Three Soviet Fliers’ 1937 Happy Landing in a Southland Pasture

Just 12 days after Amelia Earhart disappeared dramatically in the Pacific while attempting an around-the-world flight, a trio of Russian aviators blazing a new polar route had to take an unexpected forced landing--in a Riverside County cow pasture.

At a time when the young Soviet Union was establishing itself as, in Winston Churchill’s words, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” the experimental single-engine plane was the second of three pioneering Soviet flights intended to test the feasibility of a commercial airline route from Moscow to the United States.

Their surprise landing here earned them parades and hobnobs with movie stars and aviation pioneers.

On July 14, 1937, pilot Mikhail Gromov, co-pilot Andrei Yumashev and navigator Sergei Danilin piloted their brakeless, single-engine ANT-25 plane--with a wingspan of 125 feet--to a landing in what is now near the Riverside County city of San Jacinto.

Although the fliers had charted San Diego as their destination, fog forced them to find an alternative landing site. After flying the 6,305 miles from Moscow in 62 hours and 17 minutes, the crew climbed wearily out of the red-winged, silver-bodied craft, walked up to a farmer who had watched them land and handed him first a pre-printed note asking him to call the Soviet Embassy, and then three cards that read: “Bath” “Eat” and “Sleep.”

The abrupt landing only enhanced the ecstatic news coverage that had anticipated the Soviet trio. From the cow pasture, they went on to be cheered by millions in their triumphal tour through American cities--first in San Diego and downtown Los Angeles, then in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and finally New York. They were hailed in telegrams from their own leader, dictator Josef Stalin, and from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Only Philadelphia refused to honor the aviators, for reasons the mayor did not explain.

The crew had been competing with another flight piloted by Valeri Chkalov. Gromov and Chkalov’s planes were scheduled to depart at the same time, but as they readied their airplanes for takeoff, Chkalov took the single engine out of Gromov’s plane and hid it as a prank, which contributed to a three-week delay in Gromov’s takeoff. Chkalov’s flight ended in Washington state, but it was Gromov’s cow-pasture emergency landing that garnered national attention.

In an age when the notion of commercial air travel was still a novelty, news of Gromov’s flight was a sensation. Worldwide, newspapers and radio monitored the flight, while West Coast residents looked skyward for a glimpse of the plane as the landing date approached.

The three crew members, each the size of a football player, rode in a cramped 3-by-4-foot fuselage, their baggage and extra gasoline crammed into the wings all the way out to the wingtips. Soviet engineers had removed the plane’s brakes, figuring that subtracting that weight would add another 146 miles to the plane’s range.

After the plane descended on the bumpy cow pasture, local farmer Walter Harvey was the first to greet them. Dairyman Earl Smith, in whose field they landed, gave each man a glass of milk in exchange for their autographs.

Smith, with the instincts of a showman, soon roped off his pasture and charged 25 cents to view the plane. In the week before the plane departed, he collected $1,000.

Forty-five minutes after the pilots landed and began basking in their safe landing and the California sunlight, military officials from nearby March Air Force Base landed a plane in the cow pasture and taxied to a stop. Dick Bullock, a 27-year-old Army Air Corps lieutenant, was ordered to set enlisted men to protecting the plane from souvenir hunters. His men built a temporary fence, set up tents and kept gawkers from touching the plane.

All but one in the gathering crowd was friendly.

In Riverside, as in much of Southern California, citrus was sacrosanct, and an inspector with the state agriculture department quickly seized a half-sucked lemon out of Gromov’s hand and confiscated other contraband produce on board the plane. Gromov only smiled good-humoredly. (Evidently the Soviets, not trusting U.S. reports, brought their own produce to the California cornucopia.)

Their whirlwind six-day Southland journey took them on aircraft plant tours and to Twentieth Century Fox studios, where the tiny moneymaker Shirley Temple hosted a lunch and Eddie Cantor entertained them in the universal language of comedy.

In downtown Los Angeles, two days after their arrival, eager and expectant crowds of thousands waited along Spring Street for the nine-car parade to travel the blocks from 9th Street to City Hall. Russian immigrants, mostly from Boyle Heights and the Silver Lake area, picnicked on the grass-covered hill where the old red sandstone county courthouse had been torn down the year before.

Each aviator wore a gardenia on his lapel and was greeted with a shower of roses, confetti, paper streamers and clenched fists raised in salute. After they said a few words in halting English, the trio was whisked off to the Biltmore Hotel, where Mayor Frank Shaw and Gov. Frank Merriam hosted a dinner.

As the Russian heroes were being driven to San Francisco, their plane was being dismantled with the help of a local farmer, John Matchinoff. For his trouble, he was given the 70 gallons of gasoline left aboard the plane. Hurrying like the dairyman to profit from the moment, Matchinoff filled hundreds of small bottles with the gas and sold each one for 50 cents.

A month after Gromov and his men landed in Riverside, Sigismund Levanevsky, a Soviet aviator known as “the Russian Lindbergh,” and a five-man crew who had set off on the same polar route crashed near the Arctic Circle. All six men were killed, and no trace of them or the four-engine plane was left. Russians and aviation buffs continue to this day to search for the wreckage.

Months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Soviet Union, like Western Europe, was fighting Nazi Germany, Gromov was back in California, this time on a top-secret mission. The 47 Soviet fliers under his command toured airplane factories and negotiated a deal under the U.S. Lend-Lease Act to provide Russia with military planes to fight Germany. The planes were eventually shipped to the easternmost Soviet port of Vladivostok, where they were reassembled. This time, Gromov’s mission was so sensitive that a Washington state newspaper photographer who snapped an unauthorized photo of Gromov was briefly held in jail. When a boat filled with photographers tried to snap Russian aquaplanes, a Navy patrol boat fired four warning shots.

The emergency landing bore fruit decades later when San Jacinto adopted as its sister city the Russian town of Zhukovsky, home to an aviation school named for the pilot, the Mikhail Gromov Flight Research Institute.

In 1997, in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Russian landing in Riverside, Russian military and relatives of the three fliers arrived here with a replica of the plane as a gift for the March Air Field Museum. The model has a 22-foot wingspan and a 10-foot fuselage, and weighs 335 pounds.

Two markers, placed by the state and the county, commemorate the event: one at the landing site on Cottonwood Avenue west of Sanderson Avenue, where the cow pasture is hemmed about by more farmland, and another at nearby Hofmann Park on San Jacinto Avenue.