Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  She counted her blessings. “I have a husband I love,” she wrote. “Nowhere could I find, could I have found, a better husband—a husband to whom I could give so much, who gives me so much—no marriage as good. A husband, a good marriage, is earth. Charles is earth to me, the whole world, life.” And yet, she had to confess, Saint-Exupéry was “a sun or a moon or stars which light earth, which make the whole world and life more beautiful. Now the earth is unlit and it is no longer so beautiful. I go ahead in it stumbling and without joy.”

  On the night of September 18, 1944, Lindbergh left San Diego on TWA Flight 40. After almost a dozen stops, he reached Pittsburgh the following afternoon and boarded the night train to New York. When he arrived at the station the next morning a group of photographers and reporters were waiting on the platform. He put on his lensless eyeglasses and walked past them with the rest of the passengers until someone called out “that old, familiar, and annoying cry: ‘There he is.’” They chased him up the escalators, onto the street, and even opened his taxi door after he had closed himself in—so they could snap one more picture as he leaned out to shut it. He insisted he had nothing to say about his trip.

  He taxied into the city, breakfasted at the Engineers Club, and called Anne at Next Day Hill. She would go directly to Westport to make at least one room in the house ready; and the children would join them two days later. Then he caught the next train to Hartford. After spending the day with the officers of United Aircraft, he took the train to Westport. The cabdriver had to stop twice to get precise directions to the “Tompkins House” on Long Lots Road. Lindbergh liked what he saw—a large house set back from the road, surrounded by trees.

  Before she had a chance to prepare herself, Anne heard the taxi and then her husband’s familiar fast steps. “And there he was, lean and brown, very young and taut looking, bursting into the room,” she would record, “—like life always.”

  Despite the differences in their experiences, Anne liked to think that the war had not separated her from her husband so much as drawn them closer. “Is this just a miracle of understanding?” she wondered. “Or simply love. Or do we really both of us now stand at the same point, at the end of something, at the beginning of something?”

  She was not sure, knowing only, “Both of us are groping and a little lost—but we are together.”

  PART FOUR

  16

  PHOENIX

  “To me in youth, science was more important than either man or God.

  The one I took for granted; the other was too intangible

  for me to understand.”

  —C.A.L.

  BECAUSE THE WAR NEVER HAD AN OFFICIAL BEGINNING FOR Lindbergh, it never had an official ending either.

  He had not been in his Westport house an entire morning before he began commuting regularly either to the United Aircraft offices in Hartford or the Chance Vought factory in Stratford to discuss fighter design, new jet projects, fuel range, climb, speed, and firepower—still for no pay. At forty-two, he continued to work as a test pilot.

  “[T]here’s no denying the fact,” Lindbergh would later write Colonel Charles MacDonald, “that I never had a more fascinating time in my life than on those combat flights in the South Pacific.” But he never shook some of the horrifying memories he carried back from the war zones—the destruction, degradation, and deaths. For years he prayed for the soul of the Japanese pilot he had shot down at Amahai Strip; and like everybody else who lived through the war years, Lindbergh lost many who were dear to him: Philip Love, whom he had met at Kelly Field and drafted into the Air Mail Service, was killed in a transport plane crash; William Robertson, who had run the company that hired Lindbergh and Love to fly the mail and became a backer of the Spirit, was killed in a glider accident; and flying ace Major Thomas McGuire, who had recently shared his tent on Biak with Lindbergh, went down in the Southwest Pacific. The hardest blow for Lindbergh, however, came at what should have been a moment of jubilation, as the last German forces in France were surrendering.

  Dr. Alexis Carrel died on November 5, 1944. The man who had been a father-figure to Lindbergh for fifteen years had returned to wartime France to display his patriotism by serving his countrymen. In so doing, he subjected himself to four years of hardship as well as ostracism for collaborating with the enemy forces. “Cold, privations and isolation,” he had recently written a friend, had brought suffering to him and his wife. Another friend of the Nobel laureate eulogized, “He died really of a broken heart; he could not stand the accusations made against him and his sensitive soul broke under them.”

  “It is distressing,” Lindbergh noted upon Carrel’s death, “that a man who cared as deeply for his country and who was as much concerned about the welfare of mankind as Carrel should die under such a cloud of accusations. I suppose that it is to be expected in revolutionary times, and I feel sure that in the more objective future his actual accomplishments and character will show these accusations in their true light.” While many, including Corliss Lamont, had long found much of Carrel’s thinking “indescribably muddled, banal, and prejudiced”—particularly his belief in “the superiority of the white race”—Lindbergh considered Carrel one of the great figures of his time. “Regardless of whether his philosophy was right or wrong in instances,” he wrote, “it was carefully thought out and courageously stated. Many of the men who now accuse him are those whose shortsightedness and political indifference, if not actual dishonesty, brought about the conditions in which France now finds herself.”

  For the rest of his life, Lindbergh would contribute time, energy, and money wherever he thought it might restore the reputation of his mentor. Toward that end, Lindbergh helped establish a Carrel Foundation. Its objective was “to promote the study and dissemination of the ideas expounded during his lifetime by the late Alexis Carrel; to preserve manuscripts, records, apparatus, and other memorabilia left by or which relate to the late Alexis Carrel; to sponsor research projects which shall deal with subjects in which the late Alexis Carrel was interested; and the advancement and diffusion of knowledge concerning science, religion, and humanity.”

  The following year, Lindbergh and Madame Carrel themselves would pack fifty-eight wooden crates with the artifacts of this extraordinary life—everything from unpublished manuscripts to an Egyptian mummy. Lindbergh would supervise moving the bulk of the Carrel collection to Georgetown University. And in 1949, he would contribute an introduction to A Trip to Lourdes, an account of a miracle Carrel witnessed, which he had not wanted published in his lifetime. While the loss of other friends sensitized Lindbergh, Carrel’s death spiritualized him, leading him to question, as Carrel had most of his life, the relationship between science and religion.

  By the spring of 1945, battle fatigue had exhausted the nation. Anne Lindbergh, for one, felt an air of desperation overtaking her friends and family. The Lindberghs and Morrows had been luckier than most, losing no immediate family members in the war; but she sensed a virtual epidemic of depression. After years of relative calm, her brother, Dwight Jr., was displaying signs of mental disorder again; and George Vaillant, the husband of one of her oldest friends, the former Susanna Beck, committed suicide. “Obviously,” she wrote in a letter as the end of the war was in sight, “this winter & spring people are going through profound disillusionments & despairs.” On April 12, 1945, the nation’s leader for the last twelve years died.

  The passing of Franklin Roosevelt did not affect Washington’s official attitude toward Lindbergh overnight. It took a week. While Allied forces surrounded Berlin, Lindbergh was called to the capital to discuss his joining a Naval Technical Mission expedition to Europe. He would travel, as he had in the South Pacific, as a civilian representative of United Aircraft, to study the enemy’s development in high-speed aircraft. The nature of this mission was far more sensitive than Lindbergh’s recent military venture and required State Department clearances, authorization he felt he would have theretofore been denied. But, as he wrote a f
riend from America First in the second week of the Truman administration, “I … found a general feeling that there will be a definite turn in the direction of constitutional government from now on.” And, he would later report to General Wood, “the vindictiveness in Washington [has] practically disappeared as far as I was concerned.”

  “Conflicting reports have been coming in in regard to the effectiveness of German jet and rocket fighters—some say their value is greatly exaggerated,” Lindbergh wrote his mother, as he was waiting for his final clearances; “some say the Germans would have held supremacy of the air if they had been a year farther ahead with their jet and rocket development. It is important for us to find out what the real facts are, and that is my primary mission.”

  On Friday, May 11, 1945—four days after the Germans surrendered—Lindbergh left Washington on a Navy transport plane for Europe, via Newfoundland and the Azores. The Captain invited Lindbergh to take the controls for part of the journey; but he was just as happy spending the bulk of the flight lying on the cabin floor. “One might as well sleep,” Lindbergh wrote elegiacally in his journal, “for the modern military plane is usually uninteresting from the passengers’ standpoint—high above the earth—often above the clouds, so that no details can be seen (even if bucket seats and badly placed windows didn’t make it so difficult to see anyway). Every year, transport planes seem to get more like subway trains.”

  Sunday, he awoke to see the soft morning light bathing Mont-Saint-Michel outside one of the cabin portholes, seven thousand feet below. “What wouldn’t I give to spend a day on Illiec and watch and listen to its tides!” he wrote of his own magical island. “Illiec,” he wrote, “a half hour’s flight away, six years away, a war away, and God knows how much more.”

  Arriving the Sunday morning after V-E Day, Lindbergh found few officers at the Paris headquarters of Naval Force France with whom he could conduct business. Reacquainting himself with the city that had once thrown itself at his feet, he spent most of the day touring familiar sites, unrecognized. At first glance, everything seemed unchanged. Second looks revealed pockmarks of machine-gun bullets in the Arc de Triomphe and an entire column felled by a tank shell at the Hotel Crillon. Even so, Paris seemed to have escaped the war relatively unscathed. Over the next three days, Lindbergh studied secret intelligence data and met with U. S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery and General Carl Spaatz. Admiral Alan G. Kirk informed Lindbergh that France had been harmed in ways not necessarily visible—the harbors were destroyed, the country was slow to reorganize, and there persisted the threat of its turning Communist.

  It was not until the Naval Mission penetrated deeper into the Continent that Lindbergh could take full measure of the war’s effects. At times over the next week, he felt as though he were walking through a sequence of dreams, each more surreal than the last. The visions were all the more disturbing for Lindbergh, who clearly remembered all that he had admired in the Third Reich just six years earlier.

  In a G. I. uniform, Lindbergh flew into Germany along with several Technical Mission officers. Despite the armistice, they were armed with pistols because resistance activity was still being reported. The destruction he saw in Mannheim, where they landed, reminded Lindbergh of a Dali painting—“which in its feel of hellish death so typifies the excessive abnormality of our age—death without dignity, creation without God.” He found Munich also in ruins.

  Worse than any demolition of buildings for Lindbergh was the breakdown of human behavior. The French, Russians, and Poles, he learned, had looted and murdered; and the next day, in Zell-am-See, headquarters for the German Air Force, he learned that the Americans had as well. As Lindbergh’s party drove within a few miles of Berchtesgaden, they could not resist detouring to Hitler’s fabled mountain headquarters, which had been heavily bombed. Walking through rubble, Lindbergh entered Hitler’s inner sanctum and was rendered speechless. Standing at a vast space in a wall, which once held a plate-glass window, he looked onto one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen—“sharp gray crags, white fields of snow, sawtooth peaks against a blue sky, sunlight on the boulders, a storm forming up the valley.” Through a gap in the mountains, he could see Bavarian plains all the way to the horizon. “It was in this setting,” Lindbergh saw further, “that the man Hitler, now the myth Hitler, contemplated and laid his plans—the man who in a few years threw the human world into the greatest convulsion it has ever known and from which it will be recuperating for generations.”

  “Hitler,” he would write in his journal that night, “a man who controlled such power, who might have turned it to human good, who used it to such resulting evil: the best youth of his country dead; the cities destroyed; the population homeless and hungry; Germany overrun by the forces he feared most, the forces of Bolshevism, the armies of Soviet Russia; much of his country, like his own room and quarters, rubble—flame-blacked ruins. I think of the strength of prewar Germany.” The 1970 publication of this journal entry would be one of the few times Lindbergh ever came close to admitting that he might have misjudged Hitler, his first suggestion of a condemnation.

  Lindbergh was billeted that night in Zell-am-See, in a house that had been seized from a German family. As he carried his barracks bag through the door, he passed a forlorn woman lugging her belongings out. Three young children followed, looking “angry and a little frightened.” Later that night he discussed the German Air Force with the commanding officer of the 506th Parachute Infantry over dinner, at which the American soldiers proudly drank “Goering’s wine”—from his private cellar, which had been “liberated” when he had been captured nearby. Lindbergh could not help thinking of his earlier private audiences with the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich. Although he seldom imbibed, Lindbergh sampled the wine.

  Moving on to Oberammergau, Lindbergh hoped to locate an old acquaintance, Dr. Willy E. Messerschmitt, who had engineered many of Germany’s most effective flying machines and had ushered aviation into a new age. His Me262 was the world’s first jet-propelled combat airplane, and his Me163 Komet the first practical rocket-powered airplane—capable of speeds close to six hundred miles per hour. Both of these jet aircraft had been unleashed on the Allies too late to change the course of the war. Lindbergh learned the once-revered designer’s large country house had been “liberated” by American troops; and he found him living with his sister’s family in a village farther into the country, reduced to sleeping on a pallet in a barn.

  Speaking through Messerschmitt’s bilingual brother-in-law, Lindbergh conducted a technical conversation with the jet-age pioneer. Messerschmitt propounded the development of rocket-type planes for both military and commercial use and prophesied that within twenty years supersonic aircraft would need only a few hours to carry passengers between Europe and America. A visibly broken man, he told Lindbergh that he had been concerned about defeat as early as 1941, when he saw America’s estimates for its own aircraft production. Lindbergh further learned that Messerschmitt had only recently returned from England, where he had been a prisoner of war. Both the British and the French had asked him to serve as a technical adviser. When Lindbergh asked whether he would be interested in working in America if an opportunity arose, he said he would have to hear the conditions. Wernher von Braun—who had helped develop the V-1 (a robot bomb that could be ground-launched on a 150-mile predetermined course) and the V-2 (a liquid-fuel rocket used as a ballistic missile)—was about to accept such an offer from the United States government. Messerschmitt would remain in Germany, dying in 1978, never recovering financially or emotionally from the war. Von Braun, on the other hand, became celebrated as America’s most outspoken proponent of rocket development and helped thrust America ahead of its new competitor, Soviet Russia, in the space race.

  At every turn, Lindbergh saw destroyed buildings, dispossessed people, and hungry children. “I feel ashamed, of myself, of my people,” Lindbergh wrote in his diary, trying to sort out his feelings, “as I eat and watch those childr
en. They are not to blame for the war. They are hungry children. What right have we to stuff ourselves, while they look on—well-fed men eating, leaving unwanted food on plates, while hungry children look on. What right have to we to damn the Nazi and the Jap while we carry on with such callousness and hatred in our hearts.” Lindbergh felt the worst was still to come once winter set in. “Yes, I know,” Lindbergh told himself; “Hitler and the Nazis are the cause. But we in America are supposed to stand for different things.”

  Over the next three weeks, Lindbergh gathered information and collected grievances. “We stopped at demobilization centers; we confiscated documents, interrogated engineers and scientists, and picked our way through litter in looted laboratories,” Lindbergh would later write of the task. In Heilbronn he learned that German prisoners were being held in camps, exposed to the elements. Near Wiesbaden he learned that American troops had given a building full of pregnant women one hour to evacuate. He heard that in Stuttgart the French and the Senegalese were responsible for three thousand cases of rape that resulted in hospitalization—for physical injury. At a detention camp at Freising, he was told that German prisoners were fed only whatever other Germans brought them. Lindbergh considered such behavior not only morally base but also politically unsound, as the camps contained many with experience in rocket development who were hearing Russian radio broadcasts promising better conditions to those who would relocate to the Russian zone of occupation.

  On the Sunday afternoon of June 10, 1945, in the company of Navy Lieutenant E. H. Uellendahl, Lindbergh arrived at the underground tunnels of Nordhausen, dug deep into a spur of the Harz Mountains. There the Third Reich had built its factory for the V-2 rockets, a thousand of which had exploded on England.