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

by Winston Groom

  It would be the fuel of the future, he told executives, because he’d studied the new engine designs and all of them called for far more powerful engines than were in existence at the time. Military planes, fighters and bombers, Doolittle argued, would soon be built with extremely powerful engines, and the same was true for commercial aircraft, which by the early 1930s were being designed to carry up to twenty-one passengers instead of the present six or eight.

  Shell was convinced enough by Doolittle’s argument to put $3 million into research and development for the 100 octane fuel, the demand for which at the time was absolutely zero.b Doolittle took much criticism from various naysayers and disbelievers in the company, who behind his back branded it “Doolittle’s Folly.” In fact, his standing within the company was on the line, and he knew it.

  The first hurdle Doolittle had with selling the 100 octane fuel was the U.S. Army, which had solved the multifuel grade problem by designing all its military engines from motorcycles to fighter planes so they would use a single-grade fuel (87 octane). It was believed that this would simplify supply problems in wartime.

  Doolittle organized and closely monitored tests of various grades of fuel conducted by the Air Corps at Wright Field in Ohio, where engineers made an amazing discovery: using 100 octane fuel would increase power even in existing engines up to 30 percent, and that with high-compression engines the higher-grade fuel would get up to 15 percent in fuel savings.

  Jimmy made his case to the army brass and in 1936 a committee was appointed that recommended all combat aircraft engines be designed for 100 octane fuel. The commercial airlines didn’t need a committee, and by 1938 Shell Oil was selling millions of gallons of high-octane fuel monthly. By 1943, with the war on, Shell was producing fifteen million gallons of 100 octane a day. It had been a big gamble, and Jimmy had risked his career with Shell over it, but “Doolittle’s Folly” paid off in spades.

  Meantime, Jimmy announced he was retiring from air racing. He had been gravitating toward the decision for years, gently pushed by Joe, as so many of his friends and acquaintances had died in crashes. He was the number one air-racing pilot in America, but he was also thirty-four and balding, and his happy smile was beginning to look rueful. What finally pushed him into retirement was when he learned that during his last race, a Thompson Cup, news photographers had clustered around Joe and the children, hoping to capture the looks on their faces if he crashed.

  The air races, he told the press, had served their purpose. They aroused public interest and created great innovations in aircraft design such as retractable landing gear, streamlined wings, and of course more powerful engines. But now, he said, the emphasis should be on reliability and safety. When pressed on the decision, he told reporters, “I have yet to hear of anyone engaged in this work dying of old age.”

  Very soon afterward, the Curtiss company came calling once more, wanting Doolittle to make a trip around the world to sell its P6 Hawk, in conjunction with Shell Oil, of course. He took Joe along this time—after arranging for the boys to be cared for—and sailed from San Francisco in early 1933, arriving nearly a month later in Yokohama, Japan. Jimmy immediately became a subject of suspicion when the Japanese saw his passport, but he was allowed ashore anyway to visit Tokyo and sightsee other areas. He wrote later that if he’d had any inkling that the United States would one day soon be at war with Japan he would have taken careful notes of landmarks and military targets.

  Jimmy gave demonstrations of the Hawk in several Chinese cities, including Shanghai; each time he noticed on the outskirts of the field a group of Japanese photographers with telescopic lenses taking pictures of the military plane. Twice he had strong misgivings that a saboteur had tampered with the plane and damaged critical parts. They pushed on to the Philippines without further incident, making brief stops in the Dutch East Indies, the Middle East, and Europe, before sailing back to New York from England in August 1933.

  While he was in England, Jimmy had made a determined pitch to the Royal Air Force, pointing out the extra power boost its planes—especially the defensive fighters—would get by converting to 100 octane gas. He showed British engineers that a 1,000-horsepower-rated Merlin fighter engine would produce 1,700 horsepower when fueled with 100 octane gasoline. This gave the RAF an enormous edge during the Battle of Britain, when its Hurricanes and Spitfires could develop much higher manifold pressure and outclimb and outrace their German counterparts, which used only 87 octane fuel.8

  Because Doolittle’s words did not fall on deaf ears, by the middle of 1940 all RAF fighters had begun to use 100 octane fuel, and after the war the British petroleum secretary said of the conversion: “This octane was thirteen points higher than the fuel used by German aircraft. Those extra thirteen points ended the threat of any Nazi invasion of England.”9

  IN FEBRUARY 1934, a significant and expanding scandal erupted when, in answer to charges of favoritism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt without warning canceled all airmail contracts with civilian airline companies and nationalized the airmail service by ordering the Army Air Corps to fly the mail. The president’s action stemmed from his assertion that the major airlines, with the collusion of his Republican predecessor’s administration, had criminally conspired to keep all mail contracts within their own hands and nobody else’s.

  This provoked severe and biting criticism of the president by such aviation luminaries as Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh, still famous for his transatlantic flight and a large stockholder in TWA, one of the affected airlines, was never a man to mince words. The day following the announcement, he sent Roosevelt a personal telegram, simultaneously released to the press, charging that the president’s action would “unnecessarily damage all American aviation,” and condemning the president for taking arbitrary action against the airlines without a fair trial.10

  Rickenbacker, who by then was also inextricably involved with the airline industry, was even more strident. After Lindbergh’s comments were printed, reporters rushed over to Rickenbacker’s New York office to get a comment. He explained that army pilots were not suited to flying the mail. They were neither trained nor equipped for blind flying or even night flying. Their planes were not adapted to airmail flying. Pointing out that no chief pilot for a commercial airline had less than four thousand flying hours, compared with a few hundred for the average army pilot, he told the newsmen, “Either they [the army pilots] are going to pile up ships all across the continent, or they are not going to be able to fly the mail on schedule.”

  The Roosevelt administration had already developed a highly skilled attack organ within its public relations machine. In an obvious case of “if you don’t like the message, attack the messenger,” Roosevelt’s secretary Stephen T. Early immediately accused Lindbergh of, basically, being ungentlemanly for releasing his telegram to the press before Roosevelt had had a chance to read it himself.

  Not only that, but prominent Democratic congressmen began attacking Lindbergh in the press, accusing him of being a publicity seeker, a shill for the airlines, and there were assertions hinting of bribery and corruption. It was Lindbergh’s first encounter with adverse publicity, but if he was stung by it he didn’t say. It would not be his last difficult encounter with the Roosevelt administration.

  The army was scheduled to begin flying the mail by February 20. By then, all of the commercial airlines had practically gone out of business, since carrying airmail had been their mainstay, and there wasn’t yet enough passenger traffic to keep the companies going. Staff and workers were laid off to cope with the Depression however they could. On that same morning, newspaper headlines announced that three army pilots had been killed the previous day flying in snowstorms or fog, merely on their way to their airmail assignments. Rickenbacker was having breakfast with several reporters when the newspapers were brought in, and he abruptly declared, “That’s legalized murder!” When the reporters asked if they could quote him, America’s Ace of Aces said, “You’re damne
d right you can!”11

  He had been scheduled to give a fifteen-minute nationwide speech on NBC several days later and had asked the Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler for help “from his best editorial writer” to weigh in on the airmail controversy. As he was leaving for the studio, Rickenbacker said, he received a call from a friend at NBC who informed him that “orders had come from Washington [i.e., presumably from the White House] to cut me off the air if I said anything controversial.”

  Rickenbacker toned down his speech, but not enough to keep from being cut off entirely several days later, he said, by orders of the president, when he was scheduled to make another speech via NBC’s national radio forum.c

  Just as Lindbergh and Rickenbacker had predicted, in the ensuing weeks there were sixty-six crashes and ten more army pilots were killed delivering the mail, provoking a public outcry that at last caused Roosevelt to reverse himself and put the airmail service back on commercial airline contracts. But the president, in a final fit of pique, decreed that no one who worked for any of the original companies that had traditionally carried the mail would be eligible to receive a government contract. This produced a charade of musical chairs in which all the airlines simply changed their names (e.g., United Aircraft became United Airlines), a solution that Lindbergh sourly characterized as “something to be found in Alice in Wonderland.”12

  Instead of speaking out like Lindbergh and Rickenbacker, Doolittle kept his counsel during the controversy, though privately he shared the opinion of Lindbergh and Rickenbacker that the president had been imprudent in making army pilots fly airmail routes. Perhaps his silence was because he was trying to sell the government 100 octane gasoline.

  Responding to the public’s outrage, a committee was convened in Washington to investigate why the Army Air Service was in such bad condition. (In 1934, out of the three thousand aircraft that the Air Service owned, only three hundred had been suitable and serviceable for airmail duty.) Known as the Baker Board after its chairman, Newton D. Baker, who had been U.S. secretary of war during World War I, only four of the twelve members were active pilots. Lindbergh had been asked to serve but declined after his feud with Roosevelt, but Doolittle jumped at the chance to accomplish something constructive.

  In the end he came away deeply disappointed. The majority report was openly antagonistic to the aviators, declaring that the notion that airpower could produce “decisive results” in war was “visionary”—in other words, unrealistic—and heaped scorn on those sounding alarms about the Air Service, stating, “The fear that has been cultivated in this country by various zealots that American aviation is inferior to that of the rest of the world is, as a whole, unfounded.”d It went on to accuse those officers—presumably, Doolittle included—who wanted an air corps separate from the army, or even a separate budget, as “continuing agitation” and disturbing “harmonious development.”13

  Doolittle wrote an incisive, even eloquent, dissent or “minority statement,” and said afterward that he was “disgusted” with the conclusion of the Baker Board. He told the newspapers, “The country will someday pay for the stupidities of those who were in the majority of this commission. They know as much about the future of aviation as they do about the sign writing of the Aztecs.”

  THE MID-1930S WAS A TENSE and unpleasant era for most Americans. The country remained in the grip of the Great Depression, which had dramatically lowered the living standard for all but a privileged few. By mid-decade it began to seem as if the paralytic malaise would linger forever. Money was tight; getting and keeping a job was difficult, impossible even, for some 15 to 20 percent of the working population. This of course had reduced government revenues, and President Roosevelt was putting so much money into relief and jobs programs there was relatively little left for the military, most especially the Air Service.

  Meanwhile, in Germany, things had begun to brighten up, at least most Germans thought so. Adolf Hitler, an Aryan racist and odious provocateur against Jews and Slavs, had taken power as chancellor and imposed his Nazi brand of socialism on the nation.

  At first it seemed to work. Germany suffered terribly following World War I and during the 1920s had undergone a period of hyperinflation that left the German mark virtually worthless. Hitler made numerous vague promises and exuded an almost mystical confidence in himself, and in Germany’s destiny, which proved irresistible to beleaguered voters. The fact that the Nazis were largely thugs did not seem to bother most Germans and, in a political contest that could almost be used as an argument against the concept of democracy, they voted Hitler into power, thereby unleashing a twelve-year-long reign of terror across Europe.

  Hitler began by putting Germans back to work. A network of autobahns, or superhighways, was built throughout the country; the Germans built plants, mills, and car factories; they farmed, they exercised, they gave each other the Heil Hitler Nazi salute. But most of all they made weapons, because the leaders knew that the only way to pay for all that building was to conquer and rob their neighbors. Originally, Hitler’s plan was to absorb Austria and a large part of Czechoslovakia, to occupy Poland and exile or exterminate the Poles, then turn on the Soviet Union, which at the time was plunged into the dark miseries of communism.

  This was in order to provide Germany with what Hitler called lebensraum, or “living space,” a dream of many Germans since the Middle Ages. Hitler had explained all these hostile ideas carefully in his book Mein Kampf, which he had written while in prison for treason, but few Germans had taken the time to read it carefully or understand its implications.

  For the time being, most Germans were happy, possibly the happiest people in Europe, except perhaps for the Italians, whose trains were at last running on time thanks to Mussolini and his fascist Blackshirts. The Germans, at this point, had no idea that their great dream would become a national nightmare. All they knew was that Hitler had pulled them up from poverty and despair and eliminated the menace of communism.

  Hitler took a keen military interest in airpower, because it now offered the threat of destroying entire cites from the air without the enormous casualties of a ground attack. He surrounded himself with such fops as Hermann Göring, a shrewd and often amusing World War I ace who had flown with the Richthofen bunch and was now a full field marshal in charge of the German air force. Having grown immensely fat since his flying days, Göring was fond of wearing ridiculous uniforms right out of The Student Prince but had in turn surrounded himself with stellar airmen such as Ernst Udet, another ace in the Great War, who had remained a staunch supporter of German aviation.

  Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, Germany had been required to surrender some twenty thousand aircraft that it possessed at the end of the fighting, along with all other armaments and military equipment, the intention being that Germany would pose no further threat to the peace of Europe.

  However, in the 1920s, a group of former German war pilots had secretly organized themselves into various “flying clubs” in which they not only trained young men how to operate their seemingly harmless civilian planes but also schooled them in military tactics, including simulated gunnery, pursuit, evasion, dive bombing, and other maneuvers. Thus, by the mid-1930s Hitler and Göring had a solid corps of trained aviators.

  Though it was in flagrant violation of the terms of the peace treaty, the Germans began cranking out fighters and bombers at an estimated rate of three hundred per month. In 1933 Udet arrived in America to purchase two Curtiss Hawk fighter planes, which he said he intended to use to perform stunts at air shows.

  Udet was a happy-go-lucky continental playboy who had been known during the war as the “wasp” for his habit of striking down at Allied planes alone and from above, but he had become known in social sets as the “flea,” Doolittle said, “because of his habit of hopping gaily all over Europe.” Udet was also one of the world’s greatest fliers, fully in the league of Doolittle, Lindbergh, and Rickenbacker, and would soon be working ha
nd-in-glove with Göring’s Luftwaffe, designing and test flying warplanes and consulting at the highest levels, presently with the rank of full colonel.

  He asked to test fly one of the planes before the purchase was closed, but Curtiss-Wright refused on grounds that the planes cost $15,000 apiece and couldn’t risk a crack-up. The impasse was solved when Doolittle appeared on the scene and took one of the Hawks up for a spin. He performed some sleek aerobatics before putting the Hawk into a terrifyingly steep dive straight into the ground then zooming up at the last possible moment. That not only satisfied Udet, but the two men, who were about the same size and build, and born in the same year, quickly became fast friends.

  In 1937 Doolittle went to Germany on Shell Oil business and was amazed to see troops of young boys in Nazi-like uniforms marching all over town singing Nazi songs. In Berlin he looked up Udet first thing and was given the royal treatment by the high-ranking Luftwaffe officer. Not only did Udet arrange for Doolittle to visit the large German aircraft plants, such as Junkers,e Heinkel, Dornier, Messerschmitt, and Focke-Wulf, he offered him a military aide and the use of his personal plane.

  Doolittle was astounded by what he saw. The Germans were cranking out top-of-the-line fighters and bombers at an alarming rate. He was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the engines and airframes, which were decidedly better than those being manufactured in the United States. At least at that level, Hitler’s socialism ensured a quality control and economy of labor that was superior to the more or less catch-as-catch-can American method of building planes. It was obvious to Doolittle that the manufacturing of so many warplanes could mean but one thing, that Germany was planning for war. But with whom and when?