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

by Winston Groom

  At almost the last possible moment Lindbergh yanked up on the stick with all his might. Shimada also pulled up, “trying for a crash,” but Lindbergh averted him by a matter of feet—maybe even inches. He was close enough to be shuddered by the air shock as he shot past the Zero, which, as had its erstwhile companion, rolled into a long, smoking death spiral and splattered into the ocean below.

  Lindbergh’s wingman Lieutenant Joseph E. “Fishkiller” Miller (so named for erroneously dropping bombs into the ocean, causing thousands of stunned fish to surface) had also taken a run at the stricken Japanese plane but, as he declared afterward, “I was there. The old man got a Sonia fair and square … I blew some pieces off the wing, but it was Mr. Lindbergh’s victory.” Congratulations were in order when Lindbergh and the 475th returned to base.

  A few days later Lindbergh almost flew his final mission when the 475th, using his fuel economy measures, ventured all the way north to the Palau Islands, looking for a fight. They found one that quickly turned into a melee, leaving Lindbergh with a Zero on his tail, a situation “that could not have been worse,” according to Colonel MacDonald. The Japanese plane was faster and appeared larger and larger in Lindbergh’s rearview mirror, as he hunched low in his seat, trying to squeeze all of himself behind the armor plating in back of it, waiting for the bullets to slam home. Colonel MacDonald watched in horror as the Zero’s tracers flickered out, embracing Lindbergh’s P-38, and yelled out, “Break right! Break right!” Lindbergh responded by putting his plane in a ferociously tight right turn that brought the dogfight directly in the line of sight of MacDonald’s section, which saved the Lone Eagle’s bacon by shooting the Zero to pieces.

  Word of Lindbergh’s close encounter spread. When they returned Colonel MacDonald was summoned to higher headquarters where he was reprimanded and grounded for two months. Everyone assumed it was because he had allowed the Lone Eagle to get in harm’s way, but that wasn’t it. It seems that bomber command had been requesting fighter cover over Palau from the 475th (a mission that the fighter pilots loathed as boring), and MacDonald had been turning them down on grounds that the distance was too great. Now they had flagrantly disproved their own argument by flying all the way up there and back—using Lindbergh’s fuel-saving techniques—to engage in dogfights. General Kenney, however, modified MacDonald’s punishment by granting him the same two months as leave to go back to the States to his wife and newborn son, whom the colonel had never seen.

  For Lindbergh, there were dogfights yet to come, some ending in tragedy but most with the Americans wildly victorious. He had become especially fast friends with twenty-three-year-old Tommy McGuire (the two were also roommates) who would remain the second leading Pacific war ace. Five months later McGuire was killed during a dogfight over the Philippines, but he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for distinguished valor in his flying career.

  In early August 1944, Lindbergh concluded his tour of the Second World War in the Pacific with fifty combat missions to his credit, a Zero kill, and enough information to draw informed conclusions about the contrast between single-engine versus twin-engine fighter planes. In the process he had immeasurably helped MacArthur’s slow crawl northward from New Guinea to the Philippines by giving his fighters—and thus his bombers—some three hundred more miles of range in a watery wasteland where three hundred miles could be an eternity.

  CHARLES LINDBERGH HAD MADE an uneasy peace with his conflicted reasoning and emotions about the war. He still felt he’d been right in supporting the America First Committee, and as time went on his original fears began to manifest themselves as Stalin’s totalitarian Soviet Union continued to absorb nation after eastern European nation into the great maw of communism. He had been wrong about England, however, and consequently the fate of western Europe, which he freely admitted. England had been the bulwark that saved them. Against Lindbergh’s predictions of defeat, she had defended herself triumphantly against the onslaught of Göring’s Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain (which left 544 of her fliers and 24,000 British citizens dead) and became for a time the lone outpost of Western Civilization from which the Allies launched the fight against Nazism and then the strain to contain communism.

  As for himself, when word got out to the public about Lindbergh’s exploits in the Pacific, there was a kind of general softening among the American people who rejoiced that their hero was indeed genuine. This was expressly reinforced when Collier’s, one of the most widely read and respected magazines of its day, carried a two-part series in early 1946 by Colonel MacDonald titled “Lindbergh in Battle.” MacDonald described in glowing terms all of the Lone Eagle’s contributions to the war effort, including the fact that he flew as a volunteer on more combat missions than regular army fighter pilots were required to do. Roosevelt was dead, and no one seemed anxious to take up the old animosities. Indeed, Lindbergh’s services were once more embraced by the military. It wasn’t a complete vindication, especially by the eastern press, but it was a strong beginning.c

  For Lindbergh, the war had been a breathtaking revelation. For nearly two decades he had stood out—along with Rickenbacker—as the foremost proponent of the notion that the airplane, and all the applied science that went with it, was a tremendous force for good in civilization. What Lindbergh had seen with his own eyes in the war now convinced him that it might not be so anymore, that airplanes had become monumental engines of destruction including, along with the atomic bomb, the possible annihilation of life on the planet. Use of the airplane in expanding “civilization” to all parts of the earth also brought with it a more subtle kind of destruction, which Lindbergh had noticed with the miserable inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, who now disrupted their own simple civilizations with so-called cargo cults. These quasi-religious rites, which lasted into the 1980s, fixated natives on the anticipated return of the dominant culture’s airplanes, which had brought gifts of trinkets but departed forever after the war ended.

  It wasn’t simply the airplane but science itself, Lindbergh concluded, that had taken such gigantic leaps in recent years, and as a result, it universally threatened civilization as well as aided it. He began to call for a stepping back of sorts, a retrenchment to old values. With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit. Lindbergh expressed these thoughts in a splendid speech while accepting the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy at the Washington Aero Club in January 1946. Titling his speech “Honoring the Wright Brothers,” he took as his theme “the way in which science was divorcing man from his old sense of independence and moral values.”16

  Of the Wright brothers, Lindbergh said, “It is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright brothers balanced success with modesty, science, and simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.”

  What Lindbergh was getting at was the notion that technology had overstepped its bounds, and not just in skewing the sense of balance in man’s progress. It was rapidly making a mess of the world around him. The once pristine rivers and creeks near industrial plants were polluted almost beyond recognition, great heaps of scrap and discards lay everywhere, huge tanks of fuel oil blotted the horizon, smokestacks belched out odoriferous if not poisonous fumes on a twenty-four-hour basis, and so forth.

  That Lindbergh had the vision to absorb and process all this was remarkable because there existed at the time no organized environmental movement. There were or had been a number of conservationists from time to time, notably Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and later Rachel Carson, but “environmentalism” as s
uch was a concept that had not yet been developed. Lindbergh began to embrace the fundamental ideas of conservation, however. In time he became one of the most enthusiastic environmentalists on earth and, as with most passions in his life, one of the most formidable as well.

  The war had forced Lindbergh into awkward contradictions. On the one hand he loathed the brutality of it, yet he willingly participated in the killing. He came to see the relentless march of technology as a negative, even a danger, but he was unwilling to give up his concept of flight. The war unquestionably transformed Lindbergh, whipsawed him in major ways. Afterward, his outlook and behavior became increasingly esoteric, introspective, eccentric, and sometimes frankly weird. Even though his war service had rehabilitated him in the eyes of most of the American public, the remainder of Lindbergh’s life must have seemed at times like a puzzle, perhaps even to himself.

  * Anne’s preface to Saint-Exupéry’s latest book had been expunged by its publisher because of the controversy surrounding Charles and, by extension, her.

  † Willow Run became the largest “room” in the world, at a mile long and a quarter mile wide. At its peak, in 1943, Willow Run employed 35,000 people and was producing one B-24 Liberator an hour, twenty-four hours a day. By the end of the war 9,000 had been made there.

  ‡ The ability of fighter planes to dive at altitude (from above) gave them an advantage over an enemy who would have to operate at lower altitudes, making them easy prey.

  § United Aircraft was the forerunner of the Boeing Company, United Airlines, and United Technologies, which manufacture everything from Otis elevators to guided missiles and the Black Hawk helicopter.

  ‖ About $22,000 today.

  a In 1994 the volcano came alive in a huge eruption that destroyed Rabaul and left it under ten feet of ash. The capital was moved elsewhere.

  b The Japanese had perhaps a dozen types of fighters, fighter-bombers, torpedo fighter-bombers, etc. Each had a specific name in U.S. military jargon—Nell, Oscar, Kate, Claude, Tony, and so forth. But generally they were all considered to be “Zeros,” after the big red circle surrounded by a thin white border that marked all Japanese fighter-type planes. The true Zero itself, a Mitsubishi-made carrier fighter, was known to American fliers as a “Zeke.”

  c The exceptions to the general forgiveness of Lindbergh’s prewar positions included many people of Jewish descent who have carried notions of his betrayal with them throughout the years. It is understandable, since it was their people undergoing the suffering at the hands of the Nazis, and they gave little credence to his warning that there would be worse suffering under the communists—a point that was at least debatable until the Holocaust.

  CHAPTER 14

  MASTERS OF THE SKY

  JIMMY DOOLITTLE NEARLY didn’t make it to Gibraltar, where he was to command the newly formed Twelfth Air Force for the invasion of North Africa. Early in the morning of November 5, 1942, just six and a half months after his historic raid on Japan, Doolittle secretly boarded one of six stripped-down B-17 bombers at a remote base on England’s south Channel coast for the eight-hour flight to the Mediterranean “Rock,” where temporary headquarters would be located until the invasion was successfully in progress. Passengers on the other planes included General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the overall commander of the operation—which was code-named Torch—as well as Generals Mark Clark, Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, and other high-ranking American and British officers.

  Even though German fighters often patrolled the air routes toward their destination, both of the waist guns were removed from the bombers in order to have extra room for passengers and equipment. They retained only three of the six machine-gun positions on each plane and carried no trained gunners. It was a risk but they lived in risky times.

  After receiving his Medal of Honor and being made a brigadier general, Doolittle was selected by Hap Arnold and George Marshall as chief of the Twelfth Air Force, which had been activated only two months earlier. Eisenhower, however, had made it plain from the outset he didn’t want Doolittle, in all likelihood because he was a reservist and not a regular (West Point) officer. His famous raid on Japan notwithstanding, Doolittle was known mainly as an airplane-racing hotshot.

  After the Allies decided it would be impractical and risky to attempt an invasion of France across the English Channel in 1943, Torch was conceived to attack the Axis in its “soft underbelly,” as well as to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union, which was being overrun by Nazi armies. The vast areas involved in the North African operation made Doolittle’s job doubly difficult, but strong Allied airpower was vital to the success of the plan. To make things even dicier, most of Morocco and all of Algeria and Tunisia, where the main Allied invasion was to take place, were controlled by military forces of the Vichy French, who maintained an uneasy collaboration with the occupying Germans. Their reaction to the arrival of American and British forces remained an open question.

  The first sign of trouble occurred at takeoff from Hurn aerodrome. Five of the B-17s were in line on the run-up strip when the plane Doolittle rode in began taxiing toward them. Suddenly the pilot, John Summers, screamed at the copilot, Thomas Lohr—both of them mere twenty-two-year-old lieutenants—“We’ve lost hydraulic pressure! Hit the wobble pump!” The big four-engine bomber continued to lumber toward the row of B-17s containing the other Twelfth Air Force staff officers. Since all the planes were fully loaded with gasoline, Doolittle realized, there was likely to be an enormous explosion if a collision occurred. Lohr was furiously working the emergency pump to put fluid in the brake cylinders while the other planes sat innocently on the runway, “like birds on a wire,” unaware that there was big trouble coasting toward them. Just as it seemed a crash was unavoidable Summers, still yelling “Pump! Pump!,” stomped the left brake, which grabbed the tarmac and spun the plane off the runway into the mud, saving the lives of practically the entire Torch command and staff.

  The other B-17s took off without a hitch, although the one containing the major general in charge of logistics never made it to Gibraltar. It simply disappeared and was never heard from again. After a day spent repairing and servicing Doolittle’s plane, the B-17 took off next morning, heading out over the Atlantic to avoid enemy air patrols. They were about halfway to their destination when, as luck would have it, the pilot glimpsed four German Ju 88s, heavily armed twin-engine fighter-bombers, which had gone out that morning from Biarritz to prey on Allied shipping.

  The Junkers immediately turned toward the lone B-17 and broke into pairs. For some tense minutes they respectfully flew on either side of it just out of range, trying to size up the ship’s defenses. They had been in the theater long enough to know that a fully armed B-17 was not called a Flying Fortress for nothing. While Doolittle went back to the empty waist gun positions for a better look at the intruders, Torch’s chief of staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, “began to fiddle with the gun in the radio compartment.” Presently Lemnitzer, never one to miss an opportunity, for better or worse, let off a blast at the Germans from the twin .50-caliber machine guns.

  The sight of flaring tracers provoked the Junkers, which immediately peeled off and lined up to attack. They were armed with four 20 millimeter machine guns firing forward and one or two 20 mm in the rear. The Germans must have concluded that the Americans were manning all guns, however, because they chose not to attack from behind—a preferred angle—but raced around to get ahead and make close, head-on passes, where only the nose gun could get at them. Meantime, Summers dove down on the deck at wave-top level and “firewalled” the throttles, hoping to outrun the Germans and keep them from getting under him. The Americans’ situation was clearly desperate—a lone half-armed B-17 with no trained machine gunners aboard, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, and set upon by four of the Luftwaffe’s most dangerous attack planes.

  As the Ju 88s dived and fired, Summers threw the B-17 into a skid, which spoiled the Germans’ aim, but they lined up again for another pass. Doolittle watche
d helplessly through a porthole as Summers turned straight into the oncoming 88s, as if to deliberately bring on a collision. This caused the Germans to sheer off prematurely, but they ripped past blazing away with machine guns and 20 millimeter cannons. Still, the B-17 miraculously seemed to escape hits until, with shocking suddenness, the windshield shattered from a direct strike by one of the 20 mm tracers, which “looked like flaming footballs,” hurling glass into the faces of the pilot and copilot before ripping through Lohr’s arm and ricocheting around the cockpit, striking the instrument panel and scorching Lohr’s scarf in his lap.

  Summers and Lohr were temporarily blinded by the flying shards of glass and Lohr, badly injured and bleeding profusely from his wound, staggered from his seat toward the rear of the plane. Summers screamed for Doolittle, who had never flown a B-17, and Jimmy scrambled into Lohr’s place in the copilot’s seat. General Lemnitzer was still blasting away with his machine guns but stopped long enough to help Lohr. Meantime, the number three propeller on the plane “began to run away,” caused apparently by damage to its governor sometime during the attack. This put them in immediate risk of its tearing loose and chopping into their own fuselage, “like a giant power saw.” If it did, Doolittle said, “it could cut the plane in half.” While Summers struggled to keep the B-17 from plunging into the sea, Doolittle tried to figure out how to feather the third engine prop. And there were still the German fighters to contend with.

  The 88s continued their attacks from head-on, but apparently on their next pass General Lemnitzer hit one of them, and mercifully the third engine prop slowed down somewhat on its own, indicating to Doolittle that the rpm governor was not entirely out of action. Then, without so much as a howdy do, the four German fighters, one belching smoke, broke off the battle and headed for the coast. After the war, German records showed the Ju 88s had been low on gas from their patrol and nearly ran out of fuel on their way back to Biarritz. Using the B-17’s first aid kit officers managed to stanch the flow of blood from Lohr’s arm and the plane made it to the Rock of Gibraltar without further incident.