Supplying the Western Desert with Aircraft.

HyperWar : http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/I/maps/AAF-I-11.jpg



Ferrying operations over the South Atlantic route had begun in June 1941 when Atlantic Airways, Ltd., a Pan American Airways subsidiary corporation organized especially for the job, undertook to deliver twenty transport-type aircraft to the British in western Africa. Shortly after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act, the British government had requested, under terms of the act, a minimum of fifty transport planes for its trans-Africa operation.[SUP][SIZE=-1]27[/SIZE][/SUP] These planes were to be placed on the run between Takoradi in the Gold Coast Colony and Cairo--an airway of the highest strategic value in the line of communications between the British Isles and the Middle East. The trans-Africa route had been pioneered by the British in the immediate prewar years, and at the outbreak of the war Imperial Airways maintained a regular transport service over the run between Khartoum in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Lagos on the Nigerian coast. Coastal bases had been constructed at Bathurst (Gambia), Freetown (Sierra Leone), and at Takoradi and Accra in the Gold Coast Colony. Across the waist of Africa, airfields had been cut from the jungle or laid out on the desert at Kano and Maiduguri in Nigeria, at Fort Lamy in French Equatorial Africa, and at El Geneina, El Fasher, and El Obeid in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. With the loss of the French fleet in 1940 and the growing activity in the spring of 1941 of German air forces based on Sicily, the British line of air and water communications with Egypt by way of the Mediterranean was virtually closed. Fortunately, the existence of the trans-African air route enabled the British to avoid shipping aircraft by water all the way around Africa and up through the Red Sea to Egypt. A large base and an assembly plant were developed at Takoradi, and here fighter and bomber aircraft, waterborne from Britain, were assembled, tested, and then ferried across Africa to Cairo. Beginning in the fall of 1940, British ferry pilots began moving Hurricanes and Blenheims along this route. page (320)

Be sure to check out the contents page and start at the beginning! Great stuff here.

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/I/AAF-I-9.html