Lietuvos istorijos institutas

This article reveals how a complex international archival research of a supposedly well-known piece of popular history (the glorious transatlantic flight of American pilots of Lithuanian origin Stephen W. Darius and Stanley Girch and abundant controversies surrounding their crash and tragic death in Germany on 17 July 1933) has led the author to an intriguing historiographical puzzle and then – quite surprisingly – to the findings at the US National Archives: the “Darius & Girch” file No. 811.79660M which, after being put in the context of carefully analyzed archival materials from three different countries, proved to be a unique source of wide spectrum revelations and important insights into the factual story of Darius and Girėnas (the flyers became widely known by their Lithuanian names which differ from the transcripts in their American IDs). After 8 decades of permanent lack of reliable information and constant prevalence of guessing and speculations, this file provided the first known solid documentation from the US government institutions which directly pertained to the flight and crash of Lituanica in 1933, and revealed some basic aspects of the federal law regulations, influential political trends and, last but not least, the almighty bureaucratic mechanisms in Washington at the time. The aim of this study was to review all 73 documents contained in the “Darius & Girch” file and to make an attempt to finally exhibit the foggy “American part” of this story: starting with the obligatory procedures and necessary official arrangements which were carried out by or on behalf of the two American pilots before their flight from New York to Kaunas, and finishing with the international response after the tragic end of their flight in Germany and an instantly followed (and widely underestimated) gesture of the Lithuanian government which offered to arrange American pilots state funeral in Lithuania. It obviously indicated a sudden, yet unexplained de jure shift. And at this critical point it was the “Darius & Girch” file which helped finally track it down -how exactly the “American part” of the story ended and gave way to its “Lithuanian part”. The comparative analysis (utilizing data obtained earlier in Vilnius, Kaunas, Berlin, Potsdam and Chicago) enabled to look more thoroughly than ever before into the following aspects: interaction between the Department of Commerce and the Department of State in the process of legalization of the transatlantic flight proposed by Darius; the consideration of sanctions to Darius after the allegedly illegal departure of both pilots; the first report from the US Consulate General in Berlin and initial reactions of Washington to the deaths of the two American citizens; an immediate interaction between the Department of State and Lithuanian officials, approval of the initiative to organize state funeral for the deceased in Kaunas; and finally, a gradual, yet steady political drift from “waiving of claims” to “nonintervention”, then to rejection of the persistent initiatives taken by American Lithuanians and to refusal of any consent to their numerous petitions and pleas to launch the official investigation in Washington, so that the “factual cause” of the deaths of the two naturalized American citizens could be ascertained. The documents in the file suggest that such investigation was never conducted, at least in the three years following the crash, till August 1936. There were several reasons accountable for that. In one of the documents dating back to 1935, the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull made an observation that there were some “objectionable factors” related to the case of Darius and Girch, namely that “The crash which caused the deaths of these aviators has been the subject of much controversy in newspapers throughout the world”. This research disclosed that there were at least two other important “objections” which led to the aforementioned rejections.