The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (51 page)

The public reaction was swift and furious; the news media became nearly unhinged. Lindbergh was called everything from a Hitlerite to a fool. The terms “anti-Semitic” and “Nazi” were freely applied. The
Des Moines Register
called the speech “intemperate … unfair … dangerous in its implications.” The
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote, “The voice was Lindbergh’s but the words are the words of Hitler”—and that from a
Hearst
paper! Roosevelt’s press secretary compared the talk with “outpourings from Berlin.” Wendell Willkie, the Republican standard-bearer, called it “the most un-American talk made in my time by a person of national reputation.”

There was worse. The general consensus was that Lindbergh had gone too far, to say the least. In towns and cities across the country, Lindbergh’s name was removed from streets and schools. TWA even expunged the phrase “The Lindbergh Line” from its official stationery. It became clear within a few days that Lindbergh’s effectiveness for America First was demolished. There were even calls for America First to be disbanded, and calls as well for Lindbergh to be deported to Germany. In the thick of it he offered to resign from America First but his resignation was not accepted.

Was Lindbergh anti-Semitic? The answer is yes, to the same extent that many if not most Americans of his era were anti-Semitic, including many black Americans who often resented Jewish ownership of property in what came to be called black “ghettos.” Most Americans in the 1940s had been raised that way; it was as simple as that.

Seventy-five years ago, for most of the U.S. population, it was one thing to look on Jews as different, to exclude them from clubs, apartment buildings, hotels—as was regularly done and chronicled in many books and such movies as the 1947
Gentleman’s Agreement
—and to impose Jewish quotas, as Harvard and other Ivy League schools did, but to the vast majority of Americans it was another thing entirely to hate a group of people to the point of persecution and elimination as the Nazis were doing in Germany. Lindbergh’s longtime friend Harry Guggenheim said both publicly and privately, “Slim has never had the slightest anti-Semitic feeling,” but for years afterward his Des Moines speech “was enough for history to record Lindbergh as a strident Jew-hater.”
²⁰
The fact remains that what he had said was true, that as a group Jews were lobbying for the United States to go to war with Germany. But as Lindbergh’s friend former president Herbert Hoover instructed, “When you had been in politics long enough, you learned not to say things just because they are true.”
²¹

Lindbergh, though, was a self-described “stubborn Swede.” He stubbornly refused to retract his statements. Even Lindbergh’s family was mortified by the incident. Betty Morrow was an interventionist (as she was certain her late husband would have been), but she also thought that the less said about it around Charles, the better. Charles’s cousin Admiral Emory Land was furious with him, and his sister-in-law Constance—who by then had married the Welshman Aubrey Morgan, widower of her dead sister Elisabeth—lamented that Lindbergh had “gone from Jesus to Judas.”

Stubborn though he might have been, Lindbergh was also shaken by the fallout from the incident and by watching his immense prestige evaporate.

L
ESS THAN TWO MONTHS
after the Des Moines speech, on December 7, 1941, planes from Japanese aircraft carriers attacked the huge U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, essentially destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet of battleships that were moored there. The attack was a complete surprise, and the United States declared war on Japan the next day. Three days afterward, the Germans and Italians declared war on the United States, rendering the arguments of the America First Committee moot.

For Lindbergh, it was moot the moment he learned of the Japanese attack, but he now found himself in the most awkward position. Here was the war that he
believed in
fighting, but he had resigned his colonel’s commission. One can scarcely imagine a more frustrating situation for a man of Lindbergh’s temperament. A couple of years before, he had been Colonel Lindbergh, America’s hero. Now he was ex-colonel Nobody, despised by a large portion of the population; the cause for which he had fought so hard was forever lost. And now that there was a war he wanted to fight, he couldn’t get into it. Walter Winchell, a popular commentator of the day, summed it up uncharitably: “His halo has turned into a noose.”

Yet America wasn’t through with Slim Lindbergh, not by a long shot. The years ahead would bring a dazzling conclusion to the young man who made history by flying alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Before long he would take to the air once more—the Lone Eagle again in deadly earnest.

*
Titled
North to the Orient
Anne’s book would become an instant best seller when it was published in 1935.

†
The China Clippers were four-engine behemoths that were featured on U.S. airmail stamps of the 1930s.

‡
Nicolson must have confused “Miss Morgan” with Miss Morrow, referring to Anne’s sister Constance. Elisabeth Morgan, Anne’s other sister, had died two months earlier. But in fact, three years later, in 1937, Constance Morrow, at the age of twenty-three, had married Aubrey Morgan, the widower of her dead sister, and they lived happily ever after until their deaths in the last part of the twentieth century.

§
The Lindberghs’ German police dog Thor and Skean, the terrier, were on the other hand shipped to England aboard the
Queen Mary
, an honor, Lindbergh said, “I’m afraid they have not appreciated.”

‖
The 1925 Treaty of Locarno was an effort by the Allies to adjust with Germany some of the points of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I.

a
The so-called impregnable Maginot Line had been built by France after World War I to protect against any future attack by Germany. Unfortunately, it was finished before the danger from airpower was fully understood.

b
Germany would produce nearly 34,000 of the Messerschmitts before the end of the war.

c
In which England and France allowed Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia unopposed.

d
One of Lindbergh’s severest biographers, Leonard Mosley, states that at the request of the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. Joseph Kennedy, Lindbergh summarized his report and that Kennedy, an appeaser, gave it to Neville Chamberlain on the eve of the Munich Conference. Lindbergh himself says he summarized the report for Kennedy, but I can find no supporting evidence that Kennedy gave it to Chamberlain, let alone that it prompted Chamberlain to yield to Hitler.

e
Ernst Udet died mysteriously in November 1941. The German press put out the story that he was killed “in an accident with some kind of gun.” Other sources said it was a plane crash. Most people think he committed suicide. Whether at the behest of the Nazis or not, no one knows. Milch suggested that Udet had deliberately impeded Nazi aircraft production.

f
The army had changed uniforms since Lindbergh had last worn his.

g
Thompson, who was said to be the second most powerful woman in America (behind Eleanor Roosevelt), had been expelled from Germany for her anti-Nazi reporting and hated Hitler and his regime rabidly.

C
HAPTER
11

THE RAID

One of the most courageous deeds in military history
.

—A
DMIRAL
W
ILLIAM
“B
ULL
” H
ALSEY

I
N THE WEEKS FOLLOWING
the Pearl Harbor attack, everyone with authority from the president on down was wracking his brain for a way to retaliate against the Japanese. Roosevelt was particularly desirous of striking a blow. As a World War I–era assistant secretary of the navy, he felt a special indignation at the near destruction of the Pacific Fleet and heavy loss of life. Plan after plan was rejected, most often, and most glaringly, because the United States, in the early months of 1942, simply did not have the strength to go forward with them.

All along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, German submarines began ravaging American shipping, especially petroleum tankers on their way from the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma to the Northeast, exploding and sinking many of them before the eyes of horrified beachgoers from Miami to Maine. On the West Coast, Japanese subs attacked merchant shipping, and on the evening of February 23 one of them surfaced and for twenty minutes bombarded an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, slaying some cattle on a nearby ranch. Meanwhile, with help from the U.S. Secret Service, Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, crated up copies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Magna Carta, and other precious documents and put them on a special train for Fort Knox, Kentucky, where they remained in the gold vault for the duration.

On the island of Bataan in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur’s army was losing a life-and-death struggle with the Japanese. Elsewhere the Japanese imperial army and navy continued to swarm across the Pacific and Far East like a plague of locusts, extending their defensive perimeter outward thousands of miles from the main island chain.

The U.S. Navy had been launching and recovering planes from ships since 1922 when the USS
Langley
was converted from a coal barge into an aircraft carrier. But even by 1942 the standard carrier aircraft simply did not have the range to attack large targets in Japan without putting the carriers themselves in jeopardy of attack from land-based enemy planes, nor with the carrier planes’ small frames could they carry sufficient ordnance. One optimistic idea had been to bring big four-engine B-17 long-distance bombers to the area near Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, just six hundred miles from Tokyo, and strike from there. But Roosevelt was rebuffed by the Soviet dictator “Uncle Joe” Stalin. Hitler’s treachery had once again caused all the worldwide communists, socialists, and fellow travelers to switch their allegiance back to Britain and the United States. Having been double-crossed by Hitler the previous summer, Stalin was unwilling to risk provoking Japan into attacking him as well.

Thus the stalemate continued, as the Japanese octopus crawled over Indo-China, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, New Guinea, and nearly all the Pacific Island groups, including the U.S. possessions of Guam and Wake.

Then one day in early January a bright idea popped into the head of U.S. Navy Captain Francis “Frog” Low, a World War I submariner then on the staff of Vice Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of the U.S. Fleet. Low had gone to Norfolk to inspect the progress on the new aircraft carrier
Hornet
, and upon his return he looked out the window of the DC-3 transport plane that was carrying him back to Washington. Low noticed that the outline of the deck of an aircraft carrier had been painted on the surface of an adjacent runway, which he logically assumed was a practice area for carrier pilots-in-training so the navy could avoid the prospect of trainees crashing into the real thing. At the end of the runway, however, sat two big army bombers, of what nomenclature Frog Low did not know. With the kind of dashing cognizance that military brains sometimes exhibit, Low put two and two together—namely, the army and the navy—and when he reached Washington he made straight for Admiral King, who was aboard his flagship, the 333-foot former German yacht
Vixen
, which was moored in the Potomac River off the docks of the Navy Yard.
^*

Admiral King was the sort of commander people liked to describe as “more feared than loved,” a hard-boiled, hard-drinking, no-nonsense sailor, of whom it was said, “Not only did he not suffer fools gladly, he didn’t suffer
anybody
gladly.”
^†
When Low arrived the officers were preparing to go into the ship’s dining room, so he kept his counsel until after the meal, when he followed King into his study and bared his mind.

Low told of looking at the carrier imprint and the bombers and thinking, “If the army has some plane that can take off in that short distance—one that can carry a bomb load—why couldn’t we put a few of them on a carrier and bomb the mainland of Japan?”
¹

Instead of biting his head off, King looked up from his chair and said thoughtfully, “Low, that might be a good idea,” adding that he should investigate the scheme further and get back to him.
²