30 - Visions of One World

Summary

On August 26, 1942, Wendell L. Willkie, who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the 1940 presidential election, took off from Mitchell Field on Long Island in a converted B-24 four-engine Liberator bomber. The bomber, called the “Gulliver” and flown by a crew of US Army officers, took Willkie on an extraordinary forty-nine day, 31,000-mile tour around a world engulfed in war. Not only did he circle the globe but, as Willkie made a point of noting after he landed back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 14, for the bulk of his journey he flew around the equator, making numerous stops in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and looping back home through Siberia and over the Arctic Ocean (Map 30.1). En route, he toured Cairo, Egypt, and made a trip to El Alamein in the country’s Western Desert to confer with the Allied commander there, General Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, just as the Allied forces had stopped the German advance in North Africa and were planning for the final of defeat of their forces there. In Beirut, Lebanon, Willkie met with the exiled leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, in his villa in the city. In Jerusalem he received both Jewish and Arab representatives and contemplated the conflict between them, wondering presciently whether “the only solution to this tangled problem must be as drastic as Solomon’s.”¹