The route to Africa

Liberia, Scott C43, 1942, 39mm x 24mm

Once again we have a stamp issue commemorating the air supply route from North America via South America to western Africa in the middle of World War II. Only three countries are depicted (the United States, Brazil, and the issuing country of Liberia). An outsized 4-engine transport plane (possibly a C-108 Flying Fortress) is shown alongside the coast-hugging path southward.

I am not sure that the business of transport is considered to have enough charisma to show up much on stamps nowadays, relatives to the most popular topicals.

Previously.

The aeroplane age

United States, Scott C10, 1927, 47mm x 20mm
United States, Scott C8-C9, 1926, 47mm x 20mm

Look! It’s Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” flying from New York to Paris under the helpful sculptural inscription Lindbergh Air Mail. And on the other two airmail stamps, pairs of mail biplanes on a collision course. In each one, forced perspective makes it appear as the final outcome for good or for ill should occur within one or two seconds, at most. These come from a time where air travel was still new and daring, an exciting human achievement the same way the early space age felt.

Unlike the simple outlines of the countries at the edges of the North Atlantic on the Lindbergh stamp, the biplane stamp maps emphasize the geographical features of the Lower 48, not the political outlines so much, except for the southern border in bold.

Understated cooperation

Brazil, Scott 632, 1945, 37mm x 29mm
Here is another World War II commemorative masquerading as something celebrating international trade or something like that.

If one looks very closely at the destinations highlighted on this – Miami, Port [au] Prince, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Georgetown, Belém, Fortaleza, Natal [Rio Grande do Norte], Ascencion, Accra, Khartoum, and Cairo – tiny little aircraft symbols oriented west to east can be seen. This represents the route of a major troop transport mission between the U. S. and the various war fronts:

[T]he huge Parnamirim field at Natal became the focal point in the Allied air transport system that ran west then north through Belém and the Guianas, across the Caribbean to Miami, and east over the Atlantic via Ascension Island and across Africa to the China-Burma-India theater.

Who knew? And who looking at this staid issue with its modest title and no especial emphasis on the battle front would have made the connection even back then?

Red spider

Click to see the full-size image

USSR, Scott 2058, 1958, 21mm x 31mm
USSR, Scott 2086, 1958, Litho, 33mm x 21mm

Here is a stamped cover (apparently not a First Day of Issue) featuring two stamps. The map-related one shows a curiously oblate globe at its center. Crouching over the location Moscow prominently marked in red is a number of lines to various destinations, familiar and unfamiliar, including New York, London, Paris, Budapest, Cairo, Ankara, Delhi, Rangoon, Jakarta, Beijing/Peking, Khabarovsk, and Yakutsk. There’s a banner over everything with a Russian inscription I cannot make out, and a TU-104 civil aircraft at its head seeming to streak off into dark blue outer space over North America.

The second stamp from the same year marks 140th anniversary of Karl Marx’s 1818 birth, with the economic philosopher’s dauntingly bushy head reproduced in engraving from the photograph taken of him later in life. Karl Marx famously wrote

A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism.

which seems to me to be admirably suited to the other stamp, with its lurid many-tentacled shape brooding over northeastern Europe the way it does.

What a thrill and a sensation it must have been to see this piece arrive from Moscow, by air mail, to the post office at Chagrin Falls (just outside of Cleveland, Ohio) complete with an image of the old revolutionary in dusty rose-red! This was a time shortly Khrushchev ruled Russia as Premier and the Cold War with the United States was made manifest in conflicts all around the world. It was also only a year after the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite caused a great deal of popular concern about threats to the West from above. And it was not too long after the time of red-baiting had reached its height in the 1950s when a person’s ties to international Communism might cause some serious troubles for them in public.