The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  WE WERE SLOWLY

  ROTTING AWAY

  IN MARCH OF 1942, while Jimmy Doolittle prepared for his famous raid, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was firing up U.S. air crews on a whirlwind tour for Hap Arnold. From Tampa to Topeka he told them—after comparing the fabric-covered crates of his day that would quite literally come apart in a steep dive, with the metal 2,400-horsepower multi-machine-gunned modern warplanes such as the P-38 and the P-40—“You’ve got something to fight with!”

  Depending on shifts he would often make three or four hour-long talks a day. It was exhausting but gratifying—especially when he visited his old 94th Hat in the Ring squadron that had been reactivated at Long Beach, California. He stood in an amphitheater and informed them: “This is my outfit. There are new names, new faces, but the same old tradition. I know you will do the job.” Then the cheering began.

  Back in Washington Arnold arranged for Eddie to speak to a roomful of aviation executives and Air Corps generals, many of them younger than he, but he remained undaunted and did not mince words—he was Eddie Rickenbacker, a household name, and he could talk the way he pleased because he was no longer in the army: “The first thing I’ve got to say is that all of you guys get rid of your chisels that you’ve got in your pockets. I know. You brought a pocketful of them down here so you could chisel your way out of doing things that you’re going to have to do whether you like it or not.”1

  Arnold was so pleased that on April 2, the same day that the Hornet carrying Doolittle’s raiders made its mid-Pacific rendezvous with Halsey’s Enterprise, he wrote Rickenbacker a letter of commendation, stating, “Your magnificent record during the last war has been splendidly carried on in this fine piece of work that you have just finished, and we all salute you.” But the army was far from finished with Eddie Rickenbacker.

  In the end he produced an evaluation report on his findings for Hap Arnold that so impressed Henry Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, that he summoned Rickenbacker to perform a similar duty for the newly arrived American Eighth Air Force in England, where the pitiless, nine-month, round-the-clock German bombing of English cities had only recently subsided. Eddie arrived in London in mid-September to meet with his old friend from World War I flying days John Gilbert Winant, whom Roosevelt had recently appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Like many American executives serving the government, Eddie’s salary was $1 per year, and he paid his own expenses—a “dollar a year man.” His mission, as he understood it, was twofold: first, to analyze and report on the general conduct of the air war against Germany, and, second, to evaluate U.S. air equipment and personnel.

  He noted upon arrival that the preferred bomber during the German bombing campaign on London had been the Stuka, a short-range poorly armored and poorly defended dive-bombing airplane that had been shot out of the sky in great numbers by the RAF’s splendid Hurricanes and Spitfires. Nevertheless, Rickenbacker was appalled at the amount of damage caused by the Germans—the entire East End was a near ruin and much of the West End was destroyed. The Blitz, as they called it, lasted nine months and demolished or damaged a million homes. He reflected that it could have been much worse, if Göring and Hitler had been willing to lose two hundred planes a day.

  At the same time Eddie recalled how his now deceased friend Ernst Udet had told him in 1939 that he had recommended a different type of plane—a long-range heavy bomber carrying greater loads and protected by fighter escorts—but that Göring himself had canceled that plan.

  Rickenbacker had a lengthy luncheon conference with Winston Churchill and a number of highly placed government officials, during which he divined that the prime minister was not averse to having the U.S. B-17 Flying Fortress conduct precision high-altitude daytime bombing raids, while the British would continue their nighttime terror raids on Germany with incendiaries and “bunker buster”–type ordnance. The Brits themselves had tried daytime bombing, but unsuccessfully, and Washington feared that British officials would be unreceptive to such an approach by the Americans. This was important information for Henry Stimson, who would be advising Roosevelt about the upcoming Allied conference at Casablanca. Rickenbacker also was determined to convey to Stimson his opinion, heartily shared by the commander of the Eighth Air Force, Major General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, and his assistant Brigadier General Ira C. Eaker, that the Eighth not be stripped of B-17s for the upcoming invasion of North Africa, on grounds that the bombing of Germany should receive the highest priority.

  As Eddie toured Great Britain he took note of the widespread use of American earthmoving equipment carving extralong runways into the tranquil English countryside to accommodate the B-17 bombers. American factories were sending B-17s to England as fast as they could turn them out, but this proved not fast enough. It was also difficult to ferry the planes across the Atlantic—fully a third of the first shipment of thirty had been lost in the icy Arctic wastes, and Hap Arnold considered it too dangerous to transport them by ship because of the submarine menace.

  Nevertheless, when U.S. manufacturers began churning out the B-17s at maximum rate there would be thousands of them in Great Britain, and a sunny viewpoint prevalent among many high-ranking RAF leaders was that Germany could be defeated by airpower alone. Because this reflected the general principles of his friend and mentor Billy Mitchell, Rickenbacker was loath to report to Stimson that the theory was unsound—though in the end he did not hesitate. An American army, he told the secretary of war, would one day have to cross the English Channel, go into Germany, and shut it down. This too was useful information for the president when he met with Churchill and other Allied leaders in Morocco, for it was there that Roosevelt would announce—to the surprise and chagrin of Winston Churchill—that the Allies would accept nothing short of “unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers.

  Rickenbacker’s report also contained numerous specific and highly useful recommendations vis-à-vis various U.S. aircraft, in particular the B-17. The plane had been modified so many times, he pointed out, that its center of gravity was off, which made it slower. The oxygen supply was insufficient and the rubber oxygen masks often froze onto the cheeks of the aviators at high altitudes. Remembering back to 1918 when he had put an iron stovetop under the seat in the cockpit of his Spad, Rickenbacker recommended that the B-17 pilot’s and copilot’s seats be armored, that they might fly through German flak with some small measure of confidence they wouldn’t get their asses shot off.

  The machine guns in the plane were not flexible enough. Their range of motion was limited, Rickenbacker found, and the waist guns were too close together, so that if both gunners were firing they would often bump into each other as they swung. Furthermore, the spent shell casings that were ejected from the guns sometimes damaged other planes in the formation, and he recommended a box to catch them in.

  One of his suggestions turned out to be a dud—the creation of a “flying battleship.” This craft would employ the body and machinery of a B-17 but instead of bombs it would carry a huge arsenal of machine guns to escort the other planes on the mission. However, when it was tried out, the thing proved too slow and heavy to keep up with the planes it was supposed to protect.

  Rickenbacker was immensely impressed with the P-51 Mustang, a prototype of which was unveiled to him by the British, and said so in his report to Stimson. With its sleek body powerpacked with machine guns, long-range capability, and 1,600-horsepower engine, it proved to be the most popular American fighter in the European theater, and before war’s end it accounted for nearly five thousand enemy planes shot down. He was only slightly less impressed with the new and somewhat odd-looking P-38 fighter, which had gotten so much criticism even before being put into action that Hap Arnold was thinking of discontinuing it. With its twin engines and twin tail booms, the P-38 Lightning would become the most popular army fighter in the Pacific, and it was the plane that would be famed for killing the Japanese admiral Yamamoto over Bougainville in the Solomon Islands the following yea
r. The only problem Eddie found was that the twin booms and engines hampered the pilot’s vision somewhat, a condition always problematic in aerial combat. In fact, he was puzzled that nearly all of the American pursuit planes were made with Plexiglas cockpit covers that hampered rear vision. In Eddie’s day, pilots didn’t have cockpit covers and so enjoyed an unobstructed 360-degree view of the sky. In his report to Stimson he recommended that all fighter cockpits be reevaluated with the pilot’s view in consideration, especially to the rear, where somebody might be sneaking up on you.

  Before returning to the United States Eddie met with the new commander of U.S. forces in the European theater, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose staff was furiously planning a surprise Allied landing in North Africa to throw the Germans off balance and possibly take some pressure off of the Soviets, who were having a hard time staving off Hitler’s armies. Eisenhower told him that three sets of plans had been made for Operation Torch, as it was styled, and asked Rickenbacker to take one of them back to Stimson and U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. This Eddie cheerfully agreed to do, carrying the top secret scheme for what was then regarded as “the greatest invasion in history” in his briefcase through icy stops in Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Canada and handing it over to the secretary of war on October 13.

  Many of Rickenbacker’s recommendations were put into practice and Stimson was so pleased that he asked Eddie to continue his evaluation of American airpower in the Pacific theater. Even though he was exhausted by nearly two months of constant travel and work, walked with a cane, and his health was not yet fully restored from the plane crash, Rickenbacker agreed. In his soul he was a warrior and, even if he realized he was too old to actually fight, he felt duty-bound to give his full measure when it was called for. The war would not pause for him to rest up and such a delay could mean pilots killed or battles lost. The work he was being asked to do was important, and he intended to approach it in a timely and deliberate way. Little did he realize when he embarked for Hawaii on the first leg of his journey that he was entering the most dangerous period of his life, surpassing even the appalling Atlanta aviation accident and the trials of aerial combat over France.

  ON OCTOBER 19, 1942, Rickenbacker was at Pearl Harbor, again traveling with Colonel Hans Christian Adamson, who had accompanied him as aide on the mission to England. Born in Denmark, in the same year as Rickenbacker, the delightfully named Adamson had immigrated to America at an early age and became in time a journalist, explorer, author,* and later director of publicity for the Museum of Natural History, where he organized the renowned dinosaur exhibits. He was a fine raconteur and Eddie enjoyed his company.2

  Stimson had given Rickenbacker a remarkable note of introduction, which instructed commanders that Eddie was to be given all consideration, accommodation, and access to whatever he wanted by order of the secretary of war. Eddie was therefore somewhat disappointed when he reached Pearl Harbor and saw that the plane assigned to carry him to the South Pacific was an older model B-17 rather than the larger, roomier, and more modern B-24, but he decided not to make an issue of it. This was a very special mission, and he needed to be on his way.

  In addition to a tour of inspection and evaluation, Rickenbacker had been tasked with an assignment so delicate and sensitive that Stimson had told him it could not be written down but must be communicated personally: a message to General Douglas MacArthur, who was presently fighting the Japanese in New Guinea. There has been some dispute among historians about the contents of this secret message, and ultimately Eddie took that information with him to the grave. One version of the story has it that the message was actually a reprimand from Stimson, ordering MacArthur to stop publicly criticizing the Roosevelt administration, and George Marshall in particular, for the decision to direct America’s main war effort toward defeating Germany first, in regard to remarks MacArthur had been making to the press about lack of support from Washington. There was a further directive, in this account, for Rickenbacker to tell MacArthur to “ease up on personal publicity,” apparently a reference to Roosevelt’s almost paranoid fear that MacArthur would run against him in the presidential election of 1944. (Roosevelt had once described MacArthur as one of the two most dangerous men in America—the other being Louisiana’s senator Huey Long.)3

  Other evidence suggests that Rickenbacker’s message was to inform MacArthur of the date and scope of the North African invasion, top secret information the army would not want to commit to the airwaves. Events of the next several weeks lend substance to this opinion.4 Either of these scenarios is possible—in fact, both may be true—but whatever the case Rickenbacker was the ideal candidate to deliver the message because he was both trustworthy and retained his high stature as America’s most famous fighter pilot and Medal of Honor recipient. MacArthur could intimidate a lot of people, but not Rickenbacker.

  Rather than lay over at Pearl for a day, Rickenbacker asked for a flight to the South Pacific at once, and a little before ten-thirty that night he and Adamson stepped aboard the B-17, where the pilot, twenty-seven-year-old Captain William T. Cherry, and copilot, forty-two-year-old Lieutenant James C. Whittaker, were in the cockpit going through their preflight checklist. At 10:28 p.m. Whittaker felt a hand on his shoulder and a voice said, “My name is Rickenbacker.”

  The crew naturally knew who he was; everybody still knew who he was. But they had been cleared for takeoff and there was no time for formalities. Eddie and Adamson strapped themselves into the jump seats behind the pilots, and Cherry began to taxi the plane to the runway. Whittaker ran up the engines and they began to roll as Cherry released the brakes. They had reached about 75 miles per hour when a brake expander tube burst and locked one of the wheels. The plane lurched to the left, ran off the runway, and was headed for the hangars when Cherry, “by clever manipulation of the engines,” in Rickenbacker’s estimate, managed to get the B-17 back on the runway. But there was not enough speed for takeoff and they were headed for the bay at the end of the strip. Seeing that the speed had dropped to about 60 miles per hour, Cherry threw the plane into a violent ground loop to stop it, which very nearly tore off a wing and knocked the engines slightly out of their mountings. It came to a stop with such force someone said it could have broken everybody’s neck.5

  After a moment of silence to capture their breaths, Whittaker quipped, “Well, you know the old saying, any landing you can walk away from is a good one.” By then fire trucks and ambulances, their sirens blaring, had arrived on the scene, as had a car carrying Brigadier General William Lynd, who was yelling, “Anybody hurt? Anybody hurt?” Rickenbacker shocked him by asking how soon a replacement plane could be made available. In only a few hours they were again taxiing for takeoff in a more modern B-17. Their first destination was tiny Canton Island, an atoll in the Phoenix archipelago eighteen hundred miles to the southwest, where Pan Am had once refueled its Clippers, the big four-engine flying boats.

  The flying weather was clear and fine, with a few fleecy clouds and a three-quarter moon. Cherry expressed dissatisfaction to other crew members that he’d been given no time to evaluate the airworthiness of the new B-17. When Cherry complained to General Lynd back at Pearl that he needed time to check out the plane, he was told that Rickenbacker wanted to get away at once and “if he didn’t want to fly the plane [Lynd] would get somebody else to do it for him,” which would have effectively ended Cherry’s career as an army pilot.6

  For another, while that was going on, Johnny De Angelis, the twenty-three-year-old navigator, was carefully studying his octant, a complex navigational instrument used for celestial navigation. It contained a bubble to create an artificial horizon from which a skilled aviator could measure lunar, solar, or celestial angles and distances to find the relative earthly latitude and longitude of an airplane, ship, or other vehicle. Versions of octants have been in use for hundreds of years but the modern ones were fashioned with mirrors, ocular lenses, prisms, the horizon bubble, gears, and calibrators, all of wh
ich were extremely delicate. They were so sensitive that the Air Corps did not include them among a plane’s standard equipment but left each individual navigator to care for his own octant, which he carried in its specially designed hard leather case.

  De Angelis—whom other crew members said had the “instincts of a homing pigeon”—was concerned that the octant might have become damaged because during the ground loop it had flown off the navigator’s table and bounced on the deck. The most infinitesimal misalignment or miscalculation could lead to a serious error, which would simply keep compounding itself when trying to find a tiny speck of an island in an ocean as large as the Pacific. There had been no time to recalibrate or even check the adjustments before the second takeoff, and when Whittaker asked De Angelis if there was anything wrong with the octant, De Angelis replied that there didn’t seem to be, though he noted it had taken “quite a wallop.”

  If that wasn’t bad enough, before takeoff Sergeant James W. Reynolds, the radio operator, hadn’t been able to check in for a directional fix with any of the local radio stations, because all were signed off at that time of night. If he had, he would have found that the new plane’s radio direction finder, or loop, on the outside of the plane, could not be adjusted because its gears were stuck. Unaware of all of this, the crew and passengers droned on into the night, in the belief that morning would bring them to a sandy coral atoll in the ocean six miles long and three miles wide and seventeen hundred miles away.

  RICKENBACKER AND ADAMSON tried to get some sleep on cots that had been arranged for them in the empty bomb bay by Sergeant Alexander Kaczmarczyk, who was on his way back to his unit in the South Pacific after having had an appendectomy in Hawaii. Because his name was almost unpronounceable, he asked them to just call him Alex. It was freezing cold at 10,000 feet, even at the equator, and the plane wasn’t heated, making sleep problematic. At dawn, De Angelis came up from the bombardier’s compartment to report that he’d taken some “exceptional” position shots right before the stars went out and that the plane was directly on course. Rickenbacker and Adamson had some coffee and went forward to the cockpit, where Whittaker asked Rickenbacker if he wanted to take the controls. Eddie demurred, saying he knew nothing of instrument flying, but some prodding soon had him behind the yoke.