The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  He located the redoubtable professor Willy Messerschmitt, designer of the famous German Messerschmitt warplanes, living in a hovel. Messerschmitt had developed the world’s first jet engine, and the appearance of German jet fighters in combat late in the war had seriously alarmed the Allies because of their speed and agility. Both Doolittle and Rickenbacker, in fact, had gone into great detail on them in their reports. Messerschmitt told Lindbergh that the Me 262 twin-engine jet had been ready for production in 1938 but Hitler wasn’t interested. He prophesied that in the future travel time for passenger jets between Europe and the United States would be one to two hours. Lindbergh asked if Messerschmitt was interested in working in America. He was.

  Likewise, the head of German jet and rocket development, Dr. Helmut Schelp, was living in a nondescript single-story house near Munich, surrounded by an American rifle platoon bristling with automatic weapons. A team of Russians, it seemed, had moved in next door to Schelp and it was feared they intended to kidnap him into their territory, as they had been doing with other top German scientists. Lindbergh tried to persuade Schelp to come to America also, but he was frightened because his wife and child were in Dresden, which was within the Russian zone.

  Lindbergh located a BMW factory that had been manufacturing jet engines and arranged for a number of them to be shipped to the United States. While he was there a man came up and said that as the Allied armies neared he had been given the plans and drawings for numerous jet engines and told to destroy them. Instead he had buried them in the woods. This man was put in Lindbergh’s jeep and driven to the forest where they soon dug up a treasure trove of secret German engine plans.

  Lindbergh drove through the Harz Mountains, notorious for harboring former SS snipers, to Nordhausen where the Germans made the V-2 rockets that had so traumatized London. In the process he stumbled on a Nazi death camp known as Dora. There he saw the furnaces and a vast pit of ashes and charred human bones. One of the former inmates told him they killed “twenty-five thousand in a year and a half.” A rotting body of a man, left lying on a stretcher beside the ovens by Germans fleeing the Russian onslaught, testified to the gravity of the inmate’s claim.

  During his stay in Germany, which was before the Russians could occupy all of the German territory to which they were entitled under the surrender agreement, Lindbergh helped arrange for dozens of German rocket and jet propulsion scientists and their families to evacuate to the American side and later to the United States, where they brought their expertise in the fields of jet passenger travel, ballistic missiles, and, eventually, the moon rocket. Wherever the Soviets had consolidated their occupation, they machine-gunned anyone trying to cross into American territory. The riverbanks on the Russia side were littered with bodies, including that of a little girl, age about seven, according to the U.S. Navy commander in charge of the occupation.6

  For years after the war Charles was haunted by the death and destruction he had seen, the dead, mutilated corpses of Japanese soldiers, the rubble of so many historic German cities, the Nazi concentration camp with its grisly furnaces and pit of bones. He regularly prayed for the soul of the Zero pilot he had killed. At Nordhausen in the enormous whitewashed catacombs that the Germans had carved into the Harz, he had seen the V-2 rockets, nearly five stories tall, that had been launched at England by the thousands with enough explosives to shatter a city block. “Who would imagine finding this demon of sheer space hiding in a mountain like a giant grub?” he asked afterward, reflecting that Nazism had been “a strange mixture of blindness and vision, patriotism and hatred, ignorance and knowledge.”

  In Lindbergh’s life, flight had meant freedom, progress, a step toward the human good, but the war had changed that for him. In 1947 he flew over Hiroshima, still flat, prostrated, tens of thousands of people incinerated simply by the push of a button. He shuddered to think there was a reverse side of science, of flight, that was a pit of dark horror and could be used to wipe out mankind itself. “That is why I have turned my attention from technological progress to life, from the civilized to the wild,” he declared.7

  Ever restless, Lindbergh traveled the world, often raising money for environmental organizations. He was especially enthralled by East Africa and the teeming plains of Mount Kilimanjaro, spent time in the gloomy jungles of Borneo, and also returned to investigate New Guinea and its primitive tribal culture. This did not mean, however, that he had completely given up on aviation. He became a consultant to W. Stuart Symington, secretary of the new air force, and worked with the Strategic Air Command, as well as serving on a top secret committee examining America’s vast arsenal of weapons.

  He returned to writing and in 1948 published Of Flight and Life, with Charles Scribner’s Sons, which became an immediate best seller, surprising since he had once been so reviled by a large segment of the population. It was a quixotic little book based on edgy experiences in his life—the faulty oxygen gauge in the P-47 over Willow Run that nearly killed him; the Japanese Zero that got on his tail in the Pacific; the ruins he had seen in Germany after the war; Nazism, he said, “was scientific truth, unbalanced by the truths of religion. The German scientists had partaken of a fruit from which death had surely followed.”

  Like Jimmy Doolittle and Eddie Rickenbacker, during this period an array of honors was flung Lindbergh’s way—the prestigious Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy, the Daniel Guggenheim Medal, and an interview that put him on the cover of Newsweek, revealing his war record. By now it was twenty-five years since the historic Paris flight. The administration not only restored his military rank but, upon the recommendation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he was made a general.

  In 1953 The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh’s own story of the 1927 flight, was published by Scribner and became at once a massive best seller, with favorable reviews everywhere. It was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post for $100,000 and bought for the movies by Billy Wilder’s production company for $200,000 and 10 percent of the first gross dollar—an almost unheard of Hollywood concession—and made into a major motion picture starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles. To top it off, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize that year.

  The following year Charles’s mother, Evangeline, passed away at the age of seventy-eight. Ever proud of her son, she had lived out her life as a high school chemistry teacher in Detroit. Three months later Anne’s mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Morrow, died at eighty-one. Both women had left a positive and lasting impression on their children.

  The resurrection of all of this publicity, however, had an adverse effect on Anne. Charles was habitually gone much if not most of the year, and too often Anne found herself on crying jags. A successful author in her own right, she was once more completely overshadowed by her husband. “The boom days are here again,” she told her diary upon the publication of The Spirit of St. Louis. “The Great Man—the Great Epic—the Great Author, etc. etc. I am living in the aura of 1929 again. Only I am different.”

  Whether there was a tinge of jealousy there, or merely frustration, something drove Anne into psychoanalysis, and the same thing doubtless drove her into an affair with her psychiatrist Dr. Dana W. Atchley, whose own marriage was crumbling. Lindbergh apparently never knew about this assignation and after a while Anne ended it, recommitting herself to Charles and a life she had come to hate.

  They did not as much fight, it seems, as simply grow apart. He went his way and she went hers, except on those frequent formal occasions such as weddings, funerals, and White House dinners—for a variety of presidents both Democrat and Republican—where they were expected to arrive as man and wife. They had long since gotten rid of the place at Illiec, and Charles built a chalet for Anne in Switzerland, while he kept a modest house on the island of Maui, in Hawaii, which he called home.

  All the while Lindbergh brooded whether “the fascinating life I’ve led, taking part in man’s conquest of air and space,” had not instead unleashed some Frankenstein monster upon the world. There was an “overempha
sis on science,” he said, “that weakens the human character, and upsets life’s balance.” He went into the Rift Valley in Kenya and lived with a nomadic Maasai tribe to try and discover what kind of culture clash aviation had brought to these people. He became an officer with the newly formed World Wildlife Fund, which had begun publishing an “endangered list” of animals subject to extinction because of human intrusions. He flew around the world half a dozen times a year, visiting exotic places and gathering information for reports on imperiled species, and he became a conservation icon after he declared, “I would rather have birds than airplanes.”8

  Lindbergh called the Vietnam War “a bad battlefield, badly chosen,” but as a loyal military man and staunch anticommunist he refused to condemn it.9 When in 1967 his son Scott declared he was giving up his American citizenship to avoid the draft, Lindbergh lambasted him as ungrateful and irresponsible and threatened to cut him off financially.

  In 1969 Lindbergh was asked by the astronaut Neil Armstrong, whom he and Anne had met at a dinner in the Lyndon Johnson White House, to be his guest of honor for the launching of Apollo 11, the moon shot. Immediately after, however, Lindbergh journeyed to the remotest part of the Philippines in order to study a tribe of cavemen who had just been discovered. The contrast could not have been greater. Lindbergh seemed increasingly swayed toward primitive, esoteric, even mystical cultures; sometimes he was known to wade Long Island Sound perfectly nude except for mud he’d smeared on his privates.

  In 1972 he was diagnosed with lymphoma, a dangerous form of blood cancer, and underwent radiation that seemed to put the disease into remission. He continued working with the World Wildlife Fund, soliciting big donations from the many wealthy friends he had made along the way. In 1974 the cancer returned and he was treated with chemotherapy in New York. It was too late this time, however, and the condition was diagnosed as fatal. Lindbergh said he wanted to “go home,” to Maui. The doctors thought he was much too sick and would die on the way, but they at last relented and he was put aboard a plane on a stretcher and flown west.

  He lingered for a month, surrounded by family and friends, and conferred constantly with Anne and the children about his funeral service and burial. He’d acquired a plot of land nearby, overlooking the sea, and he said he wanted his coffin to be built of native wood, constructed locally, rough sawn, and rectangular. The pallbearers would be local workers and the mourners confined to people he had made friends with on the island. He went into minute detail on how the inside of the coffin was to be lined. For a headstone he ordered a slab of granite that would contain his name, dates of birth and death, and a verse from the 139th Psalm, the one that begins, “If I take the wings of the morning …”

  He wanted a short burial service with a Hawaiian hymn and prayer from the Navajo, as well as readings from Saint Augustine, Gandhi, and Isaiah. He died on August 26, a Monday, and the services were carried out as ordered.10 To the last, as usual, Charles Lindbergh was in control. It was a fitting irony that one of the most celebrated Americans of the twentieth century would pass from the scene “in the utmost simplicity,” as the New York Times noted, “far from the crowds that had hailed and repelled him in his lifetime.”

  ANNE LIVED ON TO THE RIPE AGE OF NINETY-FOUR, publishing a series of well-received books of her diaries and letters, covering the years from 1922 to 1986, and collecting numerous honorary degrees from colleges and universities, before succumbing to a stroke in 2001.

  Charles had always been a man of many surprises, but perhaps none was more astounding than the revelation, three years after Anne had passed away, that between 1957 and 1967 he had fathered seven children by three different women in Germany. He supported these secret families until his death—one woman was a Prussian socialite, another a Bavarian hat maker, and the other was a sister to the hat maker who later took up residence in Switzerland. Considering the aura of sanctity that had surrounded Lindbergh almost like a cloud, the disclosure left people stunned and amazed. Word of the matter leaked out from the hat maker’s niece, who had seen some letters Lindbergh had written, and naturally the media descended upon Lindbergh’s American children for an explanation. There wasn’t any, really, except from his youngest daughter, Reeve, who was as shocked as everyone else until she considered that “the arrangement made a certain kind of sense. No one woman could possibly have lived with him all the time.”

  Lindbergh was a frustrating man in many ways, but as he became older he apparently became obdurate to the extent that an atmosphere of tension invaded the household when he arrived, and departed with him when he left. Reeve Lindbergh put it this way: “I remember my father as a deeply intelligent and incredibly energetic man, a man of warmth and humor and charm and a kind of old-fashioned shy courtesy that I always attributed to his Midwestern upbringing.” But, she went on, “I also remember my father as the most infuriatingly impossible human being I have ever known … when he was home his very presence often crowded and startled everyone else in the family, even the dog.”11

  That seems more or less what John Marquand had meant when he said of Lindbergh, “You’ve got to remember that all heroes are horses’ asses.” Marquand might have added, however—though it probably wasn’t necessary—that being a horse’s ass, or “infuriatingly impossible,” for that matter, does not detract from the deeds of heroism themselves. In Lindbergh’s case—the splendid Paris flight, his contributions to aviation, his service in World War II—the heroism was authentic.

  I don’t know why it is these days that this dirty linen has to be aired in books about otherwise decent and interesting people, but the public seems to demand it. On that account, in fairness, it becomes in order to take up the private lives of Jimmy Doolittle and Eddie Rickenbacker. A story about Doolittle having a fling has surfaced in a couple of books, including one by his granddaughter. The woman in question was a “New York model,” who in 1940 or thereabouts threatened Doolittle with blackmail if he didn’t buy her a fur coat. The versions vary in detail but both suggest that Doolittle interceded with Joe and confessed the affair, promising not to repeat it. For her part, Joe wrote a simple note to the woman in question that said, “Well, he never bought me a fur coat. I don’t know how you could possibly expect one.”12

  As for Rickenbacker, during taped interviews in connection with his autobiography, the subject of extramarital affairs arose and was just as quickly put down with characteristic Rickenbacker taciturnity.

  “I never had the time,” he said. Nobody’s disputed him yet.13

  THE LIVES OF RICKENBACKER, LINDBERGH, AND DOOLITTLE give weight to the question: where do we find such men? Theirs, in fact, is the almost perfect American story; a tale straight from Horatio Alger but without the fabled gift of money to help things along. These men did it all themselves: they set the standards, assumed the risks, and flew like shooting stars across the arc of American history. They were raised in an age of horsecarts and buggies and lived to see men fly to the moon, and they could claim a part of that for themselves, because they were the pioneers. They were also the warriors, in the most dignified sense of the word—tough, smart, smooth, fair, patriotic, and fearless, because they managed to overcome their fears for the greater good.

  When the terrible danger approached in the 1940s, these First World War–era aviators might have simply sat it out comfortably in their middle age and no one would have blamed them. Instead all three marched up and prepared to lay down their lives for their country.

  They became heroes first when the nation needed heroes. Eddie Rickenbacker, in the most pitiless days of World War I while more than fifty thousand American doughboys died on the battlefields of France, emerged as the Ace of Aces, America’s answer to the inimitable Red Baron, the German fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen.

  In the midst of the languid 1920s, when America had slipped back into isolationism and wallowed in indifference, Charles Lindbergh turned the light of the world upon the United States with a long-chance gamble from which f
ew believed he would return.

  And Jimmy Doolittle, in the horrible crisis months of World War II, came soaring out of the skies to jolt the Japanese empire to its bones, bolstering Allied spirits and confidence everywhere, and shaking loose a fabulous trove of military secrets that helped the Allies read the enemy’s codes.

  In their time, the three of them probably knew more about flying than all the collective knowledge in aviation history. They had graduated from cloth-and-wood flying machines in the dawn of human flight to steel and aluminum behemoths with thousands of horsepower and terrific firepower; they were truly among the first to “slip the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of God.” They were giants who ruled the air. In their time few could have matched them, and years after they have died their dust still sparkles in the lore that binds the national trust.

  * He knew as well about Magic, the American project that broke the Japanese naval code.

  † Unlike the arrangement with England in which the British traded U.S. war aid in exchange for long-term leases of British military bases around the world, with the Soviets there was U.S.-lend but no corresponding leases or repayment.

  ‡ Later, when both the Soviets and the Chinese began acting aggressively toward the United States and other democracies, Rickenbacker admitted he’d been wrong and resumed his abiding hatred of communism.

  § One bane for Rickenbacker was the question of stewards versus stewardesses. He preferred the men because, he said, the women soon marry, have children, and quit. However, since flying catered largely to businessmen, who preferred stewardesses, by the 1950s all of the airlines used (“the girls”) women.

  ‖ It has been said that his drinking was partially a cause of his leaving Eastern.

  a Even after the unconditional surrender there were reports of sniping and German “werewolves”—bitter Nazis who vowed sabotage even after losing the war.