Video: 'Mr Churchill Comes Home (1942)'

(Saturday, January 17, 1942, shortly before 10:00 a.m. British Summer Time; during World War II) — British Prime Minister Winston Churchill became the first head of state to cross the Atlantic Ocean by plane when he landed this morning in Plymouth, England, after an eighteen-hour flight from Bermuda following the Arcadia Conference with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Winston Churchill sailed across the Atlantic on the brand new “Duke of York” to meet with FDR in Washington, D.C., to discuss war plans. On his return trip to the UK in January 1942 however, Churchill made a bold decision to fly back to Britain rather than return by ship due to safety concerns.

“Our presence in Washington had been for many days public to the world, and the charts showed more than twenty [German] U-boats on our homeward courses,” Churchill would later write.

Churchill flew back to England aboard the Boeing 314 Clipper Berwick, a flying boat that Pan Am had originally purchased but immediately sold to BOAC to help the UK in their war effort.