Why American officers flew into Mexico remains a mystery

Editor’s Note: The Yuma Sun is reprinting articles from past newspapers throughout the year as part of the Yuma Sun’s 150th anniversary, honoring Yuma’s unique history. This column is one in a series written by local historian Frank Love that appeared periodically in the newspaper.

Sun readers who have been around as long as this columnist may remember “Wrong Way” Corrigan, who flew to Ireland when he was supposed to be on his way to California. Refused permission for a transatlantic crossing, Corrigan said he was flying to the West Coast, but crossed the Atlantic instead. The feat won him fame in 1938.

Corrigan wasn’t the first pilot to say he was going one direction when he was actually going another. The Yuma Sun of January 1917 contained news stories strongly suggesting two Army Air Service pilots pulled the Corrigan stunt 21 years earlier. But they didn’t win fame, only criticism. It resulted in a search and rescue effort which involved local residents and saved the lives of the aviators.

The 1917 flight began at San Diego on Jan. 9 when Lt. Col. Harry Bishop and Lt. W.A. Robertson took off from North Island Air Station. They only had authority to fly in the vicinity of the airport, authorities said. To fly east toward Arizona or Mexico required permission, which the news reports claimed they didn’t have.

Why they flew southeast into Mexico is unknown, but they did, and ran out of gas near the abandoned coastal port of Rosalia in Sonora. Fortunately, they could land their Curtiss biplane on the beach beside the Gulf of California. They began walking to find help.

The disappearance of the two fliers created anxiety in San Diego. Fourteen soldiers were formed into a rescue party to look for the pilots. An Arizona search party was created at Wellton to try to find them. It began scouring the desert south and west of there.

In the meantime, Bishop and Robertson were trudging across the Sonoran desert hoping to find civilization and help. They had taken a small portion of food on their plane, but it was soon gone. After walking for four or five days, Bishop said he could go no farther. Robertson, a much younger man, said he would continue looking for help and return to Bishop when he found it.

William Proebstel of the Wellton search party finally located Robertson about 60 miles south of there. Using the pilot’s instructions, the searchers then located Bishop.

He was in bad shape with this mouth and lips swollen and he was unable to walk. The rescue party carried him to Yuma, where he was hospitalized.

Mystery still surrounds the flight of the two aviators. The military publicly treated it as a case of two officers who disobeyed orders. But was that true?

Relations between the United States and Mexico were tense at the time of their flight. “Pancho” Villa’s irregular forces killed 18 U.S. citizens in January 1916, and he soon further antagonized Americans by crossing the border to raid Columbus, N.M. Gen. Pershing was ordered into Mexico with several thousand soldiers to try to stop the banditry.

He had little success, and his troops were only withdrawn shortly before Bishop and Robertson’s plane ran out of gas and landed on the Mexican beach.

When the two fliers first disappeared, Yuma’s Sun published a theory that the pair were bound for Guaymas, where they intended to offer their flying services to Mexican President Carranza.

Speculation was they would get huge salaries to serve as aviation chiefs for his government. Others believed they simply got lost and flew into Mexico by mistake.

When The Sun reported finding Robertson in Sonora on January 20, it said that he refused to talk about why they were flying into Mexico. It is possible he was embarrassed because of the result of their flight. Bishop did talk to the Wellton man who rescued him, insisting they landed the plane on the shore of the Salton Sea. The Sun stated that Proebstel had a difficult time convincing him it landed along the Gulf of California.

Once Bishop was hospitalized in Yuma, he had nothing more to say about how the plane ended up along the Gulf of California. The local newspaper thought his silence odd, noting that local men spent days searching for him.

“If the colonel and those who advise him think it right, and are satisfied that they withheld the courtesy of an interview from The Sun, this paper cheerfully accords them the satisfaction,” it noted.

While Bishop began his recovery in the Yuma hospital, Robertson was transported to San Diego “under guard.” After a short stay in the local infirmary, Bishop was transferred to Letterman Hospital.

One can only wonder if the pair flew into Mexico to spy on military activity there. Twenty-five days after his rescue, Robertson was reported “flying again” by The Sun.

That seems strange for an officer who hadn’t permission to fly beyond San Diego, and then lost his airplane in a foreign country. If true, why wasn’t he punished?