The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  After that, Lindbergh took off for Texas. It was indeed seat-of-the-pants flying. There were numerous storms. Lindbergh had purchased a compass but failed to install it on the dashboard. The only chart he owned was an oil company map of the entire United States, which naturally contained few ground reference points. He became lost almost immediately and stayed lost until dusk, when he put down in a friendly-looking farm field. The landing went well, but as he was taxiing to a fence corner a large ditch suddenly appeared in front of him.

  He hit it fairly hard. As the plane nosed in the prop splintered. Then as the landing gear rolled down the tail reared up until Lindbergh feared the plane might flip. Instead, it settled back down. Now he could add to his list of “firsts” his first crack-up.

  The nearest town to the field where he’d crashed was Maben, Mississippi. He wired Americus for a new prop and made so many friends waiting for it that he had hundreds of dollars’ worth of paying customers by the time he got the plane fixed. At this point in his life Lindbergh was perfectly comfortable around admiring spectators and anxious to educate them about aviation. Puddle hopping northward through Texas and Nebraska, Slim stopped off at the old factory to show his new plane to the guys, then headed home to Minnesota.

  C.A., it seemed, had decided to run for an open seat in the U.S. Senate, and so Charles offered to fly him around the state. Unfortunately, no sooner had he arrived within its boundaries than he cracked up again, landing in a swamp and splintering another propeller to matchsticks.

  Despite the novelty of a candidate flying into his stump speeches, C.A.’s political career was over, and he finished a distant third. He had not been himself recently either; he had extreme reactions toward heat and cold and memory loss as well. Slim stayed in the area, barnstorming in Minnesota and Iowa, and he was earning a respectable living. One day a car drove up to the airfield with several young officers who had recently graduated from the army flight training school. They were snappy-looking in their silver wings, polished boots, and Sam Browne belts.

  One of them suggested to Lindbergh that he come into the army as a military aviator. After thinking it over Slim decided it wasn’t a bad idea; he had always wanted to fly powerful, modern planes, and perhaps become a fighter pilot, and the only way he could do any of that was via the U.S. Army. That night, in his hotel room, he wrote a letter to the chief of Air Service at the War Department in Washington, D.C., and the upshot was that on March 16, 1924, he reported, as ordered, to the army pilot training school at Brooks Field, near San Antonio, Texas.

  * He later added the h.

  † See A. Scott Berg’s masterful biography Lindbergh.

  ‡ The institution attended by the two daughters of President Barack Obama.

  § See Harrison Salisbury’s memoir A Journey for Our Times.

  CHAPTER 5

  AIR COMBAT IS NOT SPORT,

  IT IS SCIENTIFIC MURDER

  DURING THE LAST MONTH OF 1916 Eddie Rickenbacker had another epiphany. He was riding east on the Santa Fe Railway’s Super Chief from California, headed for Wolverhampton, England, to join the Sunbeam Automotive Company as an engineering and design adviser at the behest of its president, Louis Coatalen, who had approached him in California. Actually, he had been working up to this moment for several months, so perhaps it wasn’t an epiphany after all, but it was still a very big decision. Rickenbacker was through with automobile racing.

  In his private compartment on the train, Rickenbacker emptied out his coat and pants pockets of all the amulets, talismans, jujus, and other good-luck charms he’d collected over the years and laid them by the washbasin. What good had they done him, anyway, he thought? Only recently, a falling object had nearly brained him as he avoided walking under a ladder. It was superstition versus religion—and religion was the real thing from now on, he decided.1 He was still holding good to his abstinence pledge of no liquor and no cigarettes; he didn’t need those “lucky” crutches either.

  During his decade-long racing career he had seen his friends and competitors one by one killed or horribly injured. Car racing was far and away the world’s most dangerous sport, with something of a Roman circus aura about it.

  As the train rolled across the cold Southwest desert, Eddie lifted the lid of the commode and dropped his lucky charms into the bowl—rabbits’ feet, dried four-leaf clovers, a rattlesnake’s rattles, miniature Billiken dolls,* buckeyes, wishbones, and bear claws; also included were several tiny, shriveled-up bats’ hearts—“the weirdest collection of charms ever carried in the clothing of one person”—and pulled the chain, watching as they were flushed out onto the bare gravel and cross ties rushing by below.

  That year the American Automobile Association championship list ranked him the third best driver in the nation, an extraordinary achievement, and that year also he had netted nearly $40,000.† Rickenbacker would always be connected with car racing, he felt, as a backer or even an owner, but no longer a driver.

  When the train reached Indianapolis he stopped to pick up some documents at the Motor Speedway, then continued on to Washington where he applied for a passport, using officially for the first time the new spelling of his name, substituting the more anglicized k for the Germanic h.

  At the time, the Germans had not yet begun unrestricted sea warfare, but U-boat commanders were known to stop ships on the ocean and check their cargo and passenger lists, so the voyage took on an edgy mood. In New York Rickenbacker boarded the ocean liner St. Louis, bound for Liverpool. Among the passengers aboard was William Thaw II, from the prominent Pittsburgh family, who had learned to fly at Yale. In 1914, despite poor vision, defective hearing, and a bad knee, Thaw had volunteered himself, and his plane, to fight the Germans in what became the Lafayette Escadrille, a fighter squadron in the French army consisting of mostly American pilots. Eddie and Major Thaw found that they had engines and speed in common, and Thaw suggested to Rickenbacker that because of his racing experience he would be a good candidate for the Escadrille. For the first time Eddie actually began to consider the dimensions and consequences of the war that was tearing much of the world apart but had not yet affected America. Yet he wasn’t ready to jump out of the racing kettle and into a shooting fire.

  Others aboard were a pair named Goodyear and Immermann (Rickenbacker took them for Canadians), who said they were in the wheat business. All across the bleak North Atlantic the passengers engaged in small talk, but the Canadian wheat salesmen seemed to take a particular interest in Rickenbacker and joked about how he would be received in England with his German-sounding name.

  When the St. Louis arrived in Liverpool a few days before Christmas, Eddie discovered that the men weren’t joking at all. Instead of debarking, when Rickenbacker produced his passport, a British official with a drooping mustache shouted in his face, “What’s your name?”

  “Rickenbacker,” he answered. “You can read it right there on the passport.”

  “What’s your purpose in England?” the official demanded. And before Eddie could answer he added, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

  Suddenly, a big long-nosed Scotland Yard detective wearing a bowler hat materialized and escorted Rickenbacker into ship’s cabin A, and who should be sitting there but Goodyear and Immermann, who promptly revealed themselves as inspectors from Scotland Yard and accused Rickenbacker of being a German spy!

  Immermann said to Rickenbacker, “You might as well own up. You’ll be executed anyway. But it will save a lot of trouble.”

  They had been sarcastically calling him “Baron von Rickenbacher,” and Eddie asked, “What is all this ‘Baron’ stuff about?”

  They proudly produced a dossier they said had been kept on Eddie, going back some years. It was filled with old newspaper clippings from his racing days.

  It seems that at the 1913 Santa Monica races an inventive sports reporter, in an act that would make the National Enquirer blush, wrote a story claiming that Eddie was in fact a man named Edwart von Rickenbacher, long-
lost scion of a colonel in the German army who was also a Prussian baron. The story claimed that he had been expelled from the Vienna Military Academy for the offense of “speeding” after he outraced Germany’s most famous race car driver, the Mercedes engineer Max Sailer, in a car full of drunken cadets. The story went on to say that the disgrace caused his father to disinherit “Baron von Rickenbacher,” which drove him to exile in the United States, where he changed the spelling of his name and the only calling he could think of was racing cars.

  Eddie hadn’t denied the story at the time, either because he didn’t see the original or because he thought the publicity might do him some good. In any event the fiction was consequently reprinted as true and produced such nicknames for him in the press as the “Wild Teuton,” the “Happy Heinie,” and the “Daredevil Dutchman,” and all this in time became part of auto-racing lore. To Eddie, it had been a joke, but judging by the demeanor of these British policemen, it was no longer a joking matter.

  They strip-searched him, Eddie said, going so far as to remove the heels of his shoes to see if there was anything hidden inside, and rubbed lemon juice and acids on his skin to detect secret writing. They sifted through his luggage and cut open the seams of his suit jackets—all the while questioning him relentlessly and refusing his pleas to contact his sponsor Louis Coatalen at the Sunbeam factory.

  Nothing criminal was found but nevertheless they confined Rickenbacker to the ship until it sailed, banishing him from setting foot on British soil. When he protested, the long-nosed sergeant threatened to throw him into the Tower of London.

  On Christmas Eve, with the help of the ship’s captain, Eddie persuaded his tormentors to at least let him go ashore and spend the night in a hotel in Liverpool, where he could get some Christmas dinner. They agreed but took rooms next to his and refused to let him out of their sight. From the hotel he repeatedly phoned Coatalen, who was neither at home nor at work, but on Christmas morning his luck changed. Coatalen at last was contacted and immediately interceded with Scotland Yard. By that afternoon Eddie was on a train for London, bound for the fabulous Savoy Hotel.2

  AT THE CRACK OF DAWN next day Eddie was awakened by the roar of many engines as British fighter and bomber squadrons flew low over the Thames River on training maneuvers. “On hearing the engines he would hop out of bed, rush to the window, watch the formations with eager eyes, and decided that it would not be such a bad idea to join up.”3 Meantime, there was work to do at the Sunbeam factory.

  Sunbeam’s facility was located in the Midlands and Rickenbacker spent the workweek there, designing and streamlining Sunbeam racers for the upcoming season. But on the weekends he returned to the Savoy and the flights of warplanes every morning. Everything in England seemed to involve the war, and with so many young men on the streets in khaki Eddie began to feel self-conscious. He was then twenty-seven years old and decided that if the United States became involved in the war he wanted to be a fighter pilot. What he didn’t know was that twenty-seven was too old to become a fighter pilot, according to U.S. Army regulations. He also decided that he wanted the United States to get involved in the war, which turned out to be sooner than he thought.

  Rickenbacker had been in England less than two months when Germany announced it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships in British waters. At this the United States broke off diplomatic relations, and the Germans gave Americans living in England a five-day grace period in which to sail home. That was the end of the Sunbeam racing team. Eddie decided to go home but reservations were tight. He managed to share an upper berth on, of all ships, the St. Louis, where his old nemesis the long-nosed sergeant from Scotland Yard awaited him. Again he was marched to cabin A, and once again he was greeted by Inspectors Goodyear and Immermann, who began their interrogations anew. They searched all of his baggage and papers and confiscated drawings and plans of race cars he was working on. At long last they left him be, and once they had gone he went into the ship’s salon where he encountered an old friend, the noted playwright and artist Gene Buck, drinking tea and eating bonbons, who told him, “Say, Eddie, have you heard the news? There’s a big German spy on board. That’s why the boat is delayed!”

  ON THE VOYAGE HOME to the United States Eddie had an idea. He remembered the conversation he’d had on the trip over with Major Thaw, who had tried to recruit him into the Lafayette Escadrille by suggesting that his race driving experience would be an asset as a pilot. It made perfect sense. Drivers were also good mechanics, who knew how to get the most out of their engines; they had excellent reflexes and instincts (or they would not be alive); they were used to making instantaneous decisions and were brave and accustomed to putting themselves in harm’s way. If he could recruit fifty—even a hundred—drivers, the cream of the professional race car circuit, to become U.S. Army aviators, it would certainly be a formidable bunch. He even thought up a name for such a group: the Aero Reserves of America.

  When the St. Louis docked in New York the usual gaggle of newsmen awaited, including a reporter for the New York Times, which carried a story in next day’s paper headlined, “Plans to Enlist Race Drivers for Aviation,” with Eddie quoted as promising a nationwide tour, signing up the drivers.

  Before leaving New York, Eddie contacted Captain Walter G. Kilner who ran the army aviation school at Mineola, Long Island, who referred him to a Brigadier General Squier, commander of the Signal Corps in Washington, under which the Army Air Service languished. Militarily, the army had found practically no use for its air arm, which in 1917 was barely six years old and possessed fewer than fifty planes and no more than forty pilots. No one on the general staff had any aviation training, or much interest in it either.

  Despite the American brass’s ambivalence over the airplane as a weapon, by 1917 aerial warfare had become an integral part of the war in Europe, which sealed its future as a critical element in any wars to come as well. At first planes were used for scouting, as mounted cavalry had performed in previous conflicts. From heights, planes could pick up troop and artillery movements or the construction of fortifications. Opposing forces quickly began to arm pilots to attack these intruding scouts—at first with rifles, pistols, even shotguns, but soon with machine guns, which had become ubiquitous during the war. Initially the machine guns had to be mounted above the propeller if it was front-mounted, which made firing them awkward, but by 1916 the French had found a way to synchronize the timing of the machine-gun fire to the revolutions of the propeller so that the bullets fired in between the spinning blades of the prop, which made aerial battle all the more accurate and deadly.

  Photographic aircraft also soon appeared in enemy territory, with a cameraman/observer/machine gunner taking pictures of the battlefield for interpretation by intelligence officers and also for mapmaking purposes. These, too, developed counterparts in “pursuit” or fighter planes, whose job it was to shoot down the interlopers before they could complete their mission. Likewise, bombers appeared on both sides, with ever heavier explosive loads commensurate with their increase in size, power, and sophistication. They also had to contend with the pursuit fighters.

  In late 1915 there appeared on the Western Front a German flier named Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, after his royal title and a penchant for painting his squadron’s Fokker triwing fighters red. He was a natural born killer who shot down more than eighty enemy aircraft before himself being fatally brought down by ground fire from a trench containing Australian infantry while battling a British plane at low altitude. He was so vainglorious that each time he shot down a plane Richthofen ordered a Berlin jeweler to produce a specially engraved silver goblet with the date and type of airplane that was his “kill.”

  It was Richthofen and others like him on both sides who gave rise to the term “ace,” the appellation applied to pilots who shot down a certain number of enemy planes—usually, at least five. In the process, these men invented the elaborate flying maneuvers used in what were known as dog
fights—brief, bloody, and often fatal encounters among two or more enemy planes. Many of these aerial ploys were named after the pilots who perfected them—the Immelmann turn, the Lufbery loop, Dicta Boelcke, and so forth—which in turn triggered rapid improvements in speed, maneuverability, and firepower of the aircraft they flew.

  Undaunted by his putdown by the U.S. Army brass, Eddie used his celebrity to make pro-intervention speeches to men’s clubs in such cities as Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. West of the Alleghenies, however, he found that interest in the ongoing war in Europe had waned. Also, at some point, he began to have a sensation that someone was following him. Everywhere he went, it seemed, a certain tall blond man would appear—in his hotel lobby, at speeches, in restaurants. When Eddie tried to confront the man it was as if he’d vanished into thin air.

  Rickenbacker had reached Los Angeles in mid-March 1917 when the infamous Zimmermann Telegram was revealed. The British, it seemed, had intercepted a wire from Germany’s foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to Heinrich von Eckardt, the German ambassador to Mexico, offering to return to the Mexicans the provinces lost to the United States in the 1846–48 Mexican-American War in exchange for Mexican support against England, France, and the Allies. Newspapers played up the presumptuous German clandestine offer in major headlines and a surge of furious indignation swept across California, which had been free from Mexican rule only sixty-six years at that point. Eddie’s speeches suddenly began attracting large crowds.

  He was standing in the lobby of L.A.’s Alexandria Hotel one morning when the tall blond stranger materialized in an archway, approached, and introduced himself to the startled Rickenbacker with a strong British accent. “I just want to tell you,” said the man, “that my government and I are now fully satisfied as to your status as a loyal and patriotic American.” Before Rickenbacker could react, the man added, “But I do want to thank you for the wonderful trip I’ve had, following you about this interesting country.” He then turned with a nod and seemed to vanish as mysteriously as he had appeared.4