The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (65 page)

Apparently not, for the reply came next day in the affirmative. The adventure was postponed for several months due to “major military movements expected in the South Pacific,” but by the end of February 1944 Lindbergh was cleared to go, and he returned to Detroit to say goodbye to Anne and the children.

Charles had a couple of weeks before heading to the Pacific and he made the most of it with Anne and the younger kids, playing with them on the floor a game he invented called “Vild-Cats” using a blanket for a cave and malted milk tablets for bait. For several hours each day Charles immersed himself in writing chapters that became his best-selling book
The Spirit of St. Louis
.

Both of the Lindberghs remained pariahs in certain parts of the country, most notably the Northeast. The Book of the Month Club had just rejected Anne’s new book after receiving “a number of fanatical letters saying that if the club took my book they’d resign. I cannot believe, like [Charles],” she said, “that it all will change, that integrity will come out on top in the end.”

The animosity was particularly acute among Jews, who remained convinced that Lindbergh had betrayed them. An embarrassing scene illustrating just how far the Lindberghs’ esteem had fallen developed one morning at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, country home of the playwright George S. Kaufman and his wife, Beatrice, who were entertaining the novelist John P. Marquand and his wife, Adelaide, a friend of Anne’s since childhood and from Miss Chapin’s School. When everyone had gathered downstairs for brunch about eleven-thirty, “Beatrice Kaufman spoke up in her clearest and coolest voice. ‘Adelaide,’ she said, ‘while you were asleep this morning Mrs. Lindbergh telephoned you here.’ ‘Oh,’ said Adelaide, ‘I’ll ring her back.’ ‘You may call her back if you wish,’ Beatrice Kaufman said, ‘but you may not do so from this house.’ ”

At this, Mrs. Marquand burst into tears and rushed from the room, and when she returned she asked her husband to drive her to the train station. Later that afternoon Marquand and Kaufman were standing glumly on the porch of the house where the two men—old friends—had been collaborating on a Broadway adaptation of Marquand’s novel
The Late George Apley
. Kaufman at last said to Marquand, “John, why do you associate yourself with people like the Lindberghs?” to which Marquand replied, “George, you’ve got to remember that all heroes are horses’ asses.”
⁸

While Lindbergh got his affairs in order, Anne worked on a sculpture for a class she was taking at the Detroit Institute of Arts, read Arthur Koestler, and worried about Charles going to the war. As the day drew near she consoled herself that this was the worst time, that it would be better once he had gone. Anne sat on the bed while Charles packed, sewing buttons on his raincoat, taking one from hers. That, at least, pleased her. “I seemed so lost, unable to do anything else,” she told her diary, “not gloomy, just suspended.”

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INDBERGH DEPARTED
Detroit for the South Pacific. His first stop, though, was Brooks Brothers in New York City, where he was outfitted for his military uniform and other gear. As a so-called technical consultant in combat areas Lindbergh was required to wear the uniform of a U.S. Navy officer, minus insignia of rank. At Abercrombie & Fitch he purchased a waterproof flashlight, and from Brentano’s he acquired a small copy of the New Testament, remarking in his journal that, “Since I can carry only one book, it is my choice. It would not have been a decade ago, but the more I learn and the more I read, the less competition it has.”

He withdrew $1,750 in cash and traveler’s checks
^‖
and, after learning that the Associated Press was trying to contact him, left word at the United Aircraft offices that “I could not be reached.”

On April 9 Lindbergh took off in a Corsair and flew cross-country to the West Coast, stopping at marine and navy bases for mock gunnery exercises at altitude and even a little live-fire skeet shooting on officers’ club ranges. He had no urgent timetable and his flight to the South Pacific scheduled by the navy was two weeks distant. At the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County near Los Angeles, he participated in a series of live-ammo combat gunnery exercises with a tow target and was pleased to report to his journal, “I had the highest percentage of hits of anyone in the flight, and have not fired machine guns from a plane since I was a cadet nineteen years ago,” adding that, “Planes and tactics have changed tremendously since then.”

He lay on the beach at the marine base and swam in the Pacific surf, marveling that there were “no cameras, no reporters, no publicity here.” It was so wonderful, he said, it was about the only good thing to come out of the war.

On the evening of April 24 he took turns flying an unheated navy DC-3 to Oahu, which nearly froze him because he did not have a thick fur-lined pilot’s suit. At Pearl Harbor, Charles received an invitation to lunch from the military governor and commander of the Hawaiian Department, Major General Robert C. Richardson, an old friend whom he had known at Brooks and Kelly Fields in 1925. Several other generals attended the lunch. In fact, during the next several days Lindbergh was feted by a vast array of generals, admirals, and Marine Corps flying officers—veterans of the early air battles. Despite any remaining hard feelings toward him by some on the mainland, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous and sought-after civilian in the Pacific since Betty Grable.

On April 29 he flew to Midway Island in a marine Commando, the largest two-engine plane in the war. There was a squadron of navy Corsairs stationed at Midway, which was still a little gun-shy after the narrow escape from the Japanese back in ’42. Lindbergh was immediately invited to fly on a dawn patrol with the marine aviators, looking for any signs of the enemy.

None was found and on Monday he boarded a four-engine Martin flying boat bound for Marine Corps Air Station Ewa on Oahu island. The pilot, Commander L. S. Drill, proudly informed Charles that he had been chairman of the Miami chapter of the America First Committee. Again taking turns flying the huge craft, Lindbergh couldn’t help but marvel how far aviation had advanced since he first went up in his rattletrap Jenny. “Three regular pilots, a navigator, crew, cabin aft full of passengers, baggage, even a cook and ship’s galley with stove, icebox, and tables for four.… I cannot quite get used to it,” he said.

At Ewa, Lindbergh practiced masthead—low, level—bombing and dive-bombing in the morning, and in the afternoon he went spear fishing with the commanding general. This was the first time Lindbergh had put on a glass face mask and he was amazed at the difference it made underwater. “It was like suddenly entering a new world, one which turned from enemy to friend the instant you entered it.”

On May 5, Lindbergh departed for the South Pacific war zone. The general came to see him off and gave him his face mask to take along. They made the usual refueling stops at Palmyra and Funafuti, where Charles and some of the others visited the native village. There they were treated to a dance, “a sort of tom-tom affair, with good rhythm and at times very graceful gestures,” and in the evening they attended an outdoor theater where an old gangster film was featured, which Lindbergh regarded as vulgar.

Next morning they took off for Espiritu Santo, in the New Hebrides, deeper into the combat zone, where the sides of the runways were littered with parts of wrecked planes from Japanese air raids. Charles stayed for several days testing Corsairs and not liking what he found: problems with wing tanks, manifold pressures badly off, propellers out of sync, rough-running engines, rust and corrosion everywhere, something wrong with blowers and water injection, oxygen mask leaks, lack of proper instruction books, and so forth. The squadron, in gratitude for Charles’s help and advice, presented him with a waterproof wristwatch on an engraved steel bracelet that they had made in their machine shop.

Next day he was invited to a pigeon shoot on one of the cocoa plantations, but Charles found the plants and wildlife so interesting that he “slipped off into the jungle alone and did no shooting.”

On May 19 Lindbergh caught an airplane ride to Guadalcanal with a brigadier general. Known to marines and Japanese alike as the Island of Death, Guadalcanal was the site, late in 1942, of the first major combat between American and Japanese troops. It was a savage battle from which the Americans had come out victorious, but not before 7,100 marines and soldiers had been killed and 650 U.S. aircraft were lost. In turn, the marines and soldiers killed 31,000 Japanese and shot down 800 of their planes.

Now the fighting had moved three hundred miles up the Solomon chain of islands to Bougainville and the squadrons of marine Corsairs had moved with them. After meeting with the major commanders, Lindbergh bid them adieu on May 20 and flew to Bougainville. The first thing he asked was to be taken to the front. The Japanese had occupied Bougainville in 1942 with a sixty-thousand-man army and built numerous airfields there in order to interdict Allied shipping. Marines had invaded the island the previous November but the fighting remained bitter and protracted.

U.S. Army General William H. Arnold, the island commander himself, offered to escort Lindbergh to the battle area. They drove out in the general’s jeep as he explained how the Japanese had been attacking the narrow beachhead that the Allies had established a few months earlier. There had been a full-scale assault two months before, in which seventeen hundred Japanese were killed. They walked among the trenches as the general pointed out key positions and heavy fighting spots. The ground was littered with Japanese skulls and bones and clothing, rotting on the humid earth.

The Japanese had come on two hours before daybreak, in a fierce suicide charge up the hill where they were now standing. They had captured the hill and the American emplacements, but a countercharge by U.S. troops drove them back into the jungle, leaving the hillside and the ground below carpeted with dead bodies. An unsavory smell hung over the battlefield; the Japanese had tried to bury many of the corpses in the shallow trenches and foxholes they had dug before the battle, but as the corpses bloated in the tropic heat they rose out of their graves and emitted a kind of death cloud for several miles around.

Arnold and Lindbergh walked further through the depressing detritus of battle: Japanese clothing, packs, shoes, entrenching tools, canteens—a stockinged foot protruded from the ground along the path. Many of the bodies were charred black from immolation by flamethrowers. The general said the soldiers did not dare enter the wire entanglements to bury the bodies because they were persistently mined and booby-trapped.

They drove to another spot where Arnold told Lindbergh the Japanese had penetrated the American lines for a considerable distance before being driven back by a tank attack. Lindbergh wondered if there might be Japanese snipers still at large, but the general seemed unworried. They pressed on to a forward artillery position that was in the process of firing into the jungle. Presently the general told the driver to turn back. He explained to Lindbergh that although he did not think a sniper would give away his position by firing at an ordinary vehicle, the sight of a general’s star on the jeep might be too tempting. “The same idea had been occupying my own mind for some time,” Lindbergh remarked afterward.

That evening, back in the tent that served as an officers’ mess, Lindbergh spoke with a number of pilots from the fighting Corsair squadrons. At length, he wondered aloud if he might accompany them on a patrol, and he was immediately invited to take part next morning in a joint raid on Rabaul, the main Japanese military and naval base in the South Pacific, on the neighboring island of New Britain.

L
INDBERGH ROSE AT DAYBREAK
and performed his morning ablutions from a rough board table at the side of his tent, using the steel helmet he was given for a washbasin and cold water to shave in. After breakfast he went to the pilots’ ready room, received the preflight briefing, and drew his equipment: a .45 automatic, leg knife, parachute, life raft, and jungle kit. There would be four Corsairs in his flight; Lindbergh’s radio call sign was Jones.

At 8:40 they were airborne. Rabaul lay approximately two hundred miles to the northeast, which took them less than a half hour to reach. Once over water they cleared their guns—fired off a few shots—each plane carrying sixteen hundred rounds.

Allied forces had been bombarding Rabaul regularly ever since they’d gotten within fighter-bomber range, in order to isolate the Japanese troops, air forces, naval ships, and supply and repair installations there. A year earlier, using information developed from an intercepted Japanese radio message, a squadron of American P-38s had ambushed the Japanese imperial navy commander Admiral Yamamoto as he departed the base at Rabaul for Bougainville, shooting his plane down and killing him.

From a distance, Rabaul looked peaceful and serene, Lindbergh noted, lying at the edge of a huge volcanic crater, or caldera,
^a
but its tranquillity was shortly to come to an end. Several different formations of aircraft had already converged on the city from as far away as MacArthur’s base on New Guinea—army P-38 Lightnings, navy torpedo bombers, P-39 Airacobras, P-40 Warhawks, even a Dumbo, or flying boat, to rescue downed pilots. Lindbergh’s Corsair’s mission was to fly cover for the bombers in case the Japanese sent up Zeros.
^b
If there was no opposition, then the Corsairs were to go on a strafing mission against predesignated targets.

As the torpedo bombers began their dives, black puffs of antiaircraft fire began exploding around them. The Japanese gunners on Rabaul were considered the best in the South Pacific, Lindbergh said, for the simple reason that “they have had the most practice.”

The Corsairs were circling at 10,000 feet when someone reported a “bogey,” or enemy plane below. Lindbergh armed his guns and dived down to meet it, only to find it was a friendly plane. The radio reported a life raft on the water. Fighters were circling, protecting it, and the Dumbo was directed to the scene.