Rickenbacker’s celebrity took off in a different direction with the creation of a comic strip called Ace Drummond, which he scripted with the cartoonist Clayton Knight. Loosely based on the Rickenbacker character from World War I, the hero flies his plane all over the world foiling bad men and saving damsels in distress. The comic ran as a Sunday page from 1935 to 1940, and at its peak it was distributed by King Features Syndicate in 135 newspapers. Soon the strip spurred the formation of the Eddie Rickenbacker Junior Pilots Club, which in turn inspired a thirteen-chapter movie serial starring John King as Ace Drummond. The first chapter featured the adventures of Ace Drummond in Mongolia and included dragons, dungeons, and a death ray.
On February 19, 1936, a telegram caught up with Rickenbacker on the road saying that Billy Mitchell had died. Mitchell had been only fifty-six but a bad heart and influenza combined to kill him in a New York City hospital. Eddie went to New York immediately and helped escort the casket from the undertakers to Grand Central Station where it was to be shipped to Mitchell’s childhood home in Milwaukee. It was a poignant, emotional occasion. The casket had been left at the far end of Grand Central, and Eddie and a handful of Mitchell’s close friends carried it through the dark catacombs to the express car on the train. “I felt so bitter, so grief-stricken, so shocked at this ignominious, demeaning end to a brilliant career, that I found the whole episode hard to believe,” Eddie wrote afterward.
Soon enough Mitchell’s crusade would be shockingly vindicated when the Japanese carried out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which put much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet out of commission. In all, sixteen battleships were sunk by airplanes during the Second World War, making clear that airpower was supreme against these large, powerful vessels.
Mitchell was belatedly showered with honors. The B-25 Mitchell bomber was named after him, and would be flown by the crews of Jimmy Doolittle on his famous 1942 raid on Japan. In that year, too, President Roosevelt restored Mitchell to the rank of general and added an additional star, making him a major general. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, posthumously, and inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. Additionally, everything from mountains and high schools to airports, roads, streets, dormitories, and the eating hall at the United States Air Force Academy were named after him. In 1955 a first-rate movie was released, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, starring Gary Cooper and directed by Otto Preminger. In 1999 his portrait was put on a U.S. postage stamp.
All this was to recognize that in fact Mitchell was right and those in power were wrong. Eddie Rickenbacker went even further, giving it as his opinion that if the military had listened to Mitchell right after World War I ended, the United States would have built up such a powerful air force that Hitler and Göring never would have dared to start World War II—a noteworthy ideal.
WITH MITCHELL BURIED, Eddie decided he needed “a change of scenery,” and he took Adelaide and the boys to Europe, ostensibly to examine the state of aviation there. In London they had breakfast with Eddie’s friend the Canadian newspaper baron Max Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook, publisher of the London Evening Standard and the Daily Express. After learning Rickenbacker’s itinerary, Beaverbrook asked if Eddie would have dinner at his home when he returned. It was a portentous request.
They toured England, France, and Italy by air, the better to see the commercial aviation progress that the Europeans had been making. Germany was high on Rickenbacker’s list, however, because he had heard unsettling rumors since Hermann Göring, now a field marshal, had announced the existence of the Luftwaffe a few months earlier. This was done in flagrant disregard of the Treaty of Versailles, which, under Hitler, the Germans continued to ignore—just as Göring had predicted to Eddie back in 1922.
Arriving in Berlin, Eddie and Adelaide were met once again by Ernst Udet and Erhard Milch, now high-ranking officers in Hitler’s Third Reich, dressed in full Nazi regalia. Milch and Udet escorted the Rickenbackers to the new Air Service building at Tempelhof Airport, which Eddie described as “one big bomb shelter … the size of a city block,” where a grand banquet had been prepared in their honor, hosted by none other than Göring, wearing a grin and a brilliant white uniform so that he resembled a drum major in a marching band.
“Herr Eddie,” Göring greeted him effusively, “do you remember when I told you about the future of our air force when you visited us in 1922?”
Eddie assured him he remembered it clearly.
“Gut!” the German beamed, rubbing his hands together in a characteristic gesture. “Now we will show you.” With Udet as guide, they spent three days touring German aviation installations, beginning with Göring and Udet’s old squadron the Richthofen Flying Circus, which was hidden in a pine forest and so well camouflaged that Eddie didn’t realize it was there until he was “right in the middle of it.” In addition to the fighter planes, there were numerous two-seat trainers. When Eddie inquired about these, Udet surprised him by revealing that every man in the squadron was trained to fly—not just the officers but sergeants, privates, mechanics, cooks, clerks, and so on. No manpower was wasted.
They visited subterranean aviation factories that were producing both commercial and military planes and underground aeronautical labs that were using wind tunnels to test stability—a new development. In the concealed design departments, Eddie saw the newest plans for aircraft and engines. He was sure that Göring’s purpose in showing him these things—many of which would ordinarily have been highly classified—was to leave an impression for him to carry back to England, France, and America, of the new Germany’s great air strength, of her invulnerability. Further, he deduced that, because of Eddie’s reputation as a combat pilot, they couldn’t resist trying “to overawe me with their Teutonic might.” The Germans, Rickenbacker realized, had no respect for England or France as military powers. “Through their discipline, sacrifice and preparation … the Germans earnestly believed they had a right to wage war and win it.”
The day before the Rickenbackers left Berlin Udet threw a cocktail party in their honor at his apartment. Udet was no fan of Hitler, and seemed to have no qualms about criticizing him—so much so that Rickenbacker took Udet aside once to caution him, saying, “If you keep on talking like that, Ernst, you’re going to get your head shot off.” Eddie remembered that the walls of Udet’s apartment were “lined with pictures of blond Hollywood stars, all affectionately inscribed to [Udet],”b and dead center on one wall was a target, surrounded by more pictures of Hollywood stars. The German ace had an enormous collection of handguns, and after everyone “had their favorite tipple,” Udet suggested they play a game—the same he had played with Doolittle. With each man choosing a pistol, they would stand so many paces from the target and see who could hit it without breaking one of the surrounding pictures.
This went on for most of the party, with Udet showing off his marksmanship. The noise was deafening. Adelaide worried, “Those poor neighbors … what will they think? Surely they’ll think someone is being liquidated … and wonder whether they’ll come next.”
Once back in London Rickenbacker looked up Lord Beaverbrook as promised and, good as his word, Beaverbrook invited Eddie and Adelaide to dinner next night. Eddie was astounded when he arrived at Beaverbrook’s London townhome to find nearly every high-ranking cabinet member there except for Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin himself. He was cornered by the foreign undersecretary Robert G. Vansittart and asked his opinion of when Hitler would be ready for war. Eddie said three to five years, but Vansittart nervously countered, “Two years at the most!”
Rickenbacker quickly understood that the gathering had been called to elicit his appraisal of the German military buildup. In his opinion, “Germany was building a great war machine, and would not hesitate to use it if necessary to regain world dominance.” But only Vansittart—an ally to Winston Churchill—was convinced that the Nazis meant war; everyone else, Rickenbacker wrote later, “disagreed so bluntly and positively” that he realized it was po
intless to go on. The British leaders had spent so much time squabbling among themselves they had become oblivious to the threat posed by a rearmed Germany, Rickenbacker concluded. It was, he said, “a government of compromise and self-delusion.”
Things were no better when the couple reached the United States. At a meeting in Washington Rickenbacker tried to warn high-ranking Army Air Corps officers of the danger, but they brushed him off and ridiculed him when he described how the Germans were making pilots out of clerks, cooks, and mechanics. Even Eddie’s friend Hap Arnold, by then a brigadier general and assistant chief of the Air Corps, was incredulous. “Eddie, you’re nuts,” he said. “It can’t be done. You can’t make pilots out of mechanics.”
Even after Rickenbacker pointed out that he had been a mechanic himself, he was unable to convince them or raise alarm.
EVERY YEAR AFTER RICKENBACKER took over Eastern Air Lines, the company was more profitable, and Eddie was having a grand time running it until late one night when he answered the phone at home and realized that John Hertz, who had made a fortune with his Yellow Cab Company and car rental business, had apparently dialed his number by mistake and thought he was speaking with someone else.
Before Rickenbacker could say a word Hertz began railing about how he was “going to get that Rickenbacker.” Eddie let him go on until at long last he identified himself, and after “a very loud silence, he hung up.” In short, as Eddie put it, “There was no love lost between John Hertz and me.”
In January 1938 a phone call from a Hearst magazine aviation writer gave him news that landed like a blow to the stomach. “I’ve just heard,” the writer told him, “that John Hertz has taken an option on Eastern Air Lines for $2 million.”
Eddie was floored. Hertz had sold the cab business to GM in 1925 for $43 million. Then he’d bought Transcontinental and Western Airlines from Lehman Brothers and immediately wanted to raise prices for passenger air travel when Eddie wanted to lower them all around.
Furthermore, Eddie learned there was skullduggery afoot. Besides Hertz, there was a shadow buyer for Eastern Air Lines, one Ernest R. Breech, an assistant treasurer for GM, who had been asked by the company to move to Detroit but did not wish to leave New York. Breech thought that by investing in Eastern he could gain a good executive position there, and thus was backing Hertz’s bid. A further rub was that Breech had been the person who had gotten Eddie his job at Eastern in the first place.
Rickenbacker wasn’t going to take it lying down. After all, GM had been trying to sell Eastern in 1934 for $1 million when Eddie came aboard. Now, after only three years, it was worth three times that because of his stewardship, and “My reward,” he said, “was to be kicked out on my ear.”
The first thing Rickenbacker did was visit Alfred P. Sloan, chairman of General Motors. He pressed the case that it was unfair not to at least give him a shot at buying the company after he had built it up from a losing white elephant. Since taking over, Rickenbacker had replaced dozens of station managers and gotten rid of all the older aircraft. Eastern was now operating with a brand-new fleet of DC-2s, the innovative forerunner of the Douglas DC-3, which became the most popular airplane in the world. For shorter distances, Rickenbacker had acquired a fleet of five Lockheed L-10 Electras, which carried ten passengers and flew 180 miles per hour. Eastern now had fifteen flights a day between New York and Washington, the first de facto shuttle service, which took eighty minutes each way. By 1937 Eastern was flying ten of the new DC-3s, and most of Eastern’s routes, including Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans, were sellouts and fares had far eclipsed revenues from carrying U.S. mail. Eddie pleaded to Sloan for GM to give him an option to buy the company for $3,500,000 in cash rather than Hertz’s offer of $1,000,000 cash and $2,250,000 in notes.
Sloan gave Rickenbacker thirty days to get the money, roughly $50 million in today’s dollars, and certainly not the sort of figure that could be raised overnight. Eddie was not sophisticated about high finance but he was learning. First he approached Smith Barney, a venerable banking firm, but he was told it didn’t have that kind of money and so he was sent on to the banking giant Kuhn, Loeb and Company. With the able assistance of Laurance Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb was able to cobble together a complex deal involving the Securities and Exchange Commission and consisting of a public offering with cash backing. Rickenbacker went to bed worried on Friday, April 30, 1938, and woke up next morning to a phone call from Frederick Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb who asked, “Where do you want your three and a half million dollars, Eddie, and when?”
“If it’s convenient, Freddy, make it in Eastern’s hangar at Newark Airport at ten a.m. tomorrow,” Rickenbacker said.
“I’ll be there with a certified check” was the reply.
He had met the thirty-day deadline.
After that, Eddie Rickenbacker became the president and general manager of, and a major owner in, Eastern Air Lines. The Rickenbacker luck had held out again.
DURING THE LAST YEARS OF THE 1930S Eastern, known as the Great Silver Fleet, was constantly expanding, with flights from Texas to Mexico City and new routes in Alabama and Tennessee. By 1939 Eastern was showing profits of just under $1 million, and at last, though it had taken nearly fifteen years, Eddie was able to pay off the remainder of the $250,000 he had borrowed for the Rickenbacker Motor Company.
Airline travel had become increasingly popular so that by the end of the decade American-owned airline companies could boast of flying more than two million passengers a year. Planes such as the DC-3 were amazingly modern and made coast-to-coast flights in eighteen hours or under, stopping only several times to refuel. The cabins were practically soundproof, which added greatly to the attraction of flying. As Orville Wright explained, “Noise was something we always knew would have to be eliminated to get people to fly. Somehow it is associated with fear.” A number of the long-distance flights were “sleepers,” containing curtained-off berths with posh pillows and feather comforters. Meals were often gourmet—lamb chops, Long Island duckling—“served on Syracuse china with Reed & Barton silverware.” All this came with a price—as much as $5,000 in today’s dollars for a coast-to-coast flight—but it had reached a point where many airlines could sustain themselves with passenger traffic alone.18
At this stage in his career Rickenbacker was completely engaged in his work, putting in sixteen-hour days, traveling most of the time to inspect the ever widening facilities of the company. He had long since disregarded his vows to quit smoking and drinking. He went through several packs of cigarettes a day and engaged in what was then the fairly commonplace four-martini lunch and after-work imbibing, not at all unusual among executives nationwide. It has been suggested that he and Adelaide grew apart—she had her friends and he had his—and that she considered divorce. They didn’t go through with it. She had considerable wealth in her own right and proved in the future to be a devoted wife and friend of Eddie to the last.
The boys went to boarding schools, which was not uncommon among the wealthier class of families, and turned out to have vastly different personalities. William was gifted intellectually, was a talented classical musician, and made good grades, while David had more of a mechanical mind and was not a superior student. Eddie was devoted to them but with competing schedules there was not much time spent with them. Eddie took the boys to such events as the Indianapolis 500 and taught them sports, including shooting and golf. Yet there was, as in so many cases with famous parents, that kind of lofty void that so often separates and divides. William Rickenbacker once described what it was like as a boy sitting across the breakfast table from his father. “It was like looking at the Washington Monument,” he said.19
ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1939, England and France reluctantly declared war on Germany.
During that summer, as the crisis in Europe reached its peak, Eddie had taken the family for a leisurely vacation in Europe. With fourteen-year-old David and eleven-year-old William, Eddie and Adelaide revisited a Germany that exuded “the new, conf
ident belligerent spirit of the Third Reich.” During their two days there Eddie caught up with his old friend Udet who was now a major general in charge of all aircraft production for the Luftwaffe, but he gave no indication one way or the other as to whether Udet’s personality seemed altered, as Jimmy Doolittle had found earlier that same year.
From Germany the Rickenbackers went to Norway and took a “sturdy little ketch, complete with crew,” for a sail along the coast of Scandinavia. Afterward they visited Oslo and were en route to Helsinki when they were suddenly warned by a friend who ran the Norwegian division of Scandinavian Air Service (SAS) that they should leave Europe immediately.
“All hell is going to break loose,” the man told them.
Rickenbacker had made reservations to fly home early for an appointment but suggested that Adelaide take the boys to Paris for a few days, then board the Hansa at Cherbourg for the voyage home. “I thought there was a tragic possibility,” Eddie said, “that, if they did not see it then, they might not see it at all. I knew what the German bombers could do.” That had been during the last days of August 1939, when Hitler had signed a nonaggression agreement with Russia and was demanding a “corridor” through Poland to connect the two Germanys separated by the Treaty of Versailles.
Just as Adelaide and the boys arrived, refugees from Poland and other East European countries began pouring into France and the authorities ordered a national mobilization of the armed forces, a move tantamount to war. In the confusion the Rickenbackers only just made it to Cherbourg, where they found that the Hansa, a German ship, had been called home. They were barely able to make reservations on a Polish ship, the Batory, which was so overrun with refugees that Adelaide had to share a room and a bath with a Polish army general on a secret mission to Washington. While they were at sea war was declared and the Germans began torpedoing Allied ships, causing Eddie great consternation until the Batory arrived safely in New York on September 5.20
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