The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (63 page)

A
SIDE FROM THE AIRPORT
and a few filthy native huts, the city of Port Moresby had essentially been reduced to ruins by Japanese bombing. The heat was awful and the mosquitoes worse, Rickenbacker said. The Australian army had just repelled a Japanese advance across the towering Owen Stanley Range that got within thirty miles of the city. The fighting was horrid. MacArthur had arrived two weeks earlier with his twenty-thousand-man American army and was now engaged in the fierce Battle of Buna and Gona across the same mountains, where the Japanese had dug into heavily fortified and reinforced strongpoints, stubbornly resisting all attempts to dislodge them.
^‖

MacArthur lived in “a framed shack [with] an outhouse containing a cold-water shower that always ran hot.” Still he had courteously invited Eddie to stay with him. For a five-star
^a
general, he said, “MacArthur lives anything but pretentiously.” Eddie found MacArthur a “delightful host” and was taken into his confidence as well as that of the brilliant General George Kenney, who commanded MacArthur’s air force. Kenney was an old friend of Eddie’s who had also trained at the Issoudun school in France and won a Distinguished Service Cross as a flier in the last war. Kenney described for Eddie his new “skip-bombing” technique, in which an A-20 light bomber would fly low at Japanese transport ships and release its bomb load to skip across the water, similar to “dapping,” or bouncing a smooth pebble on a pond. It was one of Kenney’s many innovations in a war theater of almost breathtaking dimensions, and Rickenbacker was happy to include the gist of all this in his report to Stimson.
^b
For his part, MacArthur graciously told Rickenbacker, “You know, Eddie, I probably did the American Air Forces more harm than any living man when I was chief of staff by refusing to believe in the airplane as a war weapon, and I am doing everything I can to make amends for that great mistake.”

After delivering Stimson’s top secret message to MacArthur, Rickenbacker flew back to Brisbane where his luxury B-24 awaited. He did not look back fondly. “New Guinea is a hellhole of heat, dust, and vermin, [and] Port Moresby is the dust bowl of all creation.” Rickenbacker found himself wishing that all the top war production people in the United States could be brought there “for just one day” so they could better understand the conditions under which Americans were fighting.

E
DDIE
R
ICKENBACKER RETURNED
to the United States a hero once again. When his flight landed in California, Rickenbacker had a joyful reunion with his seventy-four-year-old mother, Lizzie, who was living in Los Angeles with her son Dewey. Eddie had supported them generously over the years. Like Adelaide, Lizzie had never given up hope that he would be rescued.

On December 19, 1942, his plane landed at Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., which was “swarming with dignitaries and top brass,” including Stimson and Hap Arnold, but Eddie “had eyes for only three people: Adelaide, David and William.”
¹⁶
After a joyous celebration they went to Stimson’s office in the newly constructed Pentagon, where Eddie gave an account of his ordeal to reporters. That same day he and the family flew to Manhattan and a large reception thrown by Mayor La Guardia.

In the coming days Rickenbacker recounted the story for
Life
magazine and began working on a best-selling book about the episode. At a luncheon given for him by Joseph M. Patterson, publisher of the New York
Daily News
, he had barely sat down when Mrs. Patterson leaned over and told him she’d been asked by a group of influential people to urge him to run for president. He laughed and replied, “I am too controversial, and you know it.” Toward the end of the lunch the
Daily News
cartoonist Batchelor arrived at the table with the original “So long, Eddie” cartoon drawing and he presented it to Rickenbacker with the word SORRY in large letters over the front.

In the following weeks, Rickenbacker delivered a blistering speech at the Pentagon regarding lifesaving and survival gear aboard aircraft, dwelling in particular on the size of the rafts and their emergency equipment, water and rations, radios, clothing, and more. Nearly all of his recommendations were rapidly put into practice.

His return coincided with the celebration of what Winston Churchill had recently described as the “end of the beginning,” after the British defeated Field Marshal Rommel’s German army at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. All in all, the last part of 1942 had been a good half year for the Allies, who had previously suffered nothing but grievous defeats and setbacks. Now it seemed the tide of battle was turning, beginning with Doolittle’s raid on Japan, followed by the enormous U.S. naval victory at the Battle of Midway, the turning back of the Japanese army in New Guinea, the dearly won successes by U.S. marines at Guadalcanal, the German defeat at Stalingrad, and the triumphal American invasion of North Africa. All of these events were encouraging, and for Americans Eddie Rickenbacker’s return from the dead was a symbol of American indestructibility. Many a Sunday sermon dealt with the parable of Eddie’s seagull as an act of deliverance by God himself. As the biographer W. David Lewis observed, “He was no longer a hero but a prophet.”

*
Among Adamson’s books was a biography of Norway’s infamous traitor and Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling, as well as the book that became the popular 1957 movie
Hellcats of the Navy
, starring Ronald Reagan and his soon-to-be-bride, Nancy Davis.

†
By army regulations Cherry, as commander of the B-17, was also commander of the refugee party. Adamson and Rickenbacker, no matter how high ranked or exalted, were merely passengers.

‡
A lava-lava is basically a skirt.

§
The Ellice Islands were a colony of Great Britain until 1974. In 1978, they became the independent nation of Tuvalu. The neighboring Gilbert Islands had also been a British colony until they were invaded and occupied by Japan.

‖
So stubborn were they that of the 6,800 Japanese engaged, only 200 were captured—the rest died.

a
MacArthur had four stars at this point.

b
Kenney famously put MacArthur’s abrasive chief of staff Richard Sutherland in his place when he told him to get a blank white sheet of paper and put a dot in the middle with his pencil. That done, Kenney informed him, “That dot represents all you know about airpower. The rest of the paper is what I know about airpower.”

C
HAPTER
13

THE LONE EAGLE
GOES TO WAR

T
HREE DAYS AFTER THE
P
EARL
H
ARBOR
attack Charles Lindbergh released a statement through the America First Committee, which was in the process of disbanding: “We have been stepping closer to war for many months. Now it has come and we must meet it as united Americans regardless of our attitudes in the past toward the policy our government has followed. Whether or not that policy has been wise, we have been attacked by force of arms, and by force of arms we must retaliate.”

If being reviled by the press and a considerable part of the American population ever bothered Charles Lindbergh, there is no record of it. Whether he thought this statement would get him back into the good graces of the government is also unrecorded, but it’s doubtful. His frustration and desperation is palpable from what he wrote in his journal several days after Pearl Harbor when Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

“Now that we are at war I want to contribute as best I can to my country’s war effort. My first inclination was to write to the President … [but] if I wrote him at this time, he would probably make what use he could of my offer from a standpoint of politics and publicity and assign me to some position where I would be completely ineffective and out of the way. I sometimes wish, for a moment, that I had not resigned my commission; but whenever I turn the circumstances over in my mind, I feel I took the right action. There was, I think, no honorable alternative … I simply cannot remain idle while my country is at war. I
must
take some part in it, whatever that may be.” Days later he was still wondering, “What part am I to take in the war in view of the obvious antagonism of the Administration?” It did not take him long to find out.

During Christmas week Lindbergh wrote to Hap Arnold offering his military services, taking note of the “complications” that might ensue as a result of his open opposition to the Roosevelt administration. A few days later the offer somehow leaked to the press, which prompted Lindbergh’s old antagonist Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to contact Roosevelt, warning of “a tragic disservice to democracy to give one of its bitterest and most ruthless enemies a chance to gain a military record.” Ickes represented Lindbergh to the president as “a fascist, motivated by hatred for you personally,” and urged Roosevelt to consign him “to merciful oblivion.”
¹

Thus it was that when Lindbergh heard nothing back from Hap Arnold, he went to see Secretary of War Stimson, who told him, quite frankly, that in view of Lindbergh’s opposition to intervention he was “extremely hesitant” to put him in a position of command.

Next day Lindbergh went to see Arnold and Assistant Secretary of War for Air Robert Lovett. Lovett asked whether Lindbergh could serve Roosevelt loyally. Lindbergh replied that while he disagreed with the president, he would follow his orders “as President of the United States [and] Commander in Chief of the Army.” Arnold wondered whether Lindbergh’s fellow officers would have confidence in him, given Lindbergh’s outspoken anti-intervention views. The meeting lasted less than half an hour, but by the end of it Lindbergh conceded there were too many obstacles for him to try to have his colonelcy reinstated. He said the country might be better served if he returned to the aviation industry. Lovett said he thought the War Department would be agreeable to that.

Lindbergh, however, soon came to see the breadth of Roosevelt’s vindictiveness. Wherever he went in the aircraft industry he was rebuffed. His old friend Juan Trippe at Pan Am, after first welcoming Lindbergh aboard, soon called back to say there were “obstacles.” It was the same at Curtiss-Wright and United Air. Lindbergh was “dynamite,” they said, and it had been made plain that any association with him could jeopardize their lucrative contracts with the War Department and other government agencies. Lindbergh later learned that when his name had come up during a White House meeting with several Democratic senators Roosevelt had said, “I’ll clip that young man’s wings.”
²

On January 15 Charles ran into Eddie Rickenbacker in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel, two blocks from the White House, and the two agreed to meet for lunch in Rickenbacker’s apartment there. Still recuperating from his atrocious plane crash in Atlanta, Eddie told Charles (whom he always called “Slim”) that the Roosevelt administration was making things as tough as possible for him, too, because of his past opposition to the president’s war politics. (This was several weeks before Rickenbacker’s tour of U.S. air bases and the mission to England.) Lindbergh thought Rickenbacker looked “much better than I expected,” considering his ordeal.
³

For her part, Anne Lindbergh felt exasperated over the situation. Six months pregnant, and living in their rented home on Martha’s Vineyard, she told her diary on March 12, “C is away—again looking for work. I am hurt for him when he gets another telephone call from a company which wants him, but cannot afford to take him, because of Administration disapproval. And I feel that his exclusion from the world of aviation is much more than mine from the world of books.
^*
He is not bitter or discouraged, and it does not seem to affect his daily life or what he gives to others, for he radiates a kind of health and gaiety and steadiness. It is a constant marvel—and lesson—to me.”

Wartime Washington made it all the more difficult not to have a position in the military. There were machine guns at the White House and on the roofs of buildings. The entire city was blacked out at night in fear of air raids. Lindbergh dwelled in his frustrating limbo until the end of March 1942, when deliverance at last came from the man who then owned the largest aircraft manufacturing company in the world, Henry Ford.

Ford was in the process of completing the stupendous government-backed warplane plant at Willow Run, Michigan, outside Detroit. Two years earlier it had been a farm owned by Ford and used to employ Depression-era youths. It was only now beginning to produce the B-24 Liberator, a four-engine, highwing heavy bomber.
^†
The Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in San Diego was presently assembling the plane by hand, but the army thought production could be vastly improved using assembly-line methods that had been developed by Henry Ford for manufacturing automobiles.