The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  What he did see, however, convinced him that Soviet air capabilities were second-rate, if that. The workers were “neither highly trained nor skillful. The bombers under construction were inferior in design” to those built by the democracies. Factories were not well laid out or organized, tools were out of date, production was sloppy, and the Russians were dependent on foreign sources for machine tools—“a serious limitation.”

  Likewise, at the flying school Lindbergh visited, he found the buildings “run down,” and in one barracks he was startled to see “embroidered pillows on sixty lined-up cadet bunks.” The Russians, it seemed, were training women to fly, and in fact when Lindbergh met some of the female cadets he found that they were on the whole neater and snappier than their male counterparts.

  Though he could make no proper estimate of Soviet airpower, Lindbergh ventured that the government possessed several thousand planes that “were no match for the Luftwaffe in either quantity or quality.”

  His impression of the Soviet Union itself was not promising—a scarcity of goods in the stores, people who seemed browbeaten, and the ice cream factory they visited was full of flies. “The system they lived under,” he concluded, “was destructive of life and incompatible with ideas of personal freedom so basic to the American mind.”

  For the next several months Lindbergh became a major figure at the highest levels among the European powers attempting to avert war. On September 22, the American ambassador to Great Britain Kennedy asked him to draw up the aforementioned letter outlining German air strength, in which Lindbergh concluded: “It seems to me essential to avoid a general European war in the near future at almost any cost. I believe that a war now might easily result in the end of European civilization. I am by no means convinced that England and France could win a war against Germany at the present time, but, whether they win or lose, all of the participating countries would probably be prostrated by their efforts.”

  Around the same time, William Bullitt, America’s ambassador to France, tried to embroil Lindbergh in a scheme to circumvent the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1935 by procuring U.S.-made warplanes for the French air force through Canada. Lindbergh countered with the apparently ridiculous proposition that the French might consider buying warplanes from the Germans, since they had so many of them. Bullitt thought he was joking, but Lindbergh was deadly serious. If he could convince the Germans to sell, and the French to buy airplanes, a line of prosperous trade would be opened that Germany would be loath to close. Perhaps a balance of power could be struck. For Lindbergh, these were desperate times that called for desperate measures, and he would grasp at any straw.

  At the end of September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference waving a note signed by Hitler that promised “peace in our time,” which temporarily halted the digging of air raid trenches and handing out of gas masks in Hyde Park. A few days later, the Lindberghs made their third trip to Germany, officially to attend an aeronautical conference, but again there were higher stakes in play.

  At a dinner in Berlin, Lindbergh sat next to Erhard Milch, then inspector general of the Luftwaffe, and used the occasion to drum up visits to all the big German aircraft production plants—Heinkel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Dornier—and, with Göring’s blessings, flew many of these types of planes, including some secret prototypes with amazing capabilities. It convinced him more than ever that the democracies would be overwhelmed in a war with Germany, and that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Prague if she wishes to do so.”

  Before leaving Germany, Lindbergh attended a stag dinner at the U.S. embassy for Hermann Göring that was thrown by the new American ambassador, Hugh R. Wilson. The hope was to soften Göring up so he would loosen the restrictions on Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany. The room was sprinkled with Nazi demigods such as Milch, Udet, Dr. Willy Messerschmitt, and Dr. Ernst Heinkel, as well as the Italian ambassador and various U.S. officers and embassy officials. As usual, Göring arrived last and marched up to Lindbergh, beaming like a harvest moon. He was dressed in a hideous sky-blue uniform of his own design and carrying a small velveteen red box, which he handed to Lindbergh with a short disquisition in German. Lindbergh did not understand German, but when he opened the box he found that it contained the Order of the German Eagle, one of the most prestigious decorations of the German government—“by order of der Führer,” Göring said proudly. The accompanying document stated that the award was for Lindbergh’s advancement of the field of aviation and for the 1927 New York to Paris flight.

  Everyone, including Ambassador Wilson, was caught off guard by this occasion. Lindbergh politely thanked the portly field marshal, “shoved the medal in his pocket,” and thought no more about it as the men went in to dinner. It would soon come back to haunt him as the centerpiece of his worst personal setback since the kidnapping of the baby. When he showed the medal to Anne that night after returning from the dinner, she took one look at it and remarked, “The Albatross.”13

  Göring continued to snow Lindbergh with stories of 500-mile-per-hour German bombers and other fantastic progress being made by the Nazi air force. “I felt that he wanted to impress me with that power,” Lindbergh wrote, “and through me, the United States.”

  Because of his continued good relationships with Göring, Milch, and Udet, Lindbergh considered that he and the family might take up residence in Berlin for a few months, since living on Illiec in the winter was out of the question, and it would give him ample opportunity to collect further intelligence on the Nazi air force. Anne had even found a satisfactory house for let. They returned to France to get the children and pack up when, on the night of November 9, 1938, hundreds of Nazis, and Nazi-style thug groups, convulsed Germany and inflamed the world with a violent pogrom-like assault on Jews and their property across the country.

  Known as Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” the attackers burned and looted several hundred synagogues and many thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and homes, killed nearly a hundred Jews, and inspired the Nazi authorities to send tens of thousands more to concentration camps. It was the regime’s most brutish treatment by far of Germany’s Jews, leaving no doubt about Hitler’s future intentions, and blackening Nazi Germany in the eyes of the world. The Roosevelt administration withdrew Ambassador Wilson in protest, a severe diplomatic rebuke. The Nazi government tried to pass off the attacks as a “spontaneous” reaction stemming from the shooting death of a German attaché in Paris by an insane Polish Jew, but nobody was buying it.

  The Lindberghs, on lonely Illiec island, did not get the newspapers until several days afterward and were as horrified as anyone when a copy of the Times arrived by boat. Anne wrote in her diary, “You just get to feeling you can understand and work with these people when they do something as stupid and brutal and undisciplined like that. I am shocked and very upset.” Charles was equally aghast and wrote in a new journal he had started, “My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this. What is the object in this persecution of the Jews?”

  It was now out of the question that Charles would move his family to Germany for the winter, so they took an apartment in Paris, where he began to initiate prospects for the French to buy aircraft from the Germans. As the process moved forward, Lindbergh made another trip to Germany on December 16.

  Lindbergh had been there a few days when he had dinner with Udet who, unsurprisingly, challenged him to a shooting contest in his apartment. Lindbergh first insisted that they discuss the possibility of Germany selling planes to France. Udet was keen on the idea as it would promote better relations but said it would have to be decided “at least as far as Göring.”

  With this matter out of the way, the shooting competition began.

  Like Rickenbacker and Doolittle before him, Lindbergh was somewhat taken aback by the setup. In his journal he leads us through Udet’s apartment with the various aviation trophies and stuffed animals (rhino
ceros, panther, etc.). “Over his bed hung an oil painting of a reclining nude,” Lindbergh wrote, “and in an adjoining room photos of pretty girls [the movie stars].” This was where Lindbergh encountered the “small metal target box” on the mantelpiece in front of the photographs of the girls. “If a shot missed the box,” he said, “it could not miss the photos behind it.”

  Lindbergh, a crack shot since his days on the shooting team at the University of Wisconsin, won the first three rounds straight. They decided to settle the contest with a kind of sudden-death shoot-out. Lindbergh lost, though he said his total score was higher. “We will shoot again sometime,” he wrote in the journal, but they never did.e

  LINDBERGH DID NOT RECEIVE AMERICAN newspapers and he had no idea how politicized the issue of Nazi Germany was becoming in the United States. Passions were highly inflamed, mostly on the East Coast, through influential publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek, among others. In New York and other East Coast cities there lived large and vocal Jewish populations horrified at what was happening to their brethren in Germany. They had formed a powerful lobby with the Roosevelt administration. Hollywood was beginning to bring anti-Nazi films to the screen. As well, the political Left (for the moment, at least) was diametrically opposed to Hitler because of the threat that fascism posed to communism, and it made those sentiments known through various media outlets. In light of these and other anti-Nazi forces, Lindbergh’s acceptance of Germany’s Eagle medal created a perfect storm of condemnation that caught Lindbergh unprepared.

  His friend Dr. Carrel warned him from New York, “There is a good deal of ill-feeling about you.” The New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, “Hitler Grants Lindbergh a Medal,” reporting that Göring had personally pinned the medal on Lindbergh, who “wore it proudly” for the rest of the evening. One magazine even claimed that Lindbergh had made the trip to Germany specifically to accept the award.

  The day after Kristallnacht, after the Lindberghs had already decided against taking a place in Germany for the winter, a front-page story in the Times reported that the Lindbergh family “plan to move to Berlin.” The New Yorker published a snide article saying, “With confused emotions we say goodbye to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who wants to go and live in Berlin, presumably occupying a house once owned by Jews.” Editorial cartoonists had a field day drawing Lindbergh’s German decoration as a Nazi swastika and other unhappy depictions.

  Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior and one of the Roosevelt administration’s most vituperative attack dogs, went so far as to say that anyone accepting such a medal from Germany “forfeits his right to be an American.”14 With stunning suddenness, Lindbergh had gone, in Rickenbacker’s words, “from hero to zero,” at least in certain parts of the country.

  Lindbergh, of course, had his defenders, including a majority of the population west of the Mississippi (except for Hollywood). Most of the big city papers in the Midwest were anti-interventionist, notably the Chicago Tribune. In addition, it should be noted that the opinion of the American South, in those days, was not generally considered important enough by the news makers to be included in issues of national debate. Even the New York Times’s influential Washington correspondent Arthur Krock pointed out that if it weren’t for Lindbergh the U.S. Army Air Corps itself would not be as far along as it was and scolded such criticism of Lindbergh as being “as ignorant as it is unfair.”15

  When on Lindbergh’s behalf it was pointed out that the Germans had recently bestowed the same medal on Henry Ford and the French ambassador, the critics retorted that it was only because they were anti-Semitic. When Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador, wrote a letter saying that Lindbergh had done the only proper diplomatic thing in accepting the medal, and that refusing it “would have been an act offensive to a guest of the ambassador of your country,” Lindbergh’s enemies turned a deaf ear. And he definitely had enemies now, not just cranks and crackpots. Among them were members of the media who had long tired of his attitude of disdain toward them. Now they had a way to hit back: a Nazi medal, a concrete symbol. They demanded that he publicly return the medal, but Lindbergh didn’t have it anymore. He had already turned it over to the St. Louis Historical Society, which owned the entire Lindbergh collection. That only created more controversy and more acrimony. Anne had been all too right when, on seeing the medal that first night, she had muttered the word “albatross.”

  The controversy probably would have blown over if Lindbergh had gone back to work and let it alone. But he did not do that. He was convinced that another European war “would destroy Western civilization,” that even if the democracies won they would be ruined financially and physically, and so become easy prey for the communist behemoth. Instead, he believed that Hitler should be able to expand toward the East, through Czechoslovakia and Poland. Sooner or later he would run into the Soviets, and in the bloody war that followed each would destroy the other. Even if Hitler survived, Lindbergh postulated, he couldn’t live forever, and the evils of his Nazi regime would die with him and better men would take charge.

  There were many “what if”s in Lindbergh’s vision, but he saw it with such crystal clarity that he became a man with a mission. When Lindbergh got his mind around a problem and decided that he had a solution, wild horses could not drag him away from pursuing it. Whether it was flying the Atlantic Ocean, developing an artificial heart, or, in the present case, preventing a war, Lindbergh approached his goal with a single-mindedness that could also be labeled stubbornness.

  ON APRIL 8, A SATURDAY, with Italy invading Albania and Europe still perched on the edge of war, Lindbergh went to Cherbourg and boarded the Aquitania for New York. Anne and the children would come later in the month, after closing up the house on Illiec for what would prove to be the last time. “Are we on the verge of the world’s greatest and most catastrophic war?” Lindbergh asked himself. “Possibly the end of European civilization. It could be all of those things. Human life will, of course, go on, but with what changes?”

  He went into the ship’s dining room early to get his seating arrangements and found they had placed him at a table for five. “The trouble is,” he said, “if I talk to my table companions they will be interviewed by the reporters at New York … they get all mixed up; then I am quoted in the papers as saying silly things I never said.” The steward promised to get him a single table next day.

  At sea he received radiograms from Hap Arnold, asking that he call as soon as he landed, and an invitation to attend a meeting of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The captain had made arrangements for Lindbergh to debark on the crew gangway but he decided instead to go down the passenger gangway “and see what happens.” This was a mistake.

  When the ship began to dock Lindbergh went to his cabin and locked the door. Soon reporters and photographers were banging on it. As he was talking to a steward, a photographer broke in through the door to the adjoining cabin, snapped Lindbergh’s picture, and ran off. A dozen New York policemen arrived and formed a wedge to shove more than a hundred clamoring newsmen out of the way. In this fashion, with Lindbergh in the middle of the wedge, he exited down the gangway, crunching on broken glass from photographers’ flashbulbs. He forced his way across the dock to a waiting limousine sent by Betty Morrow to take him to Next Day Hill. “It was a barbaric entry to a civilized country,” he remarked.

  The next morning he drove alone out of New York City and up the Hudson to West Point, where he had lunch with Hap Arnold and his wife, who were visiting their son, a cadet at the military academy. Arnold asked Lindbergh to come on active duty and make an assessment of what the Air Corps needed to meet the newest threats. He agreed, and next morning Lindbergh went to a tailor and ordered a new colonel’s uniform.f

  In the following weeks Lindbergh became deeply involved in military aviation intelligence and development technology at the highest levels, including meetings with Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring, Dr. Van
nevar Bush, director of the office of scientific research, and, lastly, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  The meeting with Roosevelt did not begin well. As Lindbergh entered the White House, at noon on April 20, he encountered “a crowd of press photographers at the door and inane women screeching at me as I passed through. There would be more dignity and self-respect among African savages,” he wrote in his journal that night.

  Roosevelt immediately broke the ice by asking about Anne, whom his daughter had known when they were students at Miss Chapin’s School in New York City. Recounting the meeting in his journal, Lindbergh found the president “an interesting conversationalist. I like him and feel that I could get along with him,” Lindbergh said, but added, “There was something about him I did not trust, something a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy.” He thought the president looked “tired, and overworked.” As he sized him up, Lindbergh seemed to have misgivings about Roosevelt, and ended up thinking it was just as well to work with him as long as he could, but he had a feeling it might not be long. In that he was correct.

  THE NEXT FEW MONTHS WERE filled with cataclysmic events, for the Lindberghs and for the world. In August of 1939 Germany shocked everyone by signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.