The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  * Among Adamson’s books was a biography of Norway’s infamous traitor and Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling, as well as the book that became the popular 1957 movie Hellcats of the Navy, starring Ronald Reagan and his soon-to-be-bride, Nancy Davis.

  † By army regulations Cherry, as commander of the B-17, was also commander of the refugee party. Adamson and Rickenbacker, no matter how high ranked or exalted, were merely passengers.

  ‡ A lava-lava is basically a skirt.

  § The Ellice Islands were a colony of Great Britain until 1974. In 1978, they became the independent nation of Tuvalu. The neighboring Gilbert Islands had also been a British colony until they were invaded and occupied by Japan.

  ‖ So stubborn were they that of the 6,800 Japanese engaged, only 200 were captured—the rest died.

  a MacArthur had four stars at this point.

  b Kenney famously put MacArthur’s abrasive chief of staff Richard Sutherland in his place when he told him to get a blank white sheet of paper and put a dot in the middle with his pencil. That done, Kenney informed him, “That dot represents all you know about airpower. The rest of the paper is what I know about airpower.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE LONE EAGLE

  GOES TO WAR

  THREE DAYS AFTER THE PEARL HARBOR attack Charles Lindbergh released a statement through the America First Committee, which was in the process of disbanding: “We have been stepping closer to war for many months. Now it has come and we must meet it as united Americans regardless of our attitudes in the past toward the policy our government has followed. Whether or not that policy has been wise, we have been attacked by force of arms, and by force of arms we must retaliate.”

  If being reviled by the press and a considerable part of the American population ever bothered Charles Lindbergh, there is no record of it. Whether he thought this statement would get him back into the good graces of the government is also unrecorded, but it’s doubtful. His frustration and desperation is palpable from what he wrote in his journal several days after Pearl Harbor when Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

  “Now that we are at war I want to contribute as best I can to my country’s war effort. My first inclination was to write to the President … [but] if I wrote him at this time, he would probably make what use he could of my offer from a standpoint of politics and publicity and assign me to some position where I would be completely ineffective and out of the way. I sometimes wish, for a moment, that I had not resigned my commission; but whenever I turn the circumstances over in my mind, I feel I took the right action. There was, I think, no honorable alternative … I simply cannot remain idle while my country is at war. I must take some part in it, whatever that may be.” Days later he was still wondering, “What part am I to take in the war in view of the obvious antagonism of the Administration?” It did not take him long to find out.

  During Christmas week Lindbergh wrote to Hap Arnold offering his military services, taking note of the “complications” that might ensue as a result of his open opposition to the Roosevelt administration. A few days later the offer somehow leaked to the press, which prompted Lindbergh’s old antagonist Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to contact Roosevelt, warning of “a tragic disservice to democracy to give one of its bitterest and most ruthless enemies a chance to gain a military record.” Ickes represented Lindbergh to the president as “a fascist, motivated by hatred for you personally,” and urged Roosevelt to consign him “to merciful oblivion.”1

  Thus it was that when Lindbergh heard nothing back from Hap Arnold, he went to see Secretary of War Stimson, who told him, quite frankly, that in view of Lindbergh’s opposition to intervention he was “extremely hesitant” to put him in a position of command.

  Next day Lindbergh went to see Arnold and Assistant Secretary of War for Air Robert Lovett. Lovett asked whether Lindbergh could serve Roosevelt loyally. Lindbergh replied that while he disagreed with the president, he would follow his orders “as President of the United States [and] Commander in Chief of the Army.” Arnold wondered whether Lindbergh’s fellow officers would have confidence in him, given Lindbergh’s outspoken anti-intervention views. The meeting lasted less than half an hour, but by the end of it Lindbergh conceded there were too many obstacles for him to try to have his colonelcy reinstated. He said the country might be better served if he returned to the aviation industry. Lovett said he thought the War Department would be agreeable to that.

  Lindbergh, however, soon came to see the breadth of Roosevelt’s vindictiveness. Wherever he went in the aircraft industry he was rebuffed. His old friend Juan Trippe at Pan Am, after first welcoming Lindbergh aboard, soon called back to say there were “obstacles.” It was the same at Curtiss-Wright and United Air. Lindbergh was “dynamite,” they said, and it had been made plain that any association with him could jeopardize their lucrative contracts with the War Department and other government agencies. Lindbergh later learned that when his name had come up during a White House meeting with several Democratic senators Roosevelt had said, “I’ll clip that young man’s wings.”2

  On January 15 Charles ran into Eddie Rickenbacker in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel, two blocks from the White House, and the two agreed to meet for lunch in Rickenbacker’s apartment there. Still recuperating from his atrocious plane crash in Atlanta, Eddie told Charles (whom he always called “Slim”) that the Roosevelt administration was making things as tough as possible for him, too, because of his past opposition to the president’s war politics. (This was several weeks before Rickenbacker’s tour of U.S. air bases and the mission to England.) Lindbergh thought Rickenbacker looked “much better than I expected,” considering his ordeal.3

  For her part, Anne Lindbergh felt exasperated over the situation. Six months pregnant, and living in their rented home on Martha’s Vineyard, she told her diary on March 12, “C is away—again looking for work. I am hurt for him when he gets another telephone call from a company which wants him, but cannot afford to take him, because of Administration disapproval. And I feel that his exclusion from the world of aviation is much more than mine from the world of books.* He is not bitter or discouraged, and it does not seem to affect his daily life or what he gives to others, for he radiates a kind of health and gaiety and steadiness. It is a constant marvel—and lesson—to me.”

  Wartime Washington made it all the more difficult not to have a position in the military. There were machine guns at the White House and on the roofs of buildings. The entire city was blacked out at night in fear of air raids. Lindbergh dwelled in his frustrating limbo until the end of March 1942, when deliverance at last came from the man who then owned the largest aircraft manufacturing company in the world, Henry Ford.

  Ford was in the process of completing the stupendous government-backed warplane plant at Willow Run, Michigan, outside Detroit. Two years earlier it had been a farm owned by Ford and used to employ Depression-era youths. It was only now beginning to produce the B-24 Liberator, a four-engine, high-wing heavy bomber.† The Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in San Diego was presently assembling the plane by hand, but the army thought production could be vastly improved using assembly-line methods that had been developed by Henry Ford for manufacturing automobiles.

  Like Lindbergh, Ford had his own sharp distaste for the Roosevelt administration and had been a backer of America First. He also maintained a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company that continued to operate in Germany until the United States entered the war. His relationship with Charles had begun in 1927, the year of Lindbergh’s historic flight, when Lindbergh had given Ford his first—and last—airplane ride in the Spirit of St. Louis.

  Deeply anti-Semitic, the seventy-eight-year-old Ford was also known for his eccentricities, but Lindbergh felt that his sheer scientific and business genius overrode the other shortcomings and had come to see him almost as a father figure.

  Ford needed Lindbergh as a troubleshooter, which in the argot of the manufacturing world translated to “
technical consultant,” but in fact meant “test pilot.” Charles told him he’d better check with the War Department and White House first, but Henry Ford, being Henry Ford, did not appreciate the notion of having to “check” with anyone—up to and including the White House—when he wanted to hire somebody.

  Lindbergh insisted that he wanted no part of bringing difficulties upon the Ford Motor Company, but as it turned out even Roosevelt didn’t want to tangle with Ford. By virtue of silence from the White House Lindbergh was allowed to take up his manifest duties as “technical consultant” for Ford’s aircraft production operations.

  WORKING IN DETROIT contained an added bonus for Lindbergh—he could be close to his mother, Evangeline, who, at the age of sixty-six, was showing the first signs of Parkinson’s disease but continued to teach chemistry at a local high school. He argued that she should retire; he had plenty of money to support her. But Evangeline was adamant that she wished to go on teaching and riding the crosstown bus to school each morning.

  Because of the tremendous wartime migration to the Detroit area, finding a house became difficult, but Charles located a two-story mock Tudor in the tony section of Bloomfield Hills. With the baby due in several months’ time Anne dreaded the idea of having to leave their idyllic place on the Vineyard—especially for Detroit—but accepted that her place was with her husband. Her arrival was marred when, just as they were moving in, their small terrier Kelpie was run over and killed. Anne hoped it was not an omen.4

  Lindbergh had just arrived at Willow Run when—only eleven days after he had returned to the United States from his celebrated raid on Tokyo—Jimmy Doolittle landed at the airfield in a Martin B-26 twin-engine bomber he was flying to compare with the B-25s his men had flown on the raid. He and Lindbergh had lunch, along with some army officers and Ford officials. Charles gave few details of their meeting other than to say that Doolittle “looked somewhat tired.”

  During his early days at Willow Run Lindbergh immersed himself in the aerodynamic characteristics of the B-24 by flying it for days on end, and soon he set to solving the many problems associated with the plane. After meeting with Hap Arnold in Washington he reported that among the combat air crews the B-17 was by far the preferred heavy bomber since, as Arnold confided, “when we send the B-17s out on a mission most of them return. When we send the B-24s out, a good many of them don’t.” Even if this somewhat overstated the case, it was a serious indictment, and Lindbergh pledged to find solutions.

  By interviewing pilots who had flown in combat, he quickly assessed a number of areas that could be improved upon: the B-24 radios didn’t work properly; the armament was in the wrong place or more was needed; there were mechanical problems with the cylinders, the bottom turret, and the nose gun turret; controls were stiff; takeoff run was too long; and so forth. One overarching difficulty was that the workmen on the B-24 had previously worked on automobiles, and the difference between a car and a huge, complicated four-engine bomber with miles of electrical wire, precision parts, weaponry, unfamiliar widgets, and gadgets was overwhelming. The sheer grandiosity of the thing was simply baffling to men who had been accustomed to bolting cylinder heads on 90-horsepower Ford Coupe engine blocks with socket wrenches or slapping a car chassis on a Ford frame.

  But beyond all that was the most unsettling trouble of all: Lindbergh detected widespread laziness among the workers. “They appeared to be doing something when I approached,” he said, but when he looked back they seemed to be loafing. He did not mention labor unions in this particular appraisal but later expressed his dissatisfaction with organized labor and its seeming lack of interest in creating an atmosphere of the careful and meticulous work ethic necessary to construct aircraft.

  On August 12, 1942, Anne gave birth to Scott Lindbergh, although, in typical Lindbergh fashion, it would be four more months before the parents filled out a birth certificate.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1942, Lindbergh volunteered to be a human guinea pig in a dangerous series of tests on the effects of high-altitude flying. Oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, begins at about 8,000 to 10,000 feet. By around 20,000 feet humans cannot live but a brief time without bottled oxygen. Above 20,000 feet is considered “extreme altitude,” which was where many military fighter planes were now operating. (Mount Everest, for instance, is 29,000 feet.) At the time, many believed that being deprived of oxygen above 40,000 feet would cause the blood to boil, as the water in the blood changed to vapor, resulting in permanent, or fatal, damage to the brain and other organs.

  Lindbergh had heard of some experiments in high-altitude flight being conducted at the notable Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where an operation known as the Aeromedical Research Unit was located. Chaired by Dr. Walter Boothby, the unit operated a simulated altitude chamber, a scary-looking apparatus similar in appearance to a gas chamber, which could replicate atmospheres of 40,000 feet and above. Lindbergh got in the thing and, ascending with a rate of climb faster than an airplane, began testing different oxygen masks to determine which was best for pilots.

  Here his two great interests, aviation and medicine, intersected, and the scientist in him began to overtake his reflective persona. Next morning he was back in the chamber to an altitude of 44,200 feet for nearly half an hour. He took a ride in a “G” machine that the unit operated, a kind of human centrifuge that simulates the acceleration a pilot experiences coming out of a dive, pulling 5.8 G’s, which is near the outside of what a person can tolerate without special pressurized gear.

  In the coming months he returned to the altitude chamber time and again, testing the army’s emergency oxygen equipment, often pushing himself so far that he lapsed into unconsciousness. This produced severe headaches later. Dr. Boothby and others worried that Charles was overdoing his trials, but—like Jimmy Doolittle and his outside loop—Lindbergh persevered with the well-known Lindbergh disdain for caution.

  He also performed simulated parachute jumps in the chamber to determine if the oxygen bottle attached to the chute was adequate to get the pilot down to safety. In the end he concluded that army pilots flying at altitude were equipped with insufficient protection.

  After two weeks at the Mayo Clinic he was home again in Bloomfield Hills, having dinner with Anne in the parlor where she read him her latest poem (“Christopher”). The boys were growing up now; Land was entering first grade, and Charles one day discovered ten-year-old Jon at his mother’s Detroit home “in the basement, bending glass tubing over one of Grandfather’s old Bunsen burners.”

  At the end of October Lindbergh extended his experiments to actual flight and began high-altitude experiments at Willow Run with the P-47 Thunderbolt, the largest, most powerful, and most expensive single-engine fighter plane thus far in history. A modern low-wing aircraft, the Thunderbolt boasted a 2,000-horsepower Ford-built Pratt & Whitney radial engine that could climb above 40,000 feet and fly at a speed of about 430 miles per hour—a far cry from the 90-horsepower Curtiss Jenny he’d learned to fly in twenty years earlier.‡ There had been a rumor that ten P-47s had crashed in Florida on takeoff, killing their pilots, but Lindbergh tracked it down and proved it false.

  He was able to fine-tune the fuel mixture to coax even more altitude from the plane, and in months of testing he made such a number of changes in emergency equipment—especially in the event of a high-altitude failure—that he is credited with saving countless pilots’ lives. On several of these experiments he nearly lost his own life.

  Once at 36,000 feet Lindbergh’s cockpit suddenly began to fill with smoke, but he managed to land on the Willow Run runway with barely enough fuel to fly. Another time the strip holding the emergency-hatch exit blew off. And on another occasion still, at 36,000 feet his oxygen suddenly cut off, though the gauge showed it was flowing correctly. In moments he was overcome by “that vagueness of mind and emptiness of breath which warn a pilot of serious lack of oxygen.” He wondered if his mask was leaking and shoved it against his face. At this altitude a pilot without oxygen h
as no more than fifteen seconds before losing consciousness. Reflexively, Lindbergh shoved the stick forward into a dive; the altimeter began spinning; he began to lose consciousness; he was going so fast the plane started to shriek; the noise woke him up. At 15,000 feet, consciousness returned and he pulled up on the stick and zoomed. His mental clarity was restored.

  “Returning from the border of death always makes one more aware of life,” Charles wrote later. The mechanic told him the oxygen gauge read fifty pounds too high. “That had caused all my troubles,” he said, “a quarter-inch error of a needle.”5

  Lindbergh’s testing often took him away from Willow Run. At one point he found himself in the Florida panhandle at Eglin Field, where Jimmy Doolittle had trained his raiders and where Charles flew a British Mosquito, a two-seat bomber with twin Rolls-Royce engines—made out of wood. Many of these planes he flew were experimental or obsolete and the work was hazardous. All the planes were unfamiliar and many had mechanical or aeronautical deficiencies.

  On one occasion he visited the Hartford, Connecticut, plant of United Aircraft Corporation, which manufactured the Vought F4U Corsair, the workhorse fighter plane of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in the Pacific.§ Eugene Wilson, the company’s president, who had told Lindbergh back in the summer of ’42 when he inquired about a job that he was “dynamite,” now informed him that “considerable water has gone under the bridge since we last talked with you” and asked if Charles was in a position to help United as a technical consultant to the Corsair.6