The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  Some might argue that Cal Rodgers’s case was an exception but they would be wrong. Pilots were killed somewhere every day in crashes caused by mechanical or structural failure and pilot error. Airmen—and a few airwomen—were just then learning what the airplane could and could not do, and about the only way to learn it was through trial and sometimes fatal error.*

  The successes—and failures—of these early aviators were front-page news. Pilots featured especially prominently in boys’ magazines and comics, fueling young imaginations at a time when America and the world had awakened to the awesome changes happening as automobiles replaced horses, electricity spread into homes, the new motion pictures vied with vaudeville, and the telephone came into widespread use.

  But the airplanes of the early days had no flying instruments to speak of, which probably would have been superfluous anyway because so many pilots took to the air with precious few hours of training under their belts. More than one flew into a cloud, spun out the bottom, and crashed and burned without ever understanding the causes of vertigo. Nor was there weather forecasting worthy of the name. If a pilot saw a storm he tried to fly around it; if that proved impossible he found a farm field to land in—or tried to. Luckily, the relatively slow aircraft speeds of the day allowed many pilots to survive crashes.

  There was no aeronautics board to investigate the causes of accidents and regulate improvements. Nevertheless, every experience of danger or crashing, or aerial uncertainty, was passed on from pilot to pilot or from mechanic to pilot. The accident rate, however, remained such that the actuarial life of an aviator was depressingly short.

  In these early years three American boys would be among the many thousands who marveled at the spectacle of flight. They almost certainly would have followed the day-to-day flying travails of Cal Rodgers, as his cross-country flight was big news in most papers. They could not have known, as crowds cheered to stunts like the barrel roll or figure-eight loop, that one day crowds would roar for them, catapulting them to the highest levels of aviation proficiency in the twentieth century, to a point where they weren’t merely great pilots but visionaries, gurus, entrepreneurs, and ultimately heroes of the highest order. They would become masters of the sky and hold a place in history that was never before and may never again be equaled.

  Their names were James H. Doolittle, Edward V. Rickenbacker, and Charles A. Lindbergh. In their time no one received the sort of frenzied admiration bestowed on these three men. In 1918 Rickenbacker was America’s number one World War I airman—known as the Ace of Aces; Lindbergh, a captain in the U.S. Army, electrified the world in 1927 when he flew alone nonstop across the Atlantic; Doolittle, then a lieutenant in the army, paved the way for modern airpower in 1929 by flying a plane completely “blind”—on instruments alone. In addition to their other accolades each was awarded the Medal of Honor.

  This story is about those worthy feats and how these men affected America, but their stories do not end there. When World War II erupted all three were middle-aged, married with families, rich, and highly accomplished, having earned the right to rest on their laurels. The amazing thing is that instead they volunteered to put their lives on the line once more and took to the air on what would be their most dangerous missions ever.

  They had vastly different personalities, these three, but strikingly similar backgrounds. Each was raised on the edge of poverty (Lindbergh’s family, the most well-off, was middle class at best). Each was estranged from his father early on and each formed a lifelong attachment to his mother. All were attracted at a young age to the notion of flight, and each in his own way became a pioneer of aeronautical science.

  All three visited Hitler’s Germany during the late 1930s and warned American military authorities of the menacing buildup of German airpower. As experienced military pilots they were acutely aware of the growing danger from Nazi Germany’s air superiority. Yet their admonitions seemed to fall on deaf ears. Airpower had not been a significant factor in the First World War, and most people, including world leaders and politicians, saw no reason why it should present a threat in the escalating crisis between Germany and the Western democracies.

  England, for instance, was particularly vulnerable, but these American experts were unable to convince British leaders that, even though they lived on an island protected by the world’s most powerful navy, long-range enemy aircraft—unlike anything seen in the First World War—could now destroy their cities and industrial complexes. It was nearly as difficult to persuade American politicians. The nation remained at the time in the throes of the Great Depression, and in Washington, Congress and the bureaucracy were in no mood to spend money to keep up with Germany’s growing dominance in airpower.

  The definitive shift toward aviation, both military and civilian in the first part of the twentieth century, and its tremendous expansion and development of capabilities in the second part, is a powerful, important story whose impact can hardly be overstated. From the flimsy crate the Wright brothers flew in 1903, to the B-29 that erased Hiroshima with an atomic bomb in 1945, to the sleek jet aircraft of today, men of the air have braved the dangerous skies the way early seafaring explorers braved uncharted oceans. They flew, saw planes crash and men die, and flew on. No one has left in his wake a greater example of devotion to the concept of flight, critical aviation knowledge, and sheer raw courage than Rickenbacker, Doolittle, and Lindbergh.

  * Rodgers’s successor for the bottling company’s sponsorship was a woman flier, handsome thirty-seven-year-old Harriet Quimby, who had been the first woman to fly across the English Channel. In 1912 she was killed after being ejected from her open-cockpit Blériot monoplane, lately christened the new Vin Fiz, over Boston Harbor. She was not wearing a seat belt as there were arguments at the time against wearing one. Her death settled the argument.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE KING OF DIRT

  SHORTLY AFTER SUNRISE ON SEPTEMBER 25, 1918, Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker of the U.S. Army Air Service, 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron, was flying solo along the Meuse River above the grisly boneyard that was Verdun, France.

  It was Rickenbacker’s first day as commander of the 94th, the notorious “Hat in the Ring” gang of American Expeditionary Force pilots, and he had gone up alone that morning, to sort things out, get a grip on himself, to see how things had changed, “for the better or the worse.”

  The squadron had been organized six months earlier as American troops began to pour into France. Now there were just three of the original twenty-four pilots left. Rickenbacker’s experience led him to conclude that air squadron leaders could not command from behind a desk; it was imperative that the commander lead personally, by example, in the air.1

  September 25 was a critical day on the Western Front. Below, in the valley of the Meuse, nearly 250,000 American soldiers of the U.S. First Army were steadily moving into the frontline trenches between the Meuse and the Argonne Forest for the first great American offensive of the war. Suspecting that an attack was imminent, the Germans had been launching large observation balloons and sending up photographic air reconnaissance patrols in an effort to comprehend the Allied buildup.

  Rickenbacker’s job was to see that the German missions failed. Ten days earlier, by default, so to speak, he had been named America’s “Ace of Aces” in aerial combat, an honorary title that he considered dubious, at best.

  Not that the title of top American ace wasn’t flattering. After all, Rickenbacker had shot down seven enemy planes in as many months. It was just that all of the former recipients of the honor had all been killed, and he could not help but ruminate over what he called “the unavoidable doom that had overtaken its previous holders.”

  Rickenbacker was tooling along at about 3,000 feet in his French-built Spad XIII, a new compact, rugged single-seat fighter with a 220-horsepower engine and armed with two Vickers .303-caliber machine guns. Beneath him he could see both the German and Allied trench lines snaking into the distance with the desolated, evil-look
ing muck of no-man’s-land in between. Seven hundred thousand men had been killed there two years earlier, during the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

  The day was clear and cool, with no clouds to hide in, when out of the blue two enemy planes appeared, at first far off, as specks. They soon proved to be a pair of German LVGs of the photographic reconnaissance variety, two-seater biplanes with 7.92mm Spandau machine guns in front and rear, and so they would be fairly dangerous to attack, coming out of Germany from the direction of Metz for a picture-taking expedition over Allied lines.

  With the big push scheduled for early next day Rickenbacker did not hesitate, for they would have discovered the preparations for the attack. He had just begun to push his stick over to engage when a sudden glimpse of a piece of sky revealed some sinister company. Five Fokker machines were flying escort above the photographic planes.

  The Fokkers were a menacing presence: top-of-the-line German tri-winged fighters, highly maneuverable and deadly, favored by the so-called Flying Circus of the late Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, which continued to operate opposite the American lines despite the death of its leader. Its new leader, Lieutenant Hermann Göring, would become infamous two decades later.

  Immediately Rickenbacker reversed himself and climbed for the sun to put himself out of view. As luck would have it, neither the Fokkers nor the German photo planes noticed until he got in the rear of them, a black, batlike object, angling in, and backlit by the sun—a perfect position from which to attack—above and behind. It did not seem to register on Rickenbacker that he was taking on seven enemy combat planes completely alone. He made a beeline for the nearest Fokker.

  By the time the Germans spotted him it was too late. Rickenbacker tore into the formation, pressed his thumbs on the triggers, and a blast of bullets from the Spad ripped through the enemy fuselage front to rear. Simultaneously the pilot tried to pull away but he must have been killed almost instantly, Rickenbacker thought, since his plane burst into flames and crashed just south of Étain.

  Rickenbacker had first intended to zoom upward and protect himself against the four remaining Fokkers, but their pilots were so dumbfounded at the sudden appearance of the fierce little Spad that, instead of rounding up for an attack, they continued in their tight formation just long enough for Rickenbacker to plummet straight through it to get at the photographing planes just ahead. This tactic so horrified the Fokkers that they immediately peeled off and turned tail in all directions “to save their own skins,” as Rickenbacker put it later.

  That gave him enough airspace to dive on the LVGs, whose pilots had already seen his attack on the Fokkers and were diving to escape.

  The Spad plunged after the nearest two-seater, taking him in the gun sights as the two German planes began to split up. The gunners in the rear seats began firing on Rickenbacker as he glanced over his shoulder to see the four Fokkers circling above in an effort to get back into a new formation in order to attack.

  Rickenbacker dived his Spad full out and plunged below the rear LVG, zooming up on the other side ready to turn in for the kill. The German pilot, however, “kicked his tail around, giving his gunner another shot at me,” Rickenbacker said. “I had to postpone shooting … and in the meantime I saw tracer bullets go whizzing and streaking past my face.” The second two-seater, it seemed, had somehow sneaked up in Rickenbacker’s rear and was trying to blow him apart.

  Rickenbacker peeled off out of range and performed a renversement*—a change of direction—that put him back directly on his original target. But the German copycatted the maneuver, and Rickenbacker was compelled to perform another renversement, at the same time keeping a weather eye on the four Fokker fighters that were wrangling themselves into formation. He also took ominous note that all the while they were all drifting deeper into Germany.

  This was a dogfight, one man now against six, with renversements, piques, zooms, chandelles, Immelmanns—all the maneuvers that Rickenbacker had learned at his first French flying school. Push the stick—dive; pull up—zoom; working feet correcting ailerons, elevators, rudder, and hands on the triggers like a one-man band—kill or be killed—and all of it dainty as a French minuet. Below, men in the trenches were looking up, cheering, cursing. Both sides knew the difference between friendly and enemy planes. If the planes got low enough the soldiers would shoot.

  Rickenbacker understood that time was short; he saw his chance and took it. The LVGs had created an opening between themselves, flying parallel to each other about fifty yards apart. He sideslipped downward until he was between the two German planes, leveled out, and then eased off the gas and began firing as he dropped back. The closest German passed right through Rickenbacker’s machine-gun pattern, and just as he released the trigger buttons Rickenbacker had the satisfaction of watching him burst into flames.

  The blazing enemy reconnaissance plane began to tumble until it was completely engulfed in fire and then plunged headlong toward earth. Over his shoulder Rickenbacker noticed that the Fokkers had at last reorganized themselves and were now rushing toward him from various angles, a development that led him to conclude enough had been accomplished for the day. He “put on the gas” and escaped toward his own lines. The whole thing hadn’t taken five minutes.

  For this action—taking on seven enemy planes and shooting down two of them—Rickenbacker was later awarded the Medal of Honor. He remained the Ace of Aces until war’s end and returned home as America’s hero of World War I.

  EDWARD RICKENBACHER WAS BORN October 8, 1890, the year of the massacre at Wounded Knee. He was the third of eight children of impoverished immigrants from the ancient population of Swiss-Germans who had fled the old country and settled in Columbus, Ohio, and other cities of the Midwest. (After World War I broke out Eddie personally changed the Teutonic spelling of his name to the more anglicized Rickenbacker.)2

  His father, William Richenbacher, had come over in 1879 at the age of twenty-two from the outlands of the Swiss canton Basel to escape the enduring poverty that gripped Europe’s lower classes. Elizabeth Basler (Liesl, or Lizzie), Eddie’s mother-to-be, arrived three years later, for the same reasons, with a note pinned on her in German saying who she was and where she wanted to go. She was eighteen. Her family had been so poor when she was thirteen that they had had to give her away, and when, five years later, she boarded the ship to America, all she had to eat during the seven-day voyage was “a round of cheese in her apron,” which “she ate … with hard rolls that she softened with seawater.”3

  William worked at a brewery for a time but was mainly a day laborer. By 1893 the couple had saved and borrowed enough to buy a lot and build a small frame house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in a subdivision amid factories and warehouses near the Columbus city limits.

  Eddie, who was often called Rick, was pugnacious and indifferent as a student, but he enjoyed daring things. He once jumped on the back of a moving coal car in the rail yards and had to be rescued by one of his brothers. Later, he fell into a cistern headfirst when curiosity about its contents got the better of him, and another time he went too far out on a limb picking walnuts and suffered a concussion.

  In 1898 he witnessed a dirigible floating over a field near his home in Columbus, which inspired him, at the age of eight, to construct a flying device consisting of a bicycle and an umbrella that he hauled to the roof of a nearby barn. Then, with the umbrella attached to the bicycle and a push from behind by an assisting friend, he flew down the steep tin barn roof and into thin air, hoping to glide at least long enough to experience the sensation of flight. The umbrella, however, immediately “turned inside out,” and the only sensation Rickenbacker felt was of plunging toward earth in a promiscuous heap—bike, umbrella, and self—into a pile of sand that lay beside the barn.

  The Rickenbacher home was without running water, unelectrified, unplumbed, unheated except by the kitchen stove. The children slept in a lightless loft under the eves that was freezing in winter, broiling in summer, an
d the family raised practically all its food. On the quarter-acre lot that wasn’t occupied by the house itself they kept a large vegetable garden—potatoes, carrots, cabbage, turnips—and a handful of small barnyard animals, including pigs, goats, and chickens. Eddie wore hand-me-downs, including shoes that his father rebuilt by sewing tears and cobbling on new heels and soles. He was particularly humiliated once when fellow students poked fun at him because his shoes didn’t match—in either color or style—and he fought every boy who teased him about it.

  Eddie’s father was old-fashioned, a firm believer that beatings were a part of a boy’s education. These were administered with such regularity that Eddie was once thrashed, following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, merely because he questioned the notion of his own mortality and eternity. In particular, Eddie became suddenly dismayed by the thought that if he died the world would simply go on without him, and he would be forgotten, and that would be the end of it and of him. William Richenbacher’s reasoning for beating him was that abstract concepts such as these were better left to him and other adults rather than occupy important time in a ten-year-old’s mind.

  His mother, Lizzie, was a practicing Christian who saw that the children attended Sunday services at a German-speaking Protestant church, read them the Bible daily, and insisted they kneel to say prayers before bedtime. History does not give us Eddie’s reaction to such fervent religiosity—especially Lizzie’s allegiance to the ominous Twenty-third Psalm—but it served him well in later life, as we shall see.

  All the while Eddie’s parents were keen to instill in the children how lucky they were to be Americans, born in the land of freedom and opportunity. They told stories of life back in Europe, where opportunities were rare and rules were strict and countries were almost always at war; where if you were not born of wealth there was scant chance you could ever acquire it in your lifetime. Most men toiled in the fields or factories, while women were hired help, basically little better than serfs. They weren’t just preaching sunshine patriotism either. In 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out, Eddie’s father tried to enlist as a private in the army but was declared ineligible because of the size of his family. Eddie was only eight then, but he never forgot how his father would pound into the children that they had to “fight for their freedom.”