1915 US Passport: A Curtiss Aeroplane Wartime Story
The Passport That Sailed Four Months After the Lusitania: Marietta Russell’s 1915 Wartime Journey
Four months before this passport was used, a German torpedo had sent the RMS Lusitania to the bottom of the Irish Sea on the very crossing Marietta Ford Russell was about to take. The Lusitania sinking on 7 May 1915 killed roughly 1,200 of the nearly 2,000 passengers and crew aboard, including over a hundred Americans, and the shock of it hadn’t faded by the time Marietta and her husband boarded their own ship for Britain. That’s the backdrop I want you to hold in mind as we walk through this pair of documents, because every visa and registration stamp on them was issued against that exact fear. Imperial War Museums
A Salesman’s War: Why the Russells Crossed the Atlantic
A passport built for war-zone travel exists because Frank Henry Russell needed to sell airplanes to a country that was fighting for its life.
Frank Henry Russell was an early aviation executive. Wikipedia and several archival sources place him at the Wright Company before he moved into a leadership role at Curtiss following the 1914 acquisition of the Burgess Company, becoming vice president and a director of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, though I’ll note that one archival finding aid pegs the formal VP title closer to 1920, so the exact year of his promotion is one of those small discrepancies worth flagging rather than smoothing over.
By 1915, Britain and France were at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary and desperately needed aircraft, and Curtiss was one of the manufacturers happy to supply them. Russell crossed the Atlantic to close those deals, and Marietta went with him.
That’s not a footnote, it’s the entire reason this passport exists: a neutral American couple, traveling for business, into two countries actively fighting a war. Wikipedia
One Passport, Four Countries: The August 1915 Travel Document
The US government issued Marietta’s passport on 23 August 1915, authorizing her to travel to the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and Italy alongside her husband.
That four-country scope is worth pausing on. A pre-war American passport rarely needed to anticipate this much itinerary flexibility, but wartime travel meant plans changed constantly depending on troop movements, shipping availability, and whichever ports happened to be open that week. The endorsements show the couple arriving in Liverpool by ship on 6 September 1915, which is where the bureaucracy really kicks in.
Into Enemy Waters: Liverpool and the Aliens Registration Requirement
Arriving in Britain in 1915 meant Marietta had to register as a foreign national with the local police, a wartime requirement that applied to virtually every neutral citizen on British soil.
On 28 September 1915, three weeks after landing, the couple registered their presence with the local police superintendent in Battle, Sussex. This wasn’t unique to them. Under the Aliens Restriction Act, passed the day after Britain declared war in August 1914, aliens were legally required to register with the police and pay a registration fee in return for a certificate. So this single line in Marietta’s passport, easy to skim past, is actually a direct artifact of British wartime security law. It’s the kind of detail that turns a travel document into a primary source. The National Archives
Crossing the Army Zone: Visas, Restricted Routes, and the Annexe du Passeport
Getting from Britain to France in the autumn of 1915 meant a French Army Zone visa, a restricted rail route, and a separate French annex document, because the short Dover-Calais crossing was reserved entirely for troop movements.
On 30 September 1915, the couple received a visa in London authorizing them to cross the Army Zone in France by rail, with a strict no-stopping restriction en route. Because Dover-Calais was off-limits to civilians, they instead embarked at Southampton for Le Havre, and were cleared “for Paris” by the French passport control officer on disembarkation. Alongside the passport itself, Marietta carried a French Annexe du Passeport, penned that same day, 30 September 1915, authorizing her to fly to France via Le Havre and confirming the couple’s arrival in Southampton on 1 October. This annex is the part collectors should pay close attention to: it’s a separate French-issued supplement, provided by French authorities operating out of London, specifically so a neutral traveler could cross France without passing through the active war zone.
Paris, the Metropole Hotel, and the Race Home
The couple’s final stretch shows them threading through three rounds of consular paperwork in under a week, just to get back across the Atlantic.
They received a visa from the British Consul in Paris on 2 October 1915, allowing them to return to Britain and stay at London’s Metropole Hotel, which several British government departments were using as office space at the time. On 4 October, they arrived in Le Havre by train from Paris and applied to the British Consul to extend their visas, this time for the return leg to Britain and then home to the United States. A French passport officer embarked them the same day. They reached Southampton on 5 October, sailed on to Liverpool, and boarded their ship back to the United States on 7 October 1915, almost exactly five months after the Lusitania went down on the same general route.
What This Pair of Documents Tells Collectors
Together, this passport and its French annex document the full bureaucratic machinery a neutral civilian had to navigate just to do business in a country at war.
What I find most valuable here isn’t any single stamp, it’s the chain of them: a US passport, a British entry, a police registration, an Army Zone visa, a French annex, a consular extension, and a return clearance, all compressed into about six weeks. Wartime travel documents like this one capture something peacetime passports never have to: the moment a government decided a neutral citizen’s movement was worth tracking, controlling, and re-approving at every border. For anyone building a WWI-era collection, a set like this, especially with the matching Annexe du Passeport still attached, is far harder to find intact than the passport alone.
If you’re researching adjacent material, two pieces from my own collection sit close to this one thematically. My piece on a German passport issued by the US Consulate in Moscow in 1915 covers how neutral countries handled enemy nationals’ affairs during the same period, and my writeup of Anton Frederik Philips’s 1915 Dutch passport follows another businessman navigating Europe under nearly identical wartime constraints.
If you want the bigger picture on Frank Russell’s career at Curtiss beyond this single trip, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum holds an archival file on Russell’s tenure at Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, and the Imperial War Museums’ account of the Lusitania sinking is the best concise primer on exactly what risk this couple was sailing back into.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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