers in long-distance flight, not to mention impress government brass who were in the midst of planning to create the U.S. Air Force as a separate branch of the military.
The Army and Navy “were trying to prove their capabilities,” Leeke explained.
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The Dreamboat, piloted by Col. Clarence Irvine, took off from Honolulu on Oct. 4, 1946, flew over the North Pole — a rare and much riskier undertaking in those days — and landed in Cairo on Oct. 7, after a 39-hour flight that covered about 9,500 miles. The crew included navigator James T. Brothers of Dayton.
The media followed the progress of both flights intensely, which meant all eyes were on Columbus when the Turtle landed here after 55 hours in the air.
“The fliers were surprised by the size of the crowd,” Leeke writes. “Uniformed Navy shore patrolmen struggled to hold back a surge of spectators . . .”
Columbus Mayor James A. Rhodes, a future governor of Ohio, greeted the crew and proposed that the kangaroo be given to the Columbus Zoo. (It went instead to the National Zoo in Washington.)
Leeke, 72, an Ohio State University graduate who served in the Navy and has worked as a journalist and written several books, said despite the Turtle’s distance record (which stood until 1962), the Dreamboat’s flight over the pole probably had the greater impact on aviation.
“Those (polar) air routes are still in use today.”
Both planes flew for a few more years before being decommissioned. The Dreamboat was scrapped; The Turtle is in the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida.
Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.
@joeblundo
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Unplanned airplane landing puts Columbus on world map in 1946
