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

by Winston Groom

  As the months passed following the outbreak of war, Americans were ever more divided into “interventionist” and “noninterventionist” camps. A political movement had begun on the East Coast urging the United States to intervene on behalf of the Allies. It was spurred by confidential British entreaties to the White House and political pressure by certain groups of Anglophiles, Francophiles, and Jewish organizations whose friends and relatives had suffered terribly under Hitler since the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935.c Most of the rest of the country was opposed to involvement, however.

  Eddie was a noninterventionist. It was his sense that what President Wilson had called the “war to end all wars” had solved nothing and that the Europeans weren’t worth squandering any more American lives or treasure for. Because of his standing as a great American war hero, Eddie fell into the role of public spokesman for the antiwar crowd.

  He began to write articles for big circulation magazines such as Collier’s and Forbes, recalling that, aside from costing more than fifty thousand lives, American participation in World War I had utterly disrupted the economy and started a ten-year-long depression. Entry into another such conflict, he warned, would cost “millions of our young men and billions of our wealth.” In speeches and radio addresses, Eddie reminded audiences that he was not a pacifist; his military record certainly proved that. But he felt that America should be strengthened militarily to the point where no nation would dare attack her. He drew up a plan for national preparedness, calling for fifty thousand warplanes and a hundred and fifty thousand pilots, always emphasizing that America should keep out of the European war. At that time under the Lend-Lease programs, the United States was supplying Great Britain with vast quantities of war materials, in exchange for long-term leases on British military bases abroad.

  The Germans quickly overran Poland—with the help of the Russians courtesy of the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany—and then, after a period of relative calm known as the Phony War, in the spring of 1940 Hitler quickly attacked and conquered, in turn, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and France. By autumn the Germans were bombing England in preparation for an invasion. Rickenbacker was both alarmed and disgusted that the Nazis had been able to subdue these countries so easily. His most venomous disgust was reserved for France, which he had condemned as “decadent” following his postwar visits there.

  In August 1940, as the French army was collapsing, General Robert E. Wood, the chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck and Company, sought to have Eddie join an antiwar organization that emphasized American preparedness. The principals of this committee paralleled Rickenbacker’s public position: they favored a staunch buildup of U.S. military might and noninvolvement in the European war.

  There is some evidence that by then Rickenbacker was beginning to rethink his views. Despite his horror at the very notion of another war, he was slowly coming to the conclusion that there was no way the United States could not be entangled in the war. If Germany conquered all of Europe, he reasoned, America would have to become a gigantic defensive camp—at a terrible expense that would plunge the nation deeply into debt. That is precisely what happened to Germany when Hitler embarked on his ferocious military buildup, but now that the Nazis had subjugated most of Europe Hitler could loot his neighbors at his leisure. America, being America, would have no such options.

  Nevertheless, Eddie gave General Wood permission to use his name in connection with the committee and soon found out that he was listed in the margin of the new America First Committee (AFC) as a member of the so-called National Committee, alongside such diverse others as Herbert Hoover, Alice Roosevelt Longworth (TR’s daughter), Henry Ford, the actress Lillian Gish, and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago.

  The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration lashed out at such organizations as America First, suggesting they were pro-Nazi. The charge was absurd but it stung anyway. Members of the president’s cabinet used the press to create the impression that opposition to the American assistance to England was unpatriotic. Charles Lindbergh, for example, who was stridently against American involvement, was singled out for particular abuse by Roosevelt’s interior secretary Harold Ickes, who declared that Lindbergh “forfeit[ed] his right to be an American.”

  It became obvious to Rickenbacker that the America First Committee—as it had with Lindbergh—wished to use his status as a war hero to bolster its cause. But Eddie was having second thoughts.

  Rickenbacker had always been a strong advocate of preparedness, but now he used his fame as a bully pulpit to spur the formation of an air force. In 1939 he had called for fifty thousand planes. Whether or not it had anything to do with Rickenbacker’s advice, Roosevelt soon announced to the country that the United States was building fifty thousand planes. By 1941 Rickenbacker was calling for a quarter of a million military planes and half a million pilots.d The war, he said, was now too big to ignore. In January 1941 Rickenbacker sent a telegram to General Wood formally resigning from the America First Committee.

  A MONTH LATER RICKENBACKER’S LUCK came uncomfortably close to running out entirely. He had canceled a speech he’d promised to make to some businessmen in Birmingham, Alabama, about improving air service to that city and to the state. But a last-minute call from Alabama’s governor Frank M. Dixon changed his mind. Dixon was a fellow veteran who had won the Croix de Guerre and the French Legion of Honor flying with the Lafayette Escadrille, and he had made a special plea to Rickenbacker, implying that people might think he was “too good” to come to Alabama.

  In the early evening of February 26, Eddie packed an overnight bag and got aboard Eastern Air Line’s Mexico Flyer, a DC-3 sleeper plane headed for Atlanta, Birmingham, Texas, and beyond. It carried thirteen passengers and a crew of three. The weather was poor when they took off—rain, windy, cold—but Eddie settled into a small private room behind the cockpit called the Sky Lounge, where he intended to do some paperwork. The weather remained foul several hours later, and when they were passing over Spartanburg, South Carolina, the pilot came into the Sky Lounge to report that the weather in Atlanta was deteriorating. Eddie told him to do what he thought was best.

  In due time the lights of Atlanta appeared below. Among the intermittent showers Eddie recognized the glow of the federal penitentiary. He had made the flight numerous times and knew the routine for an instrument landing. They were to fly past the radio beacon beam, then make a 180-degree turn to pick it up again and follow it down for a landing.e He was still working on papers when he felt the pilot put the left wing down to go into the 180-degree turn following permission from the tower at Atlanta to land at 11:44 p.m. Then things went terribly wrong. The wing hit something, which turned out to be the tops of pine trees. The pilot reacted by jerking the left wing up, and then the right wing began to hit the trees. Eddie knew his best chance was in the rear of the plane but, before he could move, the right wing was suddenly torn off the fuselage and the plane veered violently to the right, flipping up on its nose. The lights went out as the pilot cut the power switch, stopping everything electrical or mechanical.f Eddie was jerked around so powerfully that he shattered his hip on the arm of a seat.

  All of this happened in an instant.

  Next the plane flipped over in a somersault, snapping huge pine trees as it hit the ground with its tail and sheared in half right where Eddie sat, then came to an abrupt halt. Eddie found himself pinned in the wreckage where the plane had cracked in two, crushed against the dead body of the plane’s steward. It was pitch dark, freezing cold, and pouring rain, and the heavy smell of aviation gasoline was in the air. Out of the gloom there came moans, and gasps, and shrieks of pain. Amazingly, out of the sixteen people aboard, eleven survived the initial crash.

  Somehow Eddie remained conscious and tried to take stock of what had happened. His head was wedged in tight between a fuel tank, a bulkhead, and the corpse of the steward; something had dented his skull in “a groove you could lay your little fi
nger in.” He later learned that his left elbow had been shattered and the nerve destroyed, and several ribs were broken off so that the jagged ends poked out through the sides of his torso. His pelvis was broken in two places and his left knee was crushed. Everything else that wasn’t broken was tightly pinned in the wreckage, except for his right hand and forearm. He was covered in blood.

  Gasoline was everywhere—in the plane and flowing out onto the ground. Most of the sounds were of people moaning and Eddie, too, was in agony, but at one point he distinctly heard someone say, “Hey, let’s build a bonfire and get warm.”

  “No!” Rickenbacker screamed. “For God’s sake, don’t light a match!”

  Eddie, on the last edges of panic, decided to see if he could somehow loosen up the trap he was in, and he strained forward in the darkness with his neck and head. He managed to wrench himself upward a couple of inches when his head hit a jagged piece of metal that was pointed directly at his left eye with such force that it ripped his eyelid wide open and his eyeball popped out of the socket and dangled down on his cheek. In desperation he gave another heave and heard several more ribs snap that “sounded like popcorn popping.” He gave up.

  Close by there were two other passengers trapped and apparently in worse shape than he was. He kept reassuring them that help was on the way and apologized on behalf of the airline. His reassurances helped him, too, he recalled, by keeping his mind off of his predicament and his pain. But it did not help the two passengers, both of whom died during the night.

  Meantime, a crude search had been under way since the DC-3 had failed to land. Controllers in the tower immediately began calling Eastern personnel, who began to assemble at the airport. In five cars each manned by three people, they fanned out in the rainy dark with flashlights and kerosene lanterns. All night they prowled the dirt roads around Jonesboro and vicinity, but it wasn’t until daybreak, deep in the woods, that one of them saw something glint, high up in a tree, something that ought not to have been there. It was part of the wing of an airplane.

  The scene the rescuers came upon in the dull grays of dawn was Dantesque. The DC-3 itself was barely recognizable as an aircraft except for the tail section, which had sheared off and was resting upside down on a pile of rubble that was the rest of the plane. The nose and cockpit had plowed into the ground, burying the pilot and copilot in it. There were bodies everywhere, living and dead; when the rescuers got to Rickenbacker he was covered with blood and of course his eyeball was resting on his cheek. By this time he must have been delirious because he asked for a cigarette, only to be told, “Captain, you can’t smoke here,” at which he came to his senses and apologized profusely. The press had gotten word of the crash and a photographer arrived as they attempted to cut Eddie out of the wreckage. The photographer tried to get a picture but one of the Eastern Air Lines employees shoved him aside, “and not too gently.”

  It took a lot of cutting and prying to get Eddie free but at last he was put on a stretcher and a doctor gave him a shot of morphine, which didn’t seem to help. They were deep in the woods, in a ravine, and the path to the road was muddy and slippery, and more than once the carrying party stumbled and lurched, causing him intense pain. When they reached the road there was an ambulance, but it was filled with dead bodies and drove off. When Rickenbacker asked why, he was told that the state paid the ambulance company a fee of $20 to haul off corpses but authorized only $10 for living people.

  Rickenbacker waited nearly an hour for another ambulance, all the while thoroughly conscious and in great pain. When an ambulance finally arrived an Eastern pilot who had been in the search party got in as well to ride with him to the hospital. “I must have been a horrible-looking mess,” Rickenbacker said later, because the pilot suddenly became nauseated from looking at him and threw up. “Why are you sick?” Rickenbacker complained. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be sick!”

  In the emergency room two doctors, both of them interns, were working feverishly over the crash victims, and when one of them looked at Eddie he told attendants to push him out of the way, saying, “He’s more dead than alive.” A Catholic priest entered the room, looked at Eddie, and asked a nurse if she knew what religion he was. Rickenbacker piped up, “I’m a damn Protestant like ninety percent of the people.”

  Right about then the chief surgeon of the hospital, Dr. Floyd W. McRae, arrived. Coincidentally, McRae’s father, also a doctor, had treated Eddie in France in 1918. Dr. McRae shoved Eddie’s eyeball back into its socket and then sewed up his eyelid without anesthesia because, the physician said, it would have affected the muscles of the eye and so make the operation more difficult. When one of the attendants who was holding him down pushed harder, Eddie heard his ribs crackle and pop again and he flooded the room with a cascade of horrible profanity, for which he later apologized.

  As more doctors arrived, they and the interns stood around arguing over what to do with Eddie. One of them, he said later, wanted to drill a hole in his head where the dent was to relieve the pressure; others discussed whether or not to operate on the crushed hip or let it alone. Rickenbacker joined the conversation by asking for an osteopath. “Get me a good osteopath,” he said uncharitably, “and I’ll be out of this place in three days.” In the end, it was decided to leave him be for now and see what happened. He was fifty years old.

  Writing later about the experience, Rickenbacker noted that he had excellent vision in his left eye ever since, even better than the right eye. What is more, he said, “The crash actually improved my nose, which had been broken six times in my life. That time, the seventh, left it perfectly straight.”

  Adelaide had been visiting friends in Charlotte, North Carolina, and rushed down to Atlanta after picking up the boys, who were attending boarding school in Asheville. Next day when asked if he was hungry, Rickenbacker demanded a ham and egg sandwich and a bottle of beer. Ralph McGill, legendary editor of the Atlanta Constitution, had arrived to inquire after Eddie’s status, and McRae said he was very much improved. In fact, McRae said, he had just asked for a ham and egg sandwich and a Coca-Cola. It was only partly true, but since the Coca-Cola company was then, as now, Atlanta’s biggest business, this was apparently an effort to take advantage of a public relations opportunity. News was soon broadcast throughout the world and Coca-Cola sent a large cooler to Eddie’s room and kept it stocked with Coke.

  So many of Eddie’s bones had been broken that at last the doctors decided to place his entire body from head to toe in a cast—except for his right arm—to let the knitting process begin. His bed was rigged with trusses and other contraptions to keep his limbs elevated and immobile. The next day he took a turn for the worse, and death seemed to surround him in his hospital bed.

  Reporters hanging around the hospital quickly picked up word that Rickenbacker was dying. That evening Walter Winchell, the popular gossip columnist, announced on his national radio show that Eddie would be dead within the hour. With his good right hand Rickenbacker seized a bedside water pitcher and flung it at the radio.

  For the next ten days Eddie remained in the delicate state between life and death. There were times when he would sink; his pulse would either quicken or become dangerously slow. But inevitably he would rally. Dr. McRae told him he’d never seen a patient with so much determination to live. All during this time Adelaide was a tower of strength, encouragement, and bravery. She sat by his bed night and day, holding his hand, attentive to his every need.

  They kept him sedated with morphine but Eddie was suffering from hallucinations and begged to be taken off it. The doctor told him he wouldn’t be able to stand the pain, but at last he took Eddie off the drug for twenty-four hours. The pain was awful but Rickenbacker felt himself rally and “began to get better immediately.”

  After six weeks doctors removed the full body cast, introducing an entirely new period of torture. In order to repair the smashed hip socket a hole was drilled through his thigh bone so that a technician could slowly work the ball of
the socket back in place. They put his arm back in a cast but the pain was so excruciating that Rickenbacker gnawed the cast off with his teeth. After that, the doctors left it uncasted.

  During the four months that Rickenbacker stayed in the hospital some eighteen thousand letters, cards, telegrams, and gifts arrived for him. Get well wishes came from such diverse individuals as Fiorello La Guardia, J. Edgar Hoover, and Ernst Udet. Enough flower arrangements and potted plants arrived during his stay to decorate every ward and room in the hospital. In time Rickenbacker graduated from a wheelchair to a self-propelled pushcart and then to crutches and walking canes, and finally on June 25, 1941, he was released from the hospital. He looked god-awful—thin, ashen, disheveled—when he boarded a special plane that Eastern Air Lines had sent for him.

  When the flight arrived at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, Rickenbacker was greeted with cheers by several hundred Eastern employees as he stepped down the stairway with the aid of a cane. Reporters asked Eddie if he thought America should enter the war and he replied, “We are in it, and have been in it for a year. A lot of people don’t realize that. The sooner everyone knows we are in, the better it will be.” Another reporter asked whether it was vital to the United States that Hitler be defeated. Rickenbacker replied, “The sooner we crush Hitler, the better.” He had by then come full circle.21

  The family took a cottage on Connecticut’s Candlewood Lake where they spent the summer during Eddie’s slow recovery. An orderly from Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital came along as massage therapist and exercise coach. Eddie found that rowing a boat every day was beneficial; he also found that for the first time he was able to spend his days uninterrupted with the boys.