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

by Winston Groom

  Though he spent his days inspecting aircraft factories, Doolittle’s evenings were spent with Udet, who remained an amusing bon vivant and daring pilot who looked on the Nazis with disdain, particularly Hitler and Göring. He was a kind of Renaissance man who spoke fluent English, recited poetry, sang well, and was an accomplished cartoonist. He was also a renowned marksman.

  One night while they were drinking champagne in Udet’s eclectically decorated apartment, Udet challenged Jimmy to a shooting match. When Doolittle asked where, Udet produced a steel box filled with sand that had a curved top, which deflected bullets down into the sand. He set it on the mantelpiece over the fireplace, and over it Udet hung up a paper target, handing Doolittle a powerful air pistol.

  They both “had some pretty good shooting,” Doolittle recalled, which apparently improved in direct relation to the amount of champagne they drank. As the night wore on, Udet decided that a greater challenge was needed. He handed Jimmy a huge .455-caliber pistol, much larger and more powerful than the U.S. standard-issue .45 automatics. Doolittle fired it with a terrific roar but, owing to its weight, shot low and into a stack of classified Luftwaffe papers that Udet had brought home to study.

  Instead of being upset that the documents were blown all over the room, Udet seemed delighted, and he took the weapon from Doolittle to show him how it was done. But Udet himself misaimed, high, putting a hole in the wall that went all the way through to the next apartment, whose terrified occupants “could look right through at us,” Doolittle remembered, “but they never said a word.” Udet proceeded to fire another round, hitting the bull’s-eye, and with that the shooting match was ended.

  DOOLITTLE RETURNED TO THE STATES disturbed by what he had seen in Germany. It was obvious that Hitler should not be taken lightly, and that Germany must someday be reckoned with, but everywhere he went an odd air of complacency appeared to him to have affected political opinion. The unsatisfactory outcome of the previous war, with its horrendous casualties and destruction, had soured everyone except Hitler on the notion of further armed conflict. A League of Nations existed that was supposed to resolve international disagreements, and Britain and France, in particular, remained exhausted from the effects of World War I.

  In early 1939 Jimmy again returned to Germany on Shell Oil business. By then Hitler had accomplished the opening acts of his new world order. He had absorbed Austria. He’d taken all of Czechoslovakia after persuading the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain at the Munich Conference that he had intended only to occupy a small, German-speaking portion of that nation. Chamberlain had returned to London and famously predicted “peace in our time,” only to find himself now, a year later, grumbling that Hitler “was not keeping his word.”

  In the midst of this tense and disagreeable situation, Doolittle arrived in Frankfurt to find a marked change in the city, with “hundreds of uniformed men with swastika armbands and civilians with unsmiling faces on the streets and in the shops.” There was an “ominous air of impending catastrophe,” he said.

  He stayed only a few days and did not go to Berlin, but he did find time to look up his good friend Ernst Udet, who by this time was a full major general in the Luftwaffe. Udet had likewise changed. “The old ebullience and grin and laugh were gone,” Doolittle said. “He had difficulty remembering English words, and seemed much subdued.” Udet did not offer him an escort this time, or allow him into military facilities, but he did take Doolittle to an air show in Frankfurt, Jimmy recalled, where he seemed “embarrassed to have me around.” The show was confined entirely to military aircraft and tactics.

  There was a grim sense of urgency everywhere Doolittle went. He managed to meet a few German pilots but their conversations, he said, were always “one-way.” They asked questions about U.S. aircraft production, Doolittle remembered, with “an impudence bordering on rudeness,” and “talked openly about a war in Europe.”

  Udet invited Jimmy to join him on a vacation he was taking in Munich, but “something told me,” Doolittle said, “it was not the right thing to do.” It was the last time he would see his old friend.

  Doolittle stopped in London on his way home and visited the American embassy where he looked up the air attaché, Major Martin “Mike” Scanlon, whose lackadaisical attitude regarding the possibility of war was recorded by more than one observer. Scanlon was completely uninterested in hearing about the vast changes in Germany. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” Scanlon told him, suggesting to Jimmy that he tell his story to Hap Arnold when he got home, which is precisely what Doolittle did.

  Arnold early on had been Jimmy’s commanding officer at Rockwell Field and Doolittle had an extensive relationship with him. He was now the chief of the Air Corps with the rank of major general. Instead of going home to St. Louis, Jimmy went immediately to Washington when his ship landed in New York. He told Arnold he believed war in Europe was “inevitable” and offered to return to the service. Arnold knew it would mean a huge pay cut for Doolittle and the two agreed to leave the offer open.

  Not long after, on September 1, 1939, Hitler attacked Poland with planes, tanks, and infantry. Two days after that Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.

  * A device that tells the pilot whether the plane is flying level, banking, climbing, or diving.

  † Reader’s effort, later known in military jargon as FIDO, for “Fog, Intense Dispersal of,” was actually used effectively both in Los Angeles and in England during World War II. Enormous heat-dispensing devices were set up on runways to heat the air directly above the runway to the dew point. Doolittle, who was commanding the Eighth Air Force then, said some twenty-five hundred bombers and fighters returning to England’s pea soup fogs were saved.

  ‡ The Doolittle tablecloth remains one of the most remarkable signature collections in history, including not only all the famous pilots of the day and their wives but politicians, movie stars, singers, writers, scientists, and more. Today the collection resides in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

  § The Lockheed Vega was a highly sought after four-passenger modern plane. It was flown by Amelia Earhart in her renowned transatlantic crossing a year earlier, and also by the well-known pilot Wiley Post in his round-the-world flight in 1931.

  ‖ In the depth of the Great Depression this had the purchasing power of about $100,000 in today’s money.

  a The army captain was Ira C. Eaker who, along with Doolittle, would become one of the highest-ranking commanders of the air force during World War II.

  b $3 million in 1934 translates into more than $40 million today.

  c In his autobiography Rickenbacker implies that the hush order came from Roosevelt, but more likely it came from Rickenbacker’s superiors at General Motors, including Pierre du Pont, who was heavily invested in the company. Like Rickenbacker, du Pont was horrified by Roosevelt’s autocratic regime but acted out of fear for the company.

  d This was basically a slur aimed at Billy Mitchell and his lobbying but was also a slap at nearly every pilot in the Army Air Service.

  e At the Junkers factory Doolittle was stunned to discover that the two Curtiss Hawks he had sold Udet had become the basis for the German Stuka dive-bomber that was presently destroying cities such as Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.

  CHAPTER 8

  I WAS SAVED FOR SOME

  GOOD PURPOSE

  WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES on February 1, 1919, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was the highest decorated U.S. airman in World War I and, after Douglas MacArthur, the second highest decorated American soldier. In other words, he had become a household name.

  He had won nine Distinguished Service Crosses, the nation’s second highest award, one of which was later upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He held five French Croix de Guerre, the Distinguished Service Medal, and numerous other military honors.

  After hostilities ceased on November 11, 1918, the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron had b
een detailed by General Billy Mitchell as part of the Allied Army Occupation of Germany, and Eddie had been looking forward to some sightseeing in the land that had been the cause of so much grief. That opportunity was short-lived, however, for after several weeks in the German city of Koblenz he received notice from Washington that his services as a war hero were required back in the United States to kick off the fifth Liberty Loan drive that was being put on by the War Department.

  With all the strain of war, and then the jubilation at the Armistice, Eddie was just beginning to wonder about what he would do for the rest of his life. There was no doubt it would have something to do with aviation. He was a master of the sky, as skilled as anyone, and could see a great future for airpower, both military and civilian. He conceived a scheme with Captain Reed Chambers, his friend and squadron mate, to persuade the army to sponsor a cross-Atlantic flight that they were convinced would open the public’s mind to the value of aviation.

  Meanwhile, Eddie had some free time before his orders sent him back to America. He played Santa Claus for a group of the 94th’s enlisted men, who presented him with a silver cup at their Christmas Day dinner, a gay affair punctuated by the consumption of a great deal of wine, beer, and “punch.” He also met and began a lifelong friendship with the Hearst newspaper corporation’s star reporter Damon Runyon, who had been covering the war. And he met an unusual man named Laurence La Tourette Driggs, who would cowrite Eddie’s popular autobiographical book Fighting the Flying Circus, published the following year. Driggs was a ubiquitous sort. The son of a wealthy Oregon lumberman, he was a lawyer, a politician, and an accomplished writer, who had once almost joined the Army Air Service as a colonel in charge of a group of rich young aviators before the idea was shot down by President Woodrow Wilson for petty political reasons. Driggs nonetheless made his way across the Atlantic under the aegis of the press baron Alfred C. W. Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, who was England’s minister of information. As an observer and “special correspondent,” Driggs was given wide access to the Allied military units and some months earlier had befriended Rickenbacker. Early on, Eddie lent Driggs his diary, and after hostilities ceased he dictated about 140 single-spaced pages, his account of flying with the Hat in the Ring squadron.

  On the day after Christmas, Eddie began preparing for his trip home. One of his unhappiest moments was parting with his German shepherd Spad. It was simply too difficult to bring the dog back to America, especially since Eddie was going first to Paris and then to England, which had strict animal-entry laws. He’d made arrangements for Spad, but the night he started packing for Paris Eddie said Spad “knew something was happening, knew I was leaving because he hung around and cried and licked my hand and whined.”1

  Eddie’s first stop was Paris, where he and friends would visit old haunts such as Ciro’s, and the Folies Bergère, then on to London for a few days, where he intended to retrieve his briefcase and the engineering designs that Scotland Yard had confiscated in the spy fiasco of 1916. After the satchel and papers were returned, he went to Liverpool to board the White Star liner Adriatic, but not before searching around for the insufferable long-nosed Scotland Yard sergeant who had treated him so shabbily when he’d tried to come ashore to work for the Sunbeam company.

  The sergeant soon appeared with his usual disdainful countenance, and Rickenbacker marched right up to him and the man got a load of the rows of ribbons on his dress uniform. Fairly wallowing in the sergeant’s oily supplications of apology, Rickenbacker later said that it “made up to some extent for all the browbeating and insults heaped on my shoulders by the Scotland Yard boys.”2

  It was an uneventful crossing. When newspaper reporters aboard ship asked what he would be doing when he returned to the States, Eddie told them he wanted to educate Americans about the possibilities of airpower. “America’s future depends on its air service,” he told them. There was also a rumor that he would start a military flying school, similar to West Point or Annapolis.3

  Eddie arrived just in time for the new Prohibition law that had been enacted two weeks earlier (which wouldn’t go into effect until the following year). The ship actually arrived at the army docks in Hoboken the night of January 31, but Rickenbacker had been ordered not to disembark until the following morning.

  As he walked down the gangplank Rickenbacker noticed that there were no throngs of reporters, and when he reached the pier a lieutenant came up and said, “Captain Rickenbacker, report to the provost marshal’s office!”4 Wondering what he might have done wrong, Eddie followed the lieutenant across the yard from the docks to a building and, when the lieutenant opened the door, he entered a room to find—his mother, Elizabeth, who rushed into his arms to the great flashing of photographers’ powder pans and the happy smile of General Charles T. Menoher, the perfect photo op for the army public relations office.

  Rickenbacker checked into the Plaza Hotel, soon to gain notoriety for its role in Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, and after a two-day reunion with his mother he attended the first of many opulent dinner banquets that would honor him as the country’s hero. The affair was held in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, sponsored by the American Automobile Association, which, it was rumored, had offered Rickenbacker $200,000 to return to racing.

  Among the many dignitaries at the event were the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Clifford Ireland, who was toastmaster, and U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker, the same Newton Baker who would later chair the committee that so disparaged the military aviation enthusiasts and left Jimmy Doolittle “disgusted.”

  Baker inappropriately used his time at the podium to deny charges that corruption and chicanery were behind the regrettable fact that not a single airplane flown by U.S. fliers during the war had come from an American factory. Rickenbacker agreed, believing instead that the cause was “lack of foresight and mis-management,”5 but judiciously kept his counsel.

  At the conclusion of a lengthy oration by Princeton University’s Dr. Henry van Dyke, Eddie was presented with a set of gold flier’s wings, bejeweled with diamonds and sapphires, after which he was expected to respond. “I have never known such a moment of helplessness,” he wrote later. “I became frightened and embarrassed.”

  As he stood at the dais in a near defenseless panic, Rickenbacker spied his mother, described by a reporter as “a beaming little women in black silk whose eyes shone proudly through gold-rimmed spectacles,”6 and his sister, Emma, sitting in the gallery. In a moment of sudden inspiration, he held up the golden wings toward them and cried, “For you, Mother!”

  It brought down the house. There was an instantaneous standing ovation. Some women began to weep. Men shouted patriotic slogans. There was the roar of applause and people pounding furiously on the floor with their walking sticks. When the crowd had calmed down Eddie made some awkward, off-the-cuff remarks—namely about the possibility of transatlantic flight—and sat down, supremely self-conscious that anything he said paled in comparison to the elegant orations of Dr. van Dyke.

  At one point Eddie engaged Newton Baker, whom he was seated next to, in conversation about his and Reed Chambers’s notion of having the army sponsor a transatlantic flight, but the secretary of war would have none of it and brushed off the idea as a waste of time, or as Rickenbacker put it later, “indicated that he couldn’t care less.”

  However, among the spontaneous remarks Eddie made that night was a statement that he “envisioned a future in which aircraft would link the world’s peoples in peace.” This notion may have left a special impression on one of the dinner guests, the rich French-born hotel owner Raymond Orteig, because only a few months afterward, in May of 1919, he would announce the offer of a $25,000 prize for the first person or persons to fly nonstop between New York and Paris.

  Rickenbacker next traveled to Washington, D.C., where he was given a standing ovation in the House of Representatives. But he spent a fruitless week there, buttonholing anyone who would listen about the sorry stat
e of American aviation, and that England, France—even Italy—were far superior in planes and pilots to the United States. Nobody was interested in Eddie’s cross-Atlantic proposal except Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell did not have the authority to go forward with such an expensive proposition. The day before he left, Rickenbacker was made guest of honor at a tea party given by a rich Washington society matron, an experience he afterward described as “worse than an engagement with seven Fokkers.”7

  His hometown, Columbus, awaited Rickenbacker with an enormous celebration and automobile parade and official welcome by the governor of Ohio. Some extent of his notoriety can be gauged by the fact that while on the train, even in his private compartment, he was compelled to sign scores of one-dollar bills for souvenir-seeking passengers, excited to be on the same train with the great war hero.

  Rickenbacker soon returned to New York to become featured speaker on the Liberty Loan bond tour—the government still needed to pay for the war. He was embarrassed, however, at the quality of his speech and his poor delivery and so turned to his friend Damon Runyon, who had returned from overseas to the city he had deemed “Baghdad on the Hudson” and resumed covering shady characters around Broadway for the Hearst newspaper corporation. After Runyon finished redoing the speech, Eddie was completely satisfied but still worried that his delivery left much to be desired.

  Runyon tried to instruct him in the art of public speaking but soon gave up and sent Rickenbacker to an elocution instructor at the Metropolitan Opera House, one Madame Amanda by name, a stout woman who put him on the stage, while she hovered in the upper balcony—which she called the “chicken roost.” He was instructed to yell his speech up to her, and she would shout instructions down to him. “Louder!” she would holler. “Raise your right arm!… Raise your left arm!… Look up!” At Madame Amanda’s suggestion he purchased the book Modern Eloquence and later picked up a copy of Emily Post’s book on etiquette.