by Lynne Olson
No one, that is, but Henry Ford. For years one of the most ardent isolationists in the country, Ford now presided over a thriving defense manufacturing empire, turning out engines, tanks, jeeps, staff cars, and aircraft, above all, B-24 bombers, which were built at Willow Run, Ford’s mile-long aircraft assembly plant outside Detroit. The government needed Ford as much as he needed the government’s business, and he made it clear he didn’t care what administration officials had to say about his hiring Lindbergh as a technical consultant.
For more than a year, Lindbergh worked to improve the design and performance of Ford-manufactured planes, including the B-24 and the P-47 fighter, known as the Thunderbolt. Making dozens of test flights, he operated the P-47 at extremely high altitudes to test the effect of such heights on both pilots and planes. As a result of his study, Ford modified the Thunderbolt’s design and oxygen equipment, which, according to the Air Forces, bettered the craft’s performance and helped save many pilots’ lives. Later in the conflict, Lindbergh worked as a consultant to United Aircraft Corp., where he played a major role in the development and design of the Corsair, a new Navy and Marine fighter that could take off from aircraft carriers as well as from land bases.
Throughout the next three and a half years of war, Lindbergh belied the predictions of his critics that his goal was to topple the president. He resolutely stayed out of politics and the public eye, avoiding comment on the war’s progress and uttering no criticism of FDR and his policies. He had “purposely entered technical fields,” he told friends, so that he could give his “utmost support” to the country’s war effort and not be swept up again in political controversy.
Ever since his return from Europe in the spring of 1939, conventional wisdom had had it that Lindbergh would eventually run for public office. “Among most of Lindbergh’s friends,” Life wrote in August 1941, “it is an accepted fact that he will take a more active part in politics, in or out of war. They say he will be ‘forced into it,’ to prove that he has been right; that consciously or unconsciously he knows he must remain ‘in the forefront.’ ” In November 1941, Dorothy Thompson said she was “absolutely certain” that Lindbergh would form a new party and do everything in his power to become president. As it happened, a host of politicians, including Burton Wheeler and William Borah, had urged him to do just that.
Each time the idea came up, however, Lindbergh rejected it. “I do not feel that I am suited, either by temperament or desire, to the field of active politics,” he wrote to Robert Wood in late 1941. “I have entered this field during the last two years, only because of the extreme wartime emergency which confronts my country.” Entering the political arena, he said, would force him to give up the independence he so prized—the ability to say and do exactly what he thought. Then, in a statement that is key to understanding him, he noted: “Personally, I prefer the adventure and freedom of going as far from the center as my thoughts, ideals, and convictions lead me. I do not like to be held back by the question of influencing the mass of people or by the desire for the utmost security. I must admit, and I have no apology to make for the fact, that I prefer adventure to security, freedom to popularity, and conviction to influence.” Anne later told a reporter: “I don’t think Charles … ever wanted to be a leader in the sense of attracting followers, influence, popularity, and a movement behind him. Charles never really went after any of these things. He had causes he advanced, but usually he advanced them alone.”
While Lindbergh remained persona non grata in the upper reaches of the Roosevelt administration throughout the war, his military friends stayed loyal. In early 1944, some of them encouraged him to travel as a civilian consultant to the Pacific theater, where he could test fighters under combat conditions, show pilots how to get the best out of their aircraft, and make recommendations for design improvements. When he said the White House would never allow it, they replied, “Why does the White House have to know?”
A few weeks later, wearing a naval officer’s uniform without insignia, Lindbergh was on his way to the Pacific, without the knowledge of Roosevelt, Frank Knox, or Henry Stimson. For the next five months, the forty-two-year-old civilian flew some fifty combat missions against the Japanese in Navy, Marine, and Air Forces planes while squadron leaders and higher-ranking officers looked the other way. During those missions, which included patrol, escort, strafing, and dive-bombing runs, he shot down at least one Japanese Zero and came close to being shot down himself. As had been true back home, Lindbergh’s suggestions for changes improved the effectiveness of the planes he flew; in the case of the P-38 Lightning, his recommendations increased its range by five hundred miles.
By all accounts, he was supremely happy during those perilous, exciting months. In photographs taken of him during that period, he almost always had a wide smile on his face. Flying with the military, Anne wrote, “had made a new man of him—made him boyish again.” He developed close relationships with some of the young pilots with whom he flew, a number of whom were at least twenty years his junior. One morning, when he was a little slow retracting his landing gear while taking off on a mission, one of his youthful compatriots laughingly radioed him: “Lindbergh! … Get your wheels up! You ain’t flying the Spirit of St. Louis!” According to his daughter Reeve, Lindbergh was in his element: “Everything was very well ordered, and there was a kind of camaraderie, and there wasn’t the confusion and tension of the rest of the world.”
After the war, even some of Lindbergh’s harshest critics acknowledged that he had acquitted himself well. Robert Sherwood, for one, conceded in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Hopkins and Roosevelt that the man he had once denounced as a “Nazi” and “Hitler bootlicker” had in fact “rendered valuable wartime service as a civilian flyer.”
For Lindbergh’s wife, though, there was little good about the war. With her husband gone for most of it, Anne was left to raise four small children (a daughter, Anne, had been born in 1940, and a son, Scott, in 1943) by herself in a rented house in a Detroit suburb. In the South Pacific, Lindbergh had managed to escape the odium surrounding his isolationism. In the isolation of Detroit, Anne remained haunted by the past.
When Harcourt, Brace published a short novel she had written, called The Steep Ascent, in the summer of 1943, the Book-of-the-Month Club refused to consider it as a possible selection, explaining that many readers had threatened to cancel their membership if the book was chosen. Reluctantly concluding that a large portion of the reading public would not buy any book by the author of The Wave of the Future, Harcourt, Brace limited The Steep Ascent’s print run to twenty-five thousand copies, far fewer than any of her previous books.
Already disheartened by the perpetual cloud she seemed to be under, Anne was devastated to learn in August 1944 of the death of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who had joined the Free French forces in 1943 and disappeared a year later on a reconnaissance flight over southern France to map the terrain for an upcoming Allied landing.* Although she had spent only three days with Saint-Exupéry in 1939, their encounter had transformed her life. She had written The Steep Ascent as “a letter to him,” she noted, adding that he “spoke ‘my language’ better than anyone I have ever met, before or since.” She added: “Of what use to write if he were not there to read it—perhaps—sometime—somewhere?”
For weeks, she was benumbed by grief, frequently giving way to gusts of tears. Saint-Exupéry’s death, she wrote, was as painful to her as the losses of her son and sister. At the time, she reproached herself for feeling so strongly about a man with whom she had spent so short a time. She was not his wife or mistress, she acknowledged, nor even a close friend. But after rereading her diary entries about that fateful weekend, she concluded that her memories about the intimate connection she had formed with Saint-Exupéry were indeed accurate.
Pouring out her sorrow in her diary, she wrote: “I am sad we never met again. I am sad he never tried to see us, though I understand it; I am sad that politics and the fierceness of the a
nti-war fight and the glare of publicity and the calumny and mixed-up pain and hurt and wrong of my book kept us from meeting again. I am sad that I never had the luxury of knowing whether or not he forgave us for our stand, forgave me for my book.”
Earlier in her life, she had described Lindbergh as her “sun.” Saint-Exupéry seemed to have replaced him. For Anne, Charles was now “earth,” while Saint-Exupéry was “a sun or a moon or stars which light the 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.”
CHARLES LINDBERGH WAS NOT the only leading former isolationist to be given the brush-off by the White House after America entered the war. Robert Wood, the chairman of America First, also failed in his bid for active military duty. Hap Arnold, a good friend of Wood’s, interceded for him with Roosevelt, saying he needed the help of the former Army quartermaster general in improving the Air Forces’ supply system. The president was unmoved. “I do not think that General Wood should be put into uniform,” he told Arnold. “He is too old and has, in the past, shown far too great approval of Nazi methods.” But if Arnold wanted to use Wood as a civilian adviser, FDR added, he would have no objection. Arnold promptly put Wood to work, dispatching him to Air Forces bases in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific to check on their supply operations and make recommendations for their improvement. At the end of the war, the Sears, Roebuck chairman was awarded the Legion of Merit, a military decoration for exceptional service.
The young founders of America First, however, did not encounter the same hostility experienced by their more prominent elders. Robert Stuart, who held a ROTC commission in the Army Reserve, went on active duty shortly after Pearl Harbor and rose to the rank of major, serving on General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff in London. He saw combat in France immediately after D-Day. Kingman Brewster, Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, and Potter Stewart all joined the Navy. Brewster became an aviator, while Stewart served on ships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and Ford and Shriver were assigned to sea duty in the Pacific. Shriver was injured in the battle for Guadalcanal.
Even before Pearl Harbor, the mood on most college campuses had largely swung toward interventionism. Former antiwar activists enlisted in droves when war broke out, among them Neal Anderson Scott, whose 1940 commencement speech at Davidson College, like so many other graduation speeches that year, proclaimed that “the Yanks are not coming.” Scott, a Navy ensign, was killed in 1942 during the Battle of Santa Cruz in the South Pacific.
MEANWHILE, THE SENIOR MILITARY officers who had worked against the president’s interventionist policies before Pearl Harbor suffered no retribution, and in some cases, thanks to General George Marshall, they were given influential wartime positions.
In September 1941, an Army board ordered the mandatory retirement of Colonel Truman Smith because of his diabetes. Marshall, who had been cleaning out the Army’s officer corps—getting rid of many older officers for health reasons—regretfully told Smith he could no longer protect him. Shortly after his retirement, Smith emerged as an outspoken supporter of America First, openly associating with Lindbergh and other leaders of the group. Nonetheless, as soon as the United States entered the war, Marshall reinstated Smith as the Army chief’s top adviser on Germany. If Marshall had been appointed commander of the Allied forces invading Europe, as he hoped, he planned to take Smith to London as a key aide. (General Dwight D. Eisenhower got the nod as commander instead.) Although Marshall failed to get a promotion for Smith to brigadier general, he saw to it that his trusted adviser was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal at the end of the war for “his contribution to the war effort of the nation,” which was described as “of major significance.”
While Smith, by all accounts, served his country loyally during the conflict, he and his wife remained ardent Roosevelt haters. When they heard in April 1945 that FDR had died, the Smiths “burst into roars of laughter” and embraced each other and a friend, who threw “his arms high in the air in exultation,” Katharine Smith wrote in an unpublished memoir. “The evil man was dead! I know how right we were to hate him so bitterly. There is no ill, foreign or domestic, that cannot be traced back directly to his policies. Our decline, our degeneracy stems from that man and his socialist, blinded, greedy wife.”
Meanwhile, General Stanley Embick, who had opposed aid to Britain and U.S. participation in the war until Pearl Harbor, emerged as arguably the most influential and powerful Army strategist of World War II. In the fall of 1942, Marshall named Embick as the Army’s representative to the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, a group of senior officers who advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff on strategic and political decisions related to the war. According to one historian, the committee was at times “equal in influence” to the Joint Chiefs themselves. Embick was widely regarded as the committee’s dominant force.
Embick strongly opposed a key British strategy—to stage the first Allied offensives against Germany in North Africa and other areas on the perimeter of Europe rather than aim for an invasion of France across the English Channel. The strategic survey committee, under Embick’s direction, described the British strategy as a scheme to protect their empire and to preserve the balance of power in Europe.
Heavily influenced by Embick’s views, Marshall made clear to Roosevelt his own opposition to the 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa—a position that the president eventually overruled. For the Army chief of staff, “suspicion of British imperial designs under Churchill underlay every wartime scheme,” the historian Stanley Weintraub has written. Marshall himself acknowledged after the war that “too much anti-British feeling [existed] on our side, more than we should have had. Our people were always ready to find Albion perfidious.”
Another of Albion’s critics was Lieutenant Colonel Albert Wedemeyer, Embick’s son-in-law and the architect of the Victory Program, who, as one of the Army’s chief planners, also vociferously opposed Allied operations in the Mediterranean. After playing a major role in the initial planning of the Normandy invasion, Wedemeyer, whom the historian John Keegan called “one of the most intellectual and farsighted military minds America has ever produced,” was reassigned in 1943 to the Far East, where he became chief of staff to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander of the Southeast Asia Command. In 1944, Wedemeyer was named U.S. commander in China. He was convinced that his assignment to Asia came at the behest of Winston Churchill and the British, who resented his incessant criticism of them and their strategy and prevailed on Roosevelt to transfer him.
And then there was Hap Arnold, who, having survived the leak of the Victory Program, succeeded in doing what he had set out to accomplish: build the most powerful air force in the world. In just four years, his service mushroomed from several thousand men and a few hundred obsolescent aircraft to a 2.4-million-man force and eighty thousand modern planes. Convinced that strategic bombing could win the conflict virtually by itself, Arnold hoped to prove what he had long believed: that airpower was far superior to any other armed force. He was wrong on both counts.
As Marshall had long argued and Wedemeyer noted in the Victory Program, the war in Europe could not have been won without the fighting of massive numbers of ground troops. Although Arnold’s Air Forces did play an important role in the victory, the human cost, both on the ground and in the air, was huge and bloody. By the end of the war, U.S. air operations in Europe suffered more casualties than the entire Marine Corps in its protracted campaigns in the Pacific.
THE MAN WHO, MORE than any other private citizen, helped unite the country behind the idea of aiding Britain and opposing Germany spent the war promoting the importance of international cooperation after the conflict. Although he rejected an attempt by FDR to bring him into his administration, Wendell Willkie, whom one newspaper labeled “a vocal and patriotic alarm clock,” became a sort of ambassador-at-large for Roosevelt, traveling around the globe to meet with Allied heads of state,
soldiers, and ordinary citizens. Wherever he went, he talked about the importance of a united, democratic world, free from the taints of totalitarianism, imperialism, and colonialism.
In 1943, Willkie published a book called One World, setting forth his internationalist views. It became a runaway bestseller, helping to nudge public opinion toward the idea of a postwar United Nations but also making him even more of a controversial figure within the Republican Party. Dubbing Willkie a “stooge for Roosevelt,” the GOP’s conservative old guard never forgave him for his liberalism, which included strong protests against racial discrimination in the country. When a violent race riot erupted in Detroit in June 1943, Willkie blasted both Republicans and Democrats for ignoring what he called “the Negro question.” In his view, “the desire to deprive some of our citizens of their rights—economic, civic or political—has the same basic motivation as actuates the Fascist mind when it seeks to dominate whole peoples and nations. It is essential that we eliminate it at home as well as abroad.”
Willkie had dreams of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1944, but the party regulars thwarted his efforts. They didn’t even invite him to the convention in Chicago, even though he had won more votes in 1940 than any previous Republican candidate in history. Willkie’s influence was felt in Chicago all the same: the GOP adopted an internationalist platform that called for “responsible participation by the United States in a postwar cooperative organization among sovereign nations to prevent military aggression and to attain permanent peace.”
In late September 1944, Willkie told an acquaintance, “If I could write my own epitaph and if I had to choose between saying, ‘Here lies an unimportant President,’ or ‘Here lies one who contributed to saving freedom at a moment of great peril,’ I would prefer the latter.” A few days later, Willkie, whose appetites for smoking, drinking, and eating were as prodigal as his idealism, died of a heart attack. He was fifty-two.
