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

by Winston Groom

  In November of 1988 Joe had a stroke and on Christmas Eve she passed away. Before she died Joe donated her priceless damask tablecloth with its five hundred–plus embroidered signatures of famous people they had met to the Smithsonian Institution, where it may be seen in the Air and Space Museum. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C. Jimmy joined her there five years later, in the autumn of 1993, at the age of ninety-six. After the services and formal honors a lone fifty-year-old Mitchell B-25 bomber flew over the grave site, while Jimmy’s great-grandson played taps, flawlessly by all accounts.

  NO SOONER HAD EDDIE RICKENBACKER recuperated from his Pacific ordeal than the secretary of war called upon him again for a secret mission. An internecine battle had developed within the Roosevelt administration between the War Department, on the one hand, and the State Department and Roosevelt on the other. At issue was whether the Soviets were making proper use of all the Lend-Lease materials being sent them, in particular heavy shipments of combat aircraft, which might otherwise have gone to American units.† Admiral William Standley, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, had publicly condemned the Soviet government for being secretive about its use of American Lend-Lease aid, which caused a serious diplomatic brouhaha that caught the attention of Rickenbacker’s old friend Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Roosevelt had made it plain he didn’t want any pressuring of the Soviets about Lend-Lease for fear that Stalin might become angry and make a separate peace with Hitler. Roosevelt and the State Department rejected all of Stimson’s overtures concerning the issue.

  That is how matters stood in early April 1943, when Stimson summoned Rickenbacker to Washington and gave him another carte blanche letter ordering any American official anywhere, military or otherwise, to provide Rickenbacker with whatever assistance he needed for any purpose whatever, by order of the United States secretary of war. In fact what Stimson wished was for Rickenbacker to go to Moscow and find out just what in hell the Soviets were doing with all of the stuff coming out of American factories that was being convoyed to them across the Atlantic by the millions of tons and billions of dollars.

  Stimson was sure that neither the White House nor the State Department would approve Rickenbacker’s mission—not the least because Eddie had been entirely outspoken regarding the Roosevelt administration, and not always positively, in particular of its handling of the war in the Pacific and Roosevelt’s involvement with organized labor. Stimson therefore decided to disguise the mission as a goodwill and fact-finding tour, starting in Casablanca and Algiers, where the Americans were battling the Germans for North Africa. From there, under secret cover, he would travel to and report on the situation at Cairo, at Tehran in British-held Iran, India, China, and, last, Moscow, with a clandestinely stamped passport validating a Rickenbacker visit to the Soviet Union that was secretly arranged at the State Department by Eddie’s old friend Edward R. Stettinius, now head of the Lend-Lease program, whom Eddie had known through his association with the Rockefellers.

  On April 26 Rickenbacker left Washington for Miami in an army C-54 transport and the first leg of his trip, which would carry him to South America, then across the Atlantic. He was armed with an array of gifts that Adelaide had assembled for important people, paramount among them nylon stockings, cosmetics, cigarettes, and liquor. Cruising for fifteen hundred miles above the vast and empty Sahara desert from Senegal to Morocco, Eddie ventured that if given the choice of spending twenty-four days on the Pacific or twenty-four days on the desert, he would choose the ocean any day.

  At each base he visited he would perform his old routine, pepping up the troops, making them feel important, asking what was wrong. He was flying to as many as six groups a day, delivering a forty-five-minute talk to each. At Algiers he met with Eisenhower. Later that evening, while Eddie was having dinner with Jimmy Doolittle, the Germans staged an air raid. The two of them stepped onto the balcony of Doolittle’s hotel room to watch the fireworks from U.S. antiaircraft guns. Eddie was fascinated by the terrific artillery show but Doolittle, ever conscious of the calculated risk, soon observed that “all of this stuff they’re shooting up there has got to come down” and went back inside. Sure enough next morning Eddie found a twisted hunk of shrapnel on the balcony right near where he’d been standing.

  At the behest of Eisenhower, Rickenbacker took on the highly disagreeable task of telling pilots of the Twelfth Air Force, who had been promised they could go home after flying twenty-five combat missions, that such assurances were no longer “operable,” due to the demands of the war. It was a terrible position to put Rickenbacker in because the news was both shocking and dreadful, but he was chosen for it, and accepted the challenge, because he was one of the world’s most respected airmen. Almost anyone else probably would have been driven from the microphone.

  The 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron, Eddie’s old outfit from World War I, was stationed in North Africa. Before he left the states, Eddie had a New York jeweler make up gold and enameled “Hat in the Ring” pins, and he handed them out when he visited the squadron’s base.

  After finally landing in Moscow Rickenbacker soon noticed two men he took to be members of the “secret police” that were shadowing him. Everything in the Soviet Union, he found, was difficult. There were mountains of bureaucratic red tape; secretive, sometimes nonsensical delays; and a sinister, unpleasant air to just about everything. Eddie was prepared to loathe the Soviet Union and everything it stood for, and at first it did not disappoint. Upon meeting Admiral Standley, the ambassador, Rickenbacker said that he wished to see the Russian front, as many Soviet air bases as possible, and Stalin, in that order. Standley thought he was joking, and said so in his diary.2

  In the meantime word of the famous flier’s presence in Moscow got around to the Soviet military and everyone began to clamor for Eddie’s attention. This provided Rickenbacker the opportunity to demonstrate his fabled capacity to hold his liquor—in this case vodka—which, as a bourbon drinker, he detested and called “liquid fire.” Eddie’s capacity to drink Russians into insensibility soon gave him a mythical prestige among the Soviets. One of his admirers was Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had engineered the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad.3 To everyone’s astonishment, Zhukov gave Eddie permission to visit any Soviet fighting front or military base he wanted.

  First Rickenbacker was taken to the headquarters of the Moscow air defenses deep underground and was startled when the Soviet commander rushed up in a bear hug, crying “Ah, Eddie!” Turned out this officer was the pilot of a plane that had flown from Moscow to California in 1937, and Rickenbacker had entertained him in royal style when he came through New York. When Eddie asked why the Germans were bombing targets five hundred miles inside Russia but not Moscow, the young colonel handed him a stopwatch and picked up the telephone. “I will show you. When I telephone, you push,” he said. Eddie pushed the stopwatch and they rushed up to an observation post where the sky was empty. “Suddenly they began to appear,” Rickenbacker said, “American P-39s.” In thirty-nine seconds, Eddie counted more than a hundred fighter planes. He had his answer.

  True to his word, Zhukov’s blessing soon had Eddie flying over fields of Russian and Lend-Lease aircraft at the fighting front so well camouflaged they could be discovered only by flying at treetop level. Upon landing he found that all of these aircraft were maintained in fine fighting condition and had accumulated a first-rate battle record against the Germans. So far as he could tell, the Lend-Lease was working in that regard. Rickenbacker also ascertained from Russian aviators that the quality of the German pilots was deteriorating. Either they were sending their best fliers back to Berlin as a result of the round-the-clock bombing by the Eighth Air Force or they were simply running out of good pilot material. In any case, it was a valuable piece of information for Stimson, George Marshall, and Hap Arnold. It certainly wasn’t the sort of military intelligence that was coming from the Soviets through regular channels.

  In the following weeks Ricken
backer visited the various Russian combat fronts, including the Kursk front, where he was present when the Germans launched their third unsuccessful attack with thousands of tanks. Though the battle was five miles away it sounded like the end of the world. The ground was shaking violently, the entire sky was lit up, and the guns increased to a continuous roar. Rickenbacker was thoroughly impressed by the fortitude and sense of confidence of the Soviet army commanders and their determination not only to defend Russian territory but to “tear [the German army] to shreds.” In his report to Stimson Rickenbacker emphasized that nothing he had seen indicated that the Russians would cave in and sign a separate peace with Germany as they had in 1917 during the First World War.

  Back in Moscow, Eddie was given a Lend-Lease C-47, a personal pilot and interpreter, and an escort of five Yak fighters. When he protested to the Russian air force general that he didn’t think a fighter escort was necessary, the answer was, “If something should happen to you, what do you think would happen to me?” Eddie had the kind of personality, backed up by his well-known flying and racing record, that made people want to take him into their confidence. This, coupled with the copious amounts of vodka that the Soviet officers consumed, made for interesting and enlightening conversations. When Eddie once asked a group of high-ranking Russian officers why they were being so frank in discussing with him what surely must have been secret technical details, he was told, “There are two kinds of foreigners we entertain. One kind is those we must. The other is those we like.”

  In the meantime, Rickenbacker learned something about Russian communism, including, to his surprise, that work was performed on “the incentive plan”—the higher the quality and quantity of the product, the more pay the worker received, or other emoluments such as better food and housing. “What kind of Communism is that?” Rickenbacker demanded. It sounded more like capitalism to him. Also he learned that only those who worked received ration cards and housing. People who, for one reason or another, were unable to perform either begged or starved.

  By mid-July Rickenbacker departed after having spent nearly two months in the Soviet Union. Stopping briefly in London, he stayed, as always, at the Savoy, where Winston Churchill sent a car to bring him to Chequers, Churchill’s country estate, for a briefing. Afterward Eddie returned to the United States by the circle route that Lindbergh had pioneered in 1927, arriving over the Long Island Sound. Below him he noted the hundreds of sailboats and thousands of beachgoers enjoying a Saturday afternoon, while halfway around the world millions of Russians were fighting for their lives.

  Initially, the visit to Russia softened Rickenbacker’s harsh opinion of communism, and he published a well-received book about his experiences, with the somewhat grandiose title World Mission. In it, he theorized that when the war ended Russia, China, and the United States would emerge as world leaders, while the British and French empires crumbled. Eddie was impressed by the Russian people and considered them friendly to the United States. He had not met Stalin, but he did meet his chief deputy Vyacheslav Molotov (of “cocktail” fame), but in the end he had badly misjudged the intentions of the Soviet regime. Likewise, his experience in China had discounted the rise and takeover of Maoist communism. He said that the Russians had shed the old Bolshevik version of Marxism, and they were no longer concerned with taking over other nations and might even emerge from the war as “the greatest democracy in the world.” None of this occurred, of course, but at the time his views were reassuring.‡

  In 1946 Eddie’s mother, Elizabeth, died in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-three. That same year his friend Damon Runyon passed away from throat cancer. Eddie had promised to scatter his ashes by plane over lower Manhattan, a pledge he kept even though it was against the law.

  In the meantime, Rickenbacker returned to his Eastern Air Lines offices in Rockefeller Center and all of the critical decisions that needed making—purchasing of new planes, training of pilots, new air routes, maintenance, dealing with government regulation, passenger comfort, safety, and the like.§

  Commercial airline safety after World War II remained questionable at best. The war had advanced aviation considerably, but there were still terrible issues with the large passenger planes. Wings fell off at an alarming rate, there were midair collisions, crashes on takeoffs and landings, bodies falling from the sky, all gruesomely recorded by photographers and splattered across the pages of newspapers and magazines. The science of metal fatigue had not yet overtaken the forces of thousands of horsepower, pressurized cabins, and the strain of flying at hundreds of miles per hour.

  Eddie was justly proud, however, that Eastern was the only airline that had been maintained at a healthy profit and without government subsidy throughout the war and on into the decade of the 1950s. Time magazine featured Eddie on its cover in 1950 as a “captain of industry,” and like Doolittle he began to gather all sorts of honors and salutations from everything from American Legion branches to Rotary Clubs. He hobnobbed with other captains of industry, as well as movie stars, politicians, and sports figures, and he had his own table at New York’s 21 Club.

  He and Adelaide had grown somewhat apart, mainly because Eddie was constantly traveling. As their boys, David and Bill, moved out, married, and began families of their own, Eddie and Adelaide began an almost nomadic existence, living in hotel apartments all over New York’s Upper East Side. At times they occupied suites at the Carlyle, Park Lane, Stanhope, Dorset, Regency, and the Waldorf Astoria. Eddie also bought a 2,700-acre ranch in Texas, complete with an imposing hacienda, but after eight years he donated the entire spread to the Boy Scouts because he said he wasn’t using it enough.4

  In 1959, at the age of seventy, and with Eastern still showing considerable profits, Eddie stepped down as president, though he remained chairman of the board of directors. Thus began a period of the airline’s decline, as it slipped into unprofitability because of union strikes, inflation, rising labor costs, and increased competition and regulations from the Civil Aeronautics Board. Physically, Eddie’s health was remarkable (during the New York City blackout of 1965 he walked up twenty-one flights of stairs to his apartment at the Regency on Park Avenue), considering that for much of his life he smoked several packs of cigarettes a day and drank copious amounts of bourbon.‖ His friends were now dying away at an alarming rate and one day, without even a vow, he simply stopped drinking and smoking because “it no longer did anything for him.”5

  Neither did New York, so he moved to Florida. He and Adelaide had for some time maintained a large home in Coral Gables but sold it for a private villa in the old Key Biscayne Hotel, which was located on the ocean just down the Rickenbacker Causeway from Coral Gables. It was a little island paradise with a golf course, pool, broad lawns, and palm trees swaying in the ocean breezes. In October 1972, only weeks after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary, Eddie suffered a major stroke, which required a dangerous operation. He survived it, however, as well as kidney damage, but he had lost the ability to talk. This latter he quickly regained with the aid of a speech therapist at a nursing home.

  The following summer he told Adelaide he wanted to go to Switzerland and see where his parents had been born. She agreed to go, too, because there was also hope Swiss doctors could find some relief for her fading eyesight. In Zurich, before they could get into the countryside, Eddie suffered a period of irregular breathing. The doctors diagnosed pneumonia. Three days later he was dead. At eighty-two he had used up the lives of a dozen cats but couldn’t escape what he always referred to as “the old man with the knife on the stick.”

  His body was cremated and even though as a Medal of Honor recipient he could have been buried at Arlington he had chosen to be laid to rest in Columbus, Ohio, beside his parents. General Jimmy Doolittle gave the eulogy at the funeral service, praising Eddie for his “courage, humanity, patriotism, and integrity.”

  “I have known him for over half a century,” Doolittle said, “and I cannot conceive of his ‘warping a fact,’
” adding that “he believed he was his brother’s keeper.”

  After the interment, four sleek jet fighters from the 94th Aero came out of the clouds, and as they reached the cemetery the lead ship zoomed straight up and out of sight in the missing leader formation. At the reception afterward, family and friends remarked on it, agreeing, “Captain Eddie would have liked that.”

  THROUGHOUT THE FINAL YEAR of the war Lindbergh continued working with United Aircraft as a test pilot. He likewise retained his status as a military technician, and less than two weeks after Germany surrendered in May of 1945 he was once more pressed into duty in concert with the U.S. Navy to study German advances in rocketry and jet propulsion. On May 17 he arrived in Mannheim, which had been wrecked so badly by Allied bombing that it reminded Lindbergh of a Dalí painting.

  For security’s sake he was dressed like a GI, complete with boots and overseas cap, and for protection he carried a .38 automatic in a shoulder holster.a In Munich he found more of the same, so that “you felt it would take a century to rebuild and reorganize.” Everywhere, there were hungry or starving Germans—men, women, and children—but Allied regulations forbade “fraternization,” which included handing out food, cigarettes, or candy. Lindbergh thought that was not only cruel but stupid and frequently broke the rules.

  In a military jeep Lindbergh visited Berghof, in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The house had been bombed to rubble, the kitchen floor blanketed with shards of broken china, and there was the distinctly unpleasant odor of dead bodies. He had dinner with officers of the occupying U.S. Army at one of Göring’s houses on a lake.b He even drank some of Göring’s Rhine wine, which he found had “an exceptionally fine flavor.”