by Dan Hampton
Always restless, Lindbergh purchased a four-acre island off the coast of Brittany, in northwest France, in 1938. Situated below the English Channel he had crossed nine years earlier, Île Illiec was secluded, difficult to reach, and one of the most beautiful spots in France. After his overwhelming 1927 reception in Paris, Lindbergh had an affinity for the French and always wished to return though, as with so much of his life, the brief calm and happiness would not last. He was aware, as were many others in the late 1930s, that another war in Europe was nearly certain and that this cataclysm would even eclipse the Great War.
Much has been made of Lindbergh’s position regarding the war and any involvement of the United States in such a conflict. A great deal of this was true, but much was also exaggerated. Doubtless, contemporary reports of Lindbergh’s opinions were colored by his long-standing animosity for the press, and some Americans’ distaste for his fame and fortune. Lindbergh certainly didn’t help himself with his own political naïveté and, like his father, he tended toward vitriolic, strident, and uncompromising attitudes.
Like Walt Disney, Sinclair Lewis, a young Gerald Ford and many others, Lindbergh joined the America First Committee (AFC) to oppose U.S. involvement in a future war. The U.S. economy had suffered a recession following the Great War, and billions of dollars in debts remained unpaid by the Europeans. With that in mind, many Americans did not desire the sacrifices inherent in “policing” the rest of the world. Lindbergh initially did not regard the situation in Europe as an American concern, and he was certainly not alone in that. Though the majority of Americans were sympathetic to the Allied cause they did not condone active military involvement, nor would they until December 7, 1941.
In the late 1930s barely 20 percent of Americans supported intervention in Europe. If Britain and France had not prepared for such a conflict, and could not protect themselves again, how was that the concern of the United States? Less than half of Americans would vote to aid Mexico if it were invaded by Germany, and even in June, 1940, at the height of the battle for France, American attitude was still two-to-one against fighting for Europe. At its peak, the AFC numbered more than 800,000 members, including many prominent and highly decorated soldiers who felt as Lindbergh did in opposing Washington’s current foreign policies.
Yet due to Lindbergh’s celebrity and passionate views on the subject, he was widely ostracized. Though he had resigned his commission to enter the antiwar movement, Slim was, first and foremost, an American. If his nation decided to fight then he would as well; he fervently desired to be “effective in case our country is ever involved in war.”
Vividly remembering the Great War and well aware that the Treaty of Versailles had solved nothing for the long term, Lindbergh would write, “The flame of war has never been difficult to light but while it has burned in the past it is more likely to explode in the future.” If America joined the fight, Lindbergh believed his skills and experience would be best utilized in the Army Air Corps.
The problem was the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A supremely able politician, an extremely savvy operator and a formidable enemy, Roosevelt held long grudges against those he did not like, or those who had wronged him. Unfortunately, Charles Lindbergh fit both categories, and any move to put him back in a uniform was blocked by the commander in chief himself.
And Lindbergh had wronged him.
Several years earlier, in an effort to portray “honesty in government” and bolster Democrats’ chances in the 1934 midterm elections, Roosevelt’s men had begun digging up dirt, real or fabricated, on former Republican president Herbert Hoover. A report was compiled alleging widespread collusion and fraud between the U.S. Post Office and commercial carriers that were awarded lucrative airmail contracts. As these were granted in the 1920s while Herbert Hoover had been the commerce secretary, it was a perfect opportunity to smear the Republicans, discredit Hoover, and show that the new president would crack down on big-business corruption. So without real proof, an investigation, or a hearing of any sort, Roosevelt unilaterally canceled all existing airmail contracts and issued an executive order directing the Army Air Corps to carry the mail.
Lindbergh, who was a paid technical consultant for several airlines but had no role in running the businesses, was outraged. In early 1934 he sent a telegram to the president that read, in part, “Your action of yesterday affects fundamentally the industry to which I have devoted the last twelve years of my life. Your cancellation of all air mail contracts condemns the largest portion of our commercial aviation without just trial.”
All of this was quite true, but Lindbergh committed two tactical errors. He did not request to see the president in person to discuss this issue with him, and he released the telegram to the press before Roosevelt had a chance to read it. Enraged, the president told his press secretary, Stephen Early, “Don’t worry about Lindbergh. We will get that fair-haired boy.”
And he did.
Though the president was proven wrong politically and eventually forced to very publicly reverse himself, his decision cost the lives of twelve Air Corps pilots who were not trained to fly the mail, nor proficient at night or bad weather flying. Roosevelt never forgave Lindbergh and his embarrassment, plus the latter’s conspicuous involvement in the America First movement, was enough to keep the pilot out of uniform. After December 7 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with war now unavoidable, Slim wrote that “we had no practical alternative but to enter the fighting.” Aggressors had provoked the conflict and only through aggression could they be halted. America, he knew, had not chosen to become freedom’s guardian but no other nation could do it. Denied any other way to serve, Lindbergh accepted a position as an aviation consultant helping Henry Ford mass-produce B-24 Liberator bombers. “It was,” he later recalled, “a significant place where I could help my country at war.”
Lindbergh took a similar position with the United Aircraft Corporation and assisted them in improving the F-4U Corsair, currently in wide use with the Navy and Marines. Fighters were more his area of expertise and Slim toured bases all over the country learning about weapons, tactics, and gunnery. During these visits he mastered the basics of dogfighting and ground attack, so his request to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics for an open-ended assignment to the forward combat areas was not so far-fetched. Unlike other celebrities who were happy to put on a uniform but go nowhere near the fighting, or those who sought deferments and stayed safe at home, Lindbergh believed it was his duty to physically fight.*
Finally, in March 1944, he received authorization through Admiral DeWitt C. Ramsey to depart for the South Pacific as a “technical representative.” Ostensibly, he was to evaluate single-engine versus twin-engine fighters, then assist in any engineering evaluations of combat aircraft and their various components. His first fighter sortie in the Pacific, though not a true combat mission, was on the last day of April 1944, in a F-4U Corsair with VMF-113 off Midway Island.†
Lindbergh continued traveling deeper into the forward area, talking to pilots and maintenance troops, flying test flights, and conducting equipment evaluations. He worked out solutions for landing gear issues, wing tank feed problems, and water injection improvements, among other things. Eventually, on May 22, 1944, from Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field, Slim would fly his first combat mission over Rabaul in a Marine Corsair. This was amazing given that he was a civilian and expressly prohibited from flying such missions, but local commanders turned a blind eye due to the technical assistance he was providing, and the inescapable fact that he was Charles Lindbergh.
The personal risk went far beyond that of a fighter pilot in a war zone. As a civilian he was officially a noncombatant and legally should not have engaged in combat. If he were shot down or captured his status would be uncertain at best, and he would have no real protection. Given that the Japanese, who had never ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention, were notoriously brutal to Allied prisoners, Lindbergh faced tremendous danger. One Marine colone
l told Lindbergh after a mission, “You’re on civilian status. If you’d had to land and the Japs caught you, you would have been shot.”
Nevertheless, Slim flew A-20s, F-4Us, P-61s, and P-47s, to name a few, deriving practical solutions for problems with oxygen systems and wing-folding mechanisms and, perhaps most significantly, passing on cruise techniques that allowed pilots to considerably stretch their usable fuel. On July 28, while flying a P-38J with the 475th Fighter Group (Satan’s Angels), Lindbergh went head to head with a Mitsubishi Ki-51 over Amahai Airstrip on Ceram Island. Though not a fighter, the “Sonia,” as it was called, had two forward-firing machine guns plus a tail gunner. Slim put a long burst of .50-caliber and 20mm cannon shells into it very likely killing the pilot, and the plane dove into the sea.
When word of this got out, it was suggested by General George C. Kenney, the Allied Air Forces commander, that Lindbergh fly in a much safer bomber. To this Slim replied, “I wasn’t any bomber pilot. . . . I didn’t like to get shot at unless I could shoot back.” Kenney, himself a decorated fighter pilot, laughed and said he liked fighters better as well.
By the time Lindbergh returned to the United States in September 1944, he had flown fifty combat missions and solved dozens of pressing technical problems. In his wartime journal, Slim revealed many personal misgivings about his experiences, and though he believed in the necessity of this war, he had trouble with killing. As with many aspects of the man, this was paradoxical; he had demonstrated during combat that he had no hesitation in attacking enemy positions or even dogfighting, knowing that this usually resulted in a death.
“I felt great freedom of action during those missions,” he recalled nearly thirty years later. “There was freedom even in the duel of life and death—his bullets and my bullets, the freedom of life if they passed, the freedom of death if they struck.”
Lindbergh seems to have been troubled by the perceived callousness of those doing the killing. What he failed to appreciate was that this is a natural attitude for men who are yanked out of their lives, put down thousands of miles away in hostile territory, and then told to do dangerous things every day. It’s hard to be compassionate or, as Lindbergh wrote, to have “respect for the dignity of death,” when your friends die and there is no end to the war in sight.
Charles Lindbergh was a natural marksman and completely understood the concept of using aircraft and pilots as weapons. He did not hesitate at critical moments and, like many before and since, relished the utter uniqueness of combat flying. How he would have performed if recommissioned as a regular combat officer, making life-and-death decisions every day, is another question entirely. “But I realize,” he would write in May 1944, “that the life of this unknown stranger—probably an enemy—is worth a thousand times more to me than his death.”
In the end, for Charles Lindbergh, it was certainly not a matter of ability or courage—he possessed both—but one of temperament, so perhaps it is just as well that his time in combat was limited. The salient point is that he didn’t have to be there at all. He could have remained a stateside consultant, rested on his laurels, or retired altogether and remained perfectly safe, but he did not.
FOR CHARLES LINDBERGH, life after the war was as restless and polarized as before. Combat had matured him, as only it can do, and made him realize that though war was to be avoided whenever possible, there were, and always would be, times when one had to fight. “Nations are always faced with the menace of conquest,” he believed, and to that end he promptly went to work countering the next global threat: the Soviet Union. Lindbergh’s wartime record removed any stigma from the America First days, and with Roosevelt dead in 1945 there were no obstacles to his continued service. Through the Army Ordnance Department he developed better weapons and worked directly for the newly appointed secretary of the Air Force in streamlining the Strategic Air Command.
“What fools men were, I among them,” he wrote in Autobiography of Values, “when they found security by keeping lethal weapons pointed toward each other! But what was the alternative? A country had to have arms to keep its freedom.” Deeply desiring to better understand the world and its people, Lindbergh began consulting again for Pan American Airways, largely because this provided unlimited travel opportunities. He flew all Pan Am’s routes: above the Arctic Circle, through Europe, the Philippines, the Middle East, and Africa. Observing the explosive growth of the Cold War decades, Lindbergh became a committed environmentalist. Through the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund, he used his influence to preserve natural resources and vanishing wildlife. He lectured and wrote, took part in an expedition to the “cave dwelling, stone-age” Tasaday tribe, lived in a Masai boma along the Kenyan border, and at last returned to New York where he could continue working with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
Charles Lindbergh was a restless man, a lonely man and, above all, a complex man. As Scott Berg so eloquently phrased it, “Greatness came at the inevitable price of being misunderstood,” and this absolutely applied to Lindbergh. He was a natural fighter, but abhorred war; loved his family, yet was remarkably undemonstrative. Lindbergh has been harshly judged for his antiwar beliefs, yet fought courageously for his country.
It was always the sky—its freedom and vast emptiness, where he was liberated from the distraction of other men—that attracted Slim the most. “I wanted to regain close contact with the land and sea,” he would write in Autobiography of Values. “We reach a point in observation and analysis where the human intellect stares past frontiers of its evolutionary achievement, toward unreached areas infinitively vast.” It was fitting then, following his conquest of the air that Charles Lindbergh lifted his eyes still higher to the next great unknown: space.
He’d spent nearly a decade on various military related ballistic-missile committees, and on the morning of July 16, 1969, Lindbergh stood near Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s coast. As Wernher von Braun, famed rocket engineer and head of the Apollo Applications Program famously stated, “the moon is our Paris.” Atop a Saturn V rocket the Apollo 11 crew of Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong lifted off on NASA’s twenty-sixth manned spaceflight. Armstrong had personally invited Charles Lindbergh who, by crossing a great frontier proving aviation’s potential in 1927, had paved the way for crossing another frontier—walking on the moon.*
Three years later, during a yearly physical exam, Slim was diagnosed with lymphoma and informed it was likely cancerous. After beginning chemotherapy in January 1973 at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, he suffered a severe anemic reaction that cost him thirty pounds of weight. Lindbergh decided to recover in Hawaii, where he had established a home in Maui. And he did—for a time. But by August the following year he was back in New York undergoing blood transfusions, and Slim knew the end was fast approaching.
“I have eight to ten days to live, and I want to come back home to die,” he argued from his bed. On August 18, against medical advice, Lindbergh was placed on a commercial flight from Kennedy Airport. Less than a week after returning to Maui, he slipped into a coma and peacefully passed away on the morning of August 26, 1974.
Before his death, Lindbergh had purchased a thirty-foot plot on a sweeping cliff-top vista overlooking Kipahulu Bay. Earth, sea, and sky unite in a beautiful setting that is at once dangerous, unpredictable, and enduring. Difficult to reach, the grave is set well apart from others; like but unlike, near but not too close, and lonely—like the man himself. A massive stone cut from Vermont granite lays flat over the grave facing skyward, and simply reads:
CHARLES A. LINDBERGH
Born Michigan 1902 Died Maui 1974
“. . . If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea . . .”
C.A.L.
Though we all belong to nature, Slim needed to be within it, to commune in a way he never quite managed with his fellow humans. One wonders if this restless q
uest wasn’t irrevocably stoked during his magnificent solo flight across the Atlantic. This was a man who was only comfortable with his place in the world a very few times during his long, eventful life: so perhaps his greatest, and only true peace, came during those fateful, thirty-three hours between New York and Paris in May 1927.
Despite everything that came later, what Charles Lindbergh did, what he truly accomplished, was to remind us that we have more similarities than differences, and are capable of great deeds. His immortal flight clearly, unequivocally, and irrevocably demonstrated the tremendous capacity of the universal human spirit, in which we all can take pride.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN 2015 PETER HUBBARD, my talented, tireless editor at HarperCollins, suggested this book. “No one,” he said, has written about Lindbergh’s flight from the cockpit. “It would take a pilot to do that,” I replied without thinking, and walked directly into his trap.
Peter’s enthusiasm was infectious. I realized, as I usually do with my books, how much I was not taught about such an event, or in this case about the man himself. In creating The Flight, I have been privileged to have had a great deal of valuable professional assistance. Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), made the prologue possible. His exhaustive compilation of reports and personal experiences concerning the disappearance of the White Bird are unparalleled.
Charles Lindbergh was a meticulous note taker, journalist, and record keeper. Over the span of his life, he would routinely take suitcases of his papers to the Yale University Library, where they now reside under the watchful eyes of Judith Schiff and Michael Frost, both of whom generously gave their time in answering my repeated inquiries. So did Dr. Bob Van Der Linden and Elisabeth Borja of the National Air and Space Museum, who answered my sporadic and continuous questions as only experts can.