The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (23 page)

g
Specifically, Johnson accused Huffer of appearing at a party in public with a “notorious prostitute.” At the court-martial Billy Mitchell testified that Huffer had come to the American service “from the French” where, he implied, sexual mores were somewhat more relaxed, and therefore Huffer didn’t know any better. In the end the prosecution was apparently unable to disprove the virtue—or lack of—of the lady in question, and Huffer was acquitted.

h
Harvard conferred a bachelor of arts degree on Quentin Roosevelt posthumously.

i
Went into a steep dive.

j
“Ham” Coolidge was the great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson and the best friend of Quentin Roosevelt, who had been killed three months earlier. Like Roosevelt, Coolidge received his degree with the Harvard Class of 1919 posthumously.

k
Upon his release after the war, Gude was not court-martialed, apparently for lack of evidence—or lack of interest—and he went on to distinguish himself (and become fabulously wealthy) as a pioneer in the electrical sign business, especially in the lighting up of Broadway, for which he is said to have coined the phrase “the Great White Way.”

C
HAPTER
6

NEW YORK TO PARIS

No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris
.

—O
RVILLE
W
RIGHT

C
HARLES
L
INDBERGH TOOK SURPRISINGLY WELL
to the U.S. Army’s stern regimentation. In March of 1924, age twenty-two, he reported along with 104 other cadets to the U.S. Army Flying School at Brooks Field, near San Antonio, Texas. When the courses of instruction and the weeding-out process were over a year later, only nineteen of these would be left to graduate as officers, and Lindbergh would stand at the top of the class.

With the lessons of World War I firmly entrenched in its curriculum, the school was perhaps the finest of its type in the world. The first half year of instruction included twenty-five courses, among them aerodynamics, field service regulations, engines, mapmaking, ratio theory, aerial photography, and military law. This was on top of ground school and actual flying.

The flying was done in the morning because there was less wind. The instructors were war-hardened veterans, and the training plane was the Curtiss Jenny, such as Lindbergh had once owned but with a more powerful Hispano-Suiza 150-horsepower engine and a top speed of 125 miles per hour, compared with his Jenny’s 90 miles per hour.
^*
Other courses were conducted in observation, meteorology, gunnery, navigation, formation flying, bombing, combat attack and pursuit—this last was the most difficult and dangerous and the branch Lindbergh aspired to.

When he first arrived, though, Lindbergh seemed to slip into his old sloppy studying habits, and his first grades were low C’s—barely passing, when two failing marks constituted a washout. This time, he took stock and realized that this was something he really wanted to do and that there would be no second chances. It was an epiphany of sorts, and a good one. He studied until taps and then often made his way to the latrine to study under the lights till midnight. For once in his life he was scared of failure.

It was all the more remarkable that Lindbergh was able to achieve his academic and practical success because he received a most severe emotional blow. He had not been at Brooks Field more than three weeks when a telegram arrived from his half sister informing him that his father, C.A., was in the hospital ill with a “bad breakdown.” Two weeks later a second, more urgent, telegram arrived, saying Lindbergh’s father was “very low.”

C.A. had been taken to the hospital founded by the two Mayo brothers in Rochester, Minnesota, after his behavior became increasingly unstable. He was confused, had lost his sense of taste, repeatedly asked the same questions, and had motor-physical difficulty. Charles arranged for a short furlough, but by the time he arrived in Rochester the doctors had diagnosed an inoperable brain tumor. Charles spent as much time as possible with C.A. and at first the sixty-five-year-old brightened to see his son, only to drift back into confusion and stupor minutes later. Before Charles’s eyes, C.A. was losing his senses, and after a week it became clear that death was only a matter of time.

When it was apparent that C.A. could no longer recognize him, Charles decided to return to Brooks Field; if he pushed his furlough longer he could be washed out of flying school. On May 24, 1924, C.A. died.

The service was held three days later at the First Unitarian Church in Minneapolis, attended by family and many old political associates, after which the body was cremated. It had been C.A.’s wish that Charles “throw his ashes to the winds” from a plane over the old farm at Little Falls. It would take him ten years to do it.

After his father died, Charles’s personality seemed to open up somewhat. Where before he had been an introspective loner he now engaged in practical jokes with the other cadets, was friendly with everyone (but close to no one), and kept a smiling disposition. He still abstained from alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and women but nobody seemed to mind.
¹

After graduation in September the thirty-two remaining cadets were taken to Kelly Field a dozen or so miles away for advanced training. Here they flew the de Havilland DH-4B observation plane, which had a 400-horsepower engine and an unfortunate tendency for the wings to fall off if pushed too hard. They also flew the SE-5 Sopwith pursuit fighter.

Lindbergh almost didn’t make it out of flight school, or anyplace else, due to a midair accident during a dogfight exercise barely a week before graduation. He and a Lieutenant McAllister were in fighters at 8,000 feet and instructed to dive and mock fight a DH-4B “enemy” flying below at 5,000 feet. They came at the enemy from different angles and Lindbergh ducked under the de Havilland, expecting to come up on the other side into empty air. Instead he felt a jolt, and then a crash, and to his shock and amazement, when he’d recovered from banging his head on the cowling, he discovered that McAllister’s plane and his had not only collided but were locked in a wing-to-wing, fuselage-to-fuselage dance of death—a slow, unrecoverable spin, revolving toward earth “like a windmill.”

Lindbergh looked over and saw McAllister, not four feet away, who had climbed out of his cockpit and was preparing to jump. Lindbergh did the same, crawling out on the engine cowling, which at that point was almost vertical, he said.
^†
Jumping from an airplane was old hat for Lindbergh, but this was the first time he’d ever been
forced
to jump. He and McAllister thus became, respectively, the twelfth and thirteenth members of the so-called Caterpillar Club, a select fraternity including, later, Jimmy Doolittle, who had parachuted out of airplanes to save their lives.
^‡

On March 14, 1925, Lindbergh graduated from the army’s Advanced Flying School at the head of his class and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.

H
E HAD ALSO, HOWEVER
, graduated at the absolute nadir of military aviation. At the end of World War I there had been nearly two hundred thousand men and eight thousand aircraft in the U.S. Army Air Service. By 1925 there were fewer than ten thousand men and fifteen hundred aircraft on active duty. At that point the only person of any consequence hustling for a strong air corps was Billy Mitchell, and he was about to find himself sacrificed on the altar of internecine rivalry.

Lindbergh applied, without much hope, for a slot in the regular army. While he waited to hear he resumed his barnstorming career, but he realized that, ultimately, it was a dead end. The only other possibility lay in getting involved with airmail. In 1918 the federal government began a scheduled airmail service between New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., expanding in 1920 to California on a route laid out by Eddie Rickenbacker, who had recently returned from the war and entered the aviation business. But in 1925 the government decided to get out of flying its own airmail and let contracts to private enterprises, a godsend to small aviation companies struggling for income. Lindbergh applied to one of these companies, Robertson Aircraft of St. Louis, to become an airmail pilot, and he was accepted pending confirmation of the Robertson company’s airmail contract with the U.S. Postal Service.

Action on both his request for a regular army commission and the airmail contract were agonizingly slow, so that summer he took a job with Captain Wray Vaughn’s Mil-Hi Airways and Flying Circus in Denver, Colorado—mainly to study the behavior of updrafts, downdrafts, and other turbulence in the mountain canyons. It was dangerous business involving many unknowns and unpredictables, but Lindbergh had by now developed—at least in the beginning stages—the curious mind of a scientific intellectual, wanting to sop up knowledge for its own sake, no matter what the cost.

In Denver all that summer and into the fall, for $400 a month, Lindbergh was a wing walker, parachute jumper, all-around stuntman, and mechanic as the little flying circus made the rounds of small country fairs in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, and Wyoming. At some point he acquired a dog that enjoyed seeing the sights from the front cockpit of the plane, and was strapped in when Lindbergh was doing stunts, and people came from miles around to see them. “Ranchers, cowboys, storekeepers in town, followed with their eyes as I walked by,” Lindbergh said. “Had I been the ghost of ‘Liver-Eating Johnson’ I could hardly have been accorded more prestige. Shooting and gunplay those people understood. But a man who’d willingly jump off an airplane’s wing was beyond them.”
²

At last the Robertson brothers’ airmail contract was confirmed, and the winter of 1926 found Lindbergh back in St. Louis as chief pilot, mapping the mail route, going over aircraft, and hiring pilots. They had five planes, army surplus de Havillands—the old “flaming coffins,” whose fuel tanks were located behind the pilot—and the pilots that he hired were pals from army flying school Phil Love and Thomas Nelson. Lindbergh surveyed nine landing fields along the three-hundred-mile route from St. Louis to Chicago, which were little more than spacious farm fields where a pilot could put down near a small storage of gasoline and a nearby telephone. A majority of the flying would be at night, and if a pilot got in trouble his only landing lighting was by parachute flare, which he would throw out over the field and then circle back to and come down as quickly as possible. If fog moved in, or fierce rainstorms, or a low ceiling, the pilot was basically out of luck. There were no aeronautical instruments tested as yet to permit blind landings.

The Robertson company had agreed to fly five round-trips a week, and Lindbergh inaugurated the first of them at 3:30 on the afternoon of April 15, 1926. The occasion was especially festive, and all the town fathers, pols, and hoity-toity folks of St. Louis turned out with speeches and ribbon cuttings captured on motion picture film. The highlight of the affair was when Myrtle Lambert, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the airfield owner, strewed flowers on the wings of Lindbergh’s plane and said, “I christen you ‘St. Louis.’ May your wings never be clipped!” whereupon Slim Lindbergh roared off northward toward Springfield to pick up fifteen thousand pieces of mail bound for Chicago.

The airmail service saved a day over regular scheduled trains, which to some people—such as bankers—was important.
³
But it was frightfully dangerous work. Navigation was visual only except for a compass, especially at night. A pilot could only estimate his position by counting the “glow” of towns and cities along the route. Planes tended to break down at inconvenient times—such as when they were in the air—and often involved things the pilot couldn’t fix once he landed. In those cases the mail was put on the nearest train.

Around seven o’clock on the night of September 16, 1926, fog closed in somewhere over Peoria; Lindbergh turned away from Chicago into open country, hoping to find a hole in the fog. He tossed out a flare but it failed to ignite. He kept on flying, right on through his regular and reserve gas tanks when, at 5,000 feet, the engine died. Lindbergh rolled out over the right side of the cockpit, pulled the rip cord, and was sinking down toward the fog bank with nothing but the wind whistling in his ears when he heard a chilling sound. The engine of the plane had sputtered back to life, apparently because its angle had shifted with his bail-out and whatever gas was left ran back into the carburetor. He hadn’t bothered to turn off the ignition because he thought the fuel was all gone.

He could hear the plane spiraling around him with its engine roaring, threatening to mow him down in midair. But soon the plane veered off and Lindbergh landed safely in a cornfield. With the help of a nearby farmer he located the aircraft, which was smashed into a pile. But with no gas there was no fire, and they managed to get the mail on the 3:30 milk train to Chicago.