Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Lindbergh found such thinking lost on the English. To him, they seemed worried about Germany but just as incapable of doing anything about it. Except for a few people he met at Cliveden, he found the conversation at tea parties centered on grouse hunting and the indomitability of the Royal Navy. “And the people show little sign of changing,” he wrote. “They need an entirely new spirit if British greatness is to endure.” Literally choking on the smoke-filled fog of London, Lindbergh craved fresh air.

  THE MOST STIMULATING CONFLUENCE of earth, water, and sky Lindbergh had ever seen lay not two hundred miles across the English Channel, where Brittany’s Côtes-du-Nord forms the Inlet of Pellinec. On this northwestern spur of France, huge cumulonimbus clouds roiling off the Atlantic play with the light, flooding a tiny archipelago of miniature islands below in pinks, oranges, and purples. Most of the time, these rock formations sit as islands dotting the coastline; but twice a day the tide recedes, pulling so much water out of the inlet that the islands stand as weird, craggy hills among tidal pools—a wet desert, dead-quiet except for the birds and the constant winds.

  It was no wonder that the Carrels had settled on the Île Saint-Gildas, the largest member of this mystical archipelago. Since the eleventh century, a chapel has towered over the small compound of buildings that came to be erected behind protective walls on the hundred-acre island—“a combination of an old French farm and a Maine island and the moon.” Lindbergh had enjoyed nothing more in Europe than his visits there, savoring the arrival as much as the stay.

  When traveling alone to Saint-Gildas, Lindbergh flew over the island and dropped a message tied to a streamer and weighted with a stone to announce his approach. Then he parked his plane at the airdrome at either Morlaix or Dinan, where a car and driver navigated the sinuous Brittany roads and dropped him off at the edge of the small town of Port-Blanc, where the pavement dead-ended at the water. Lindbergh did not reach this point on his first visit until close to midnight and high tide, which would have consigned most visitors to the mainland for the night. But along with his personal bag, Lindbergh carried an emergency rubber raft, which he inflated and paddled through the phosphorescent water to the island.

  A few islands away—ten minutes by boat, a kilometer walk at low tide—was Illiec. Barely four acres, it was smaller but higher than any of the surrounding islets, completely at one with the elements—“a part of the sea,” Lindbergh wrote in his diary, “—like a boat in a storm.” Anomalously, in the middle of this bizarre natural granite sculpture, jammed up against a towering rock with one sheer side that dropped to the water, sat a majestic, three-story Breton manor house. Beneath its slate roof, the stone structure had a dozen rooms, including a tiny chapel and two conical towers. It was built in the 1860s by Ambroise Thomas, who composed his opera Mignon there. It lacked all the modern conveniences—heating, electricity, and plumbing, though it had cistern drinking water.

  The moment Lindbergh learned that it might be for sale, he deputized Madame Carrel to negotiate its purchase. For the asking price of $16,000, it became the Lindberghs’. He knew it was a folly, seeing “only too well that the conditions in France are bad—that they may even lead to revolution.” But, he admitted to his journal on March 31, 1938, “even one summer at Illiec would almost justify buying it. The very memory of such a summer would strengthen the rest of life. I have never seen a place where I wanted to live so much.”

  Within a week, Charles and Anne flew to Brittany, to inspect the pig they had bought in a poke. Anne was as taken by the scenery as her husband, but the interior of the house was drearier than she feared—dark walls covered with matting, heavy Victorian furniture, cheap tapestries. By the end of the the day, however, Anne had planted some cuttings from Long Barn among the heather and gorse, and her head was swimming with plans for redecorating, building cupboards, buying chemical toilets. Off to one side of the house was a cottage, where a caretaker, cook, and their thirteen-year-old son lived. The next day, men began work on the property, inside and out.

  The Lindberghs returned to England for the balance of the spring, during which time Charles completed his work on The Culture of Organs and Anne all but completed hers on Listen! The Wind, for which Charles wrote a foreword and drew several maps. They also spent these six weeks cramming in as much social activity as possible.

  The Lindberghs discussed politics at Sissinghurst with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (“Lindbergh is most pessimistic,” Nicolson wrote in his diary a few weeks later, erroneously ascribing Lindbergh’s suggestion that England “should just give way and then make an alliance with Germany” to what he assumed was his belief “in the Nazi theology, all tied up with his hatred of degeneracy and his hatred of democracy as represented by the free Press and the American public.”) That same week they also stayed with the Astors at Cliveden, where Anne found Charles “shocking the life out of everyone by describing Germany’s strength”; and they rejoined Lady Astor at 4 St. James’s Square for luncheon with George Bernard Shaw. The other guests included the American Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and Thomas Jones, Lloyd George’s confidant and Secretary to the British Cabinet. The conversation that day turned mostly to a provocative mimeographed newsletter being published in London called The Week, whose editor, Claud Cockburn, had coined the term “Cliveden Set,” a disparaging term he used to suggest the pro-Nazi leanings of the Astors and their friends. (The American Embassy had long since discredited the bulletins, finding them riddled with gossip, scandal, and unreliable information.)

  The Astors also invited the Lindberghs to a ball at the end of the month for the King and Queen. Charles wore a new set of tails, his first since Paris in 1927. The Queen conversed with Anne, noting that she had heard that the Lindberghs’ child had been born on Coronation Day. “I think it’s very nice,” Queen Elizabeth said, “when something big is happening to you, to think that something big is happening to someone else, too.”

  Later in the evening, the Queen sent word that she wished Lindbergh to dance with her. Lindbergh explained to the attendant that he had never danced a step in his life and was told it would be acceptable to sit out the dance and talk. And so for twenty minutes they conversed about the troubles of the world and the perils of the American press. Lindbergh liked Queen Elizabeth, finding her natural and dignified, “but not at all stiff.” After the party, when Anne asked what they had talked about, Charles explained that he felt the Queen was terribly tired, showing the strain of her new regal life, and that he just went on prattling because he thought “it was the easiest thing for her.”

  Two days later, an invitation arrived from Buckingham Palace, inviting the Lindberghs to a ball on June first. The Lindberghs booked a room at Claridge’s for the evening, where they could dress for the formal event, which was called for 10:30 P.M. Shortly before leaving for the palace, Anne and Charles sat opposite each other at a small table in their room, sipping sherry and eating melba toast—he in his knee breeches and white waistcoat, and she with a tiara—laughing at each other.

  Anne danced until three. Charles sat out all the dances, finding the event less of an ordeal than he had anticipated, thanks in large measure to Lady Astor’s conversation. He granted that nobody pulled off formal occasions with more dignity than the English. Through it all, he could not help noticing that his wife looked positively “drunk with happiness,” happier than he had ever seen her. For a moment it seemed to dawn on him that had he not swept her away a decade earlier, this would probably have been the sort of life Ambassador Morrow’s daughter would have led.

  Instead, on June seventh, Lindbergh flew his wife and their two sons to their private island—where heat came only from the fireplace, light from kerosene lamps, and water from a well in front of the house. By the twenty-third, they were able to move out of their guest quarters on Saint-Gildas and into their own house on Illiec. Work continued all summer, with five hundred cypress trees getting planted on the east side of the i
sland and five hundred pines on the west.

  Illiec proved to be the haven of Lindbergh’s imaginings, a physical and mental challenge. He and Anne found it conducive for walking and working. Although Jon was deprived of any friends his own age, he was already growing up enormously independent, fascinated by marine life. He spent most of his time swimming, shell-collecting, and often gathering their dinner from the sea—shrimp, crab, even abalone, which he pried from underneath rocks.

  Illiec’s greatest attraction remained Dr. Carrel. Lindbergh spent every available minute with his mentor; and for months his mind was Carrel’s to mold. Sitting in the doctor’s high-walled garden or by the fireplace late into the night, the two men discussed improving qualities within the human species and the population at large, through diet and reproduction. “Eugenics,” Carrel wrote in Man, the Unknown, “is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great race must propagate its best elements.” He and Lindbergh carried on such discussions over the course of the summer, delving into the subject of “race betterment.” Unfortunately, similar discussions were raging throughout the Third Reich, a coincidence that would not be lost on future detractors of either Carrel or Lindbergh.

  Lindbergh planned to continue his quest for life’s answers that summer in Brittany and beyond. He had hoped to study the local folklore and its superstitions in the neighboring islands and provinces; and he wanted to return to India and see the Himalayas. But along with “the maritime tides of Saint-Gildas,” he found, “there was a rising world-wide tide of war.” Increasingly, letters requesting his participation in more earthly affairs arrived for him at the Penvénan post office on the mainland. “Problems of civilization and survival towered above my fascination with phenomena that sometimes lay exposed in the tidelands of rationality and life,” he wrote of those days. “Why spend time on biological experiments when our very civilization was at stake, when one of history’s great cataclysms impended?”

  At the suggestion of Colonel Raymond L. Lee, military attaché for air in the U.S. Embassy in London, Lindbergh agreed to undertake a survey of aviation in the Soviet Union. He and Anne spent the last two weeks of August 1938 in Russia, following an itinerary prescribed by the Soviet government—Mogilev, Kiev, Odessa, Rostov, and Moscow.

  What Lindbergh did not see on the trip impressed him more than what he did. It quickly became apparent that “Stalin’s Russia did not wish to expose her Air Force to foreign eyes”—mostly, Lindbergh realized, out of embarrassment. The few aeronautical sites he was shown were far inferior to the many other sights they showed off—the new subway, the new theater built in the form of a huge tractor, the new ice-cream factory, and a collective farm. While Lindbergh could not observe enough to estimate the nation’s production capacity, he concluded that “the Russian Air Force probably consisted of several thousand planes which would be effective in a modern war but were no match for the Luftwaffe in either quality or quantity.” He found Russian life bleak—marked by secrecy, scarcity, and suppression.

  They left the Soviet Union by way of Czechoslovakia, where Lindbergh met with President Eduard Beneš and his military staff and visited their aviation establishments. “This country is prepared for a German invasion at any moment,” he wrote his mother. He found their army strong and modern but “not well equipped in the air.”

  On September 8, they flew to Paris and checked into the Crillon. The press quickly gathered outside the hotel. The Lindberghs delayed their return to Illiec by a day in response to a private invitation from Ambassador Bullitt. At dinner the next night, with French Minister of Air Guy La Chambre also in attendance, they talked for hours about aviation. Lindbergh tried to make La Chambre see, as he would write in his journal, “The French situation is desperate. Impossible to catch up to Germany for years, if at all.” France was producing fifty warplanes per month, about one-tenth Germany’s output.

  Charles and Anne had only a few days in Illiec before they flew to England. They spent the third week of September in London, often in the company of Ambassador Kennedy. More than ever, Lindbergh felt that “the English are in no shape for war…. They have always before had a fleet between themselves and their enemy, and they can’t realize the change aviation has made.”

  At Kennedy’s request, Lindbergh committed to paper the next day some of his comments regarding military aviation in Europe, so that they could be transmitted to both the White House and Whitehall. Kennedy promptly wired the bulk of the letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull—including Lindbergh’s estimates of German production and his conviction that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Prague if she wishes to do so. England and France together have not enough modern war planes for effective defence or counter-attack.” That being the case, Lindbergh added, “I am convinced that it is wiser to permit Germany’s eastward expansion than to throw England and France, unprepared, into a war at this time.”

  Germany felt less bold. Although Lindbergh would have no way of knowing it, that very day Goering received a secret report from his own General Helmuth Felmy, who informed him that none of their bombers or fighters could “operate meaningfully” over England. “Given our present means,” the report stated, “we can hope at best for a nuisance effect…. A war of annihilation against Britain appears to be out of the question.”

  The Lindberghs spent the night of September twenty-sixth at Cliveden, where they listened to Hitler on the radio. It was a spellbinding oration, even to those who did not understand German—one that brought the aggressive nation to the brink of war. The Astors and their guests debated the issue all night. Charles and Lady Astor argued that England should steer clear of the fray, while Lord Astor and the others got caught in what Lindbergh called “the spirit of the ‘Light Brigade,’” insisting that Germany must be stopped now before getting any stronger. Charles and Anne retired for the night in the “Tapestry Room,” which afforded them a view of the gardens and beyond to the Thames.

  The next day, Lindbergh went into London, where he noticed trenches being dug in parks, sandbags surrounding doors and windows of buildings, and lines of people waiting for gas masks. He had tea with David Lloyd George, who told him that war seemed inevitable and that the Nazi system was as bad as the Russian system. Having visited both countries recently, Lindbergh became exasperated that the former Prime Minister did not “recognize any difference to England between an alliance with European Germany and Asiatic Russia. He apparently does not worry about the effect of Asia on European civilization.”

  Lindbergh spent much of the next two days at the Embassy with Joseph Kennedy, who, in turn, preached appeasement to an already persuaded Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister left for a conference in Munich—where he would meet Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier of France. Chamberlain returned to his jubilant nation with the promise of “peace for our time.”

  As much as any diplomat in the world, Lindbergh spent the next month globe trotting among the capitals of Europe on government missions. A minister without portfolio, his sole motivation was public service. He had no thirst for power or attention, and he paid for all his flights out of his own pocket. At Ambassador Bullitt’s beckoning, he went first to Paris, where he was asked to help supply military aircraft to France. The goal was to purchase warplanes from the United States, which the Neutrality Act of 1935 made impossible. Bullitt suggested, however, that American factories be built in Canada, where they could circumvent the law and produce the planes.

  This private meeting—which included Daladier, La Chambre, Bullitt, and Jean Monnet—thrust Lindbergh into a crisis of conscience. “Aside from the personal problems involved,” Lindbergh would later retell, “there were serious questions relating to loyalty to my own country and to the civilization of which it was a part. I loved France second only to America, and I had fallen in love with Europe as a whole. From the time the Canadian Plan was first outlined to me, I had reservations about the effect it would have on both America and Europe.” It se
emed to Lindbergh “a roundabout way of getting the United States again involved in Europe’s wars—against the wishes of Congress and the American people.”

  Lindbergh believed England and France were viewing the gameboard in the wrong way, looking only at short-term moves. To him, totalitarianism was the ultimate enemy, and that if England and France would draw back, “a westward expansion by Hitler might still be prevented through a combination of diplomacy, strategic convenience, and the use of defensive power.” Lindbergh’s worst fear was that “the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot, and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.”

  “I was far from being in accord with the philosophy, policy, and actions of the Nazi government,” Lindbergh would later write of his position, “but it seemed to me essential to France and England, and even to America, that Germany be maintained as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.” Lindbergh astounded his confreres at the private meeting by suggesting that France purchase bombers not from Canada but from Germany! He argued that Hitler might actually “welcome the opportunity to make a gesture to protect his western frontier.”

  Lindbergh went to Illiec to ponder his role in the Canadian Plan. After three days of climbing the rocks and wandering among the tidal pools, he patriotically recommended men in American aviation whom the French could contact in confidence. After writing letters of introduction, he excused himself from further meetings on the plan, which soon dissolved. He flew to Berlin, where the military attaché of the American Embassy had invited him for the third time, ostensibly to attend the Lilienthal Society’s Aeronautic Congress. Before his arrival, Lindbergh received his first slap in the face over his new role in world affairs.