China To NYC 1942 Cover "[…] Per. Pan American Airplane."

China to New York City, 1942 "Via Weilin + Wu Cho // Per. Pan American Airplane." Specifics of origination indecipherable to me.

Thought this one was scan-worthy. Comments welcomed. Thanks for looking!

(First topic outside of the " inherited" forum; feel free to advise.)

At this time in 1942 Pan American Airlines was under contract to the US military to fly military and civilian airmail around the world, including China. Basically most airmail to the US was flown by this service, though there was also some flown on BOAC westward via Portugal that went to New York. By the end of 1942 the Army Air Force had forced Pan Am to become a part of the Army Air Force to do the same job, but with all of the Pan Am folks now being officers and enlisted men in the Army they were paid much less than when they were contractors. This included Pan Am subsidiary airlines such as Chinese National Air Corporation (CNAC) that flew internally in China. Depending on what month it was during the war mail from China was routed either eastward across the Pacific or westward to Burma, India, Egypt, Nigeria, Gold Coast, Liberia then across the south Atlantic to Brazil and up to Miami before being delivered to its addressee in the US. The decision was based on which route was less likely to be intercepted at that moment.

Nice cover! The script actually says "Via Weilin to Wuchow", although it should say "Via Kweilin to Wuchow". These two places in modern times are now romanized as Guilin and Wuzhou. You showed a cover in another thread that also had a Guilin postmark. I hadn't paid attention to the board name and didn't realize until now that this was part of an inheritance. Condolences for your family loss, but congratulations on your acquisition of interesting stamps.

The cover was sent from a business to another business. On the China end, it is from Mr. Huang of the Rongyi Company. It looks like is was postmarked first at Wuchow (23Apr1942) and then Kweilin (28Apr1942).

@kimo thank you for the historical info, it's fascinating to learn about.

@khj thanks! I inherited the stamps and the hobby. I guess it runs in the blood… now I know where my love for collecting comic books came from.