The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (67 page)

At length MacDonald asked, “What did you say your name was, and what phases of the operation are you particularly interested in?” Lindbergh restated his name and said he wanted to compare the fighting characteristics of the P-38 with single-engine fighters.

“Are you a pilot?” MacDonald inquired, having seen no wings on Lindbergh’s uniform.

“Yes” was the reply. MacDonald returned to his game, and then—as though a lightbulb suddenly appeared above his head—he reflexively cringed and spun around for a closer look.

“Not
Charles
Lindbergh!” he gasped.

“That’s my name.”

B
Y CHOW TIME THAT EVENING
the two men had become well acquainted and Lindbergh was invited to be a part of a combat patrol next morning, consisting of four planes: Colonel MacDonald’s and those of Major Meryl M. Smith and Major Thomas B. McGuire (the second leading American ace of World War II, with thirty-eight victories). After Lindbergh had left to retrieve his baggage the deputy group commander exclaimed, “My God! He shouldn’t go on a combat mission! When did he fly the Atlantic?… Nineteen twenty-seven? [He’s] too old for this kind of stuff.” McGuire, who was all of twenty-three and would be Lindbergh’s wingman in the morning, spoke up: “I’d like to see how the old boy does.” And there the matter rested until the patrol took off the next morning for the Japanese-held bases of Jefman and Samate.

As it turned out, Lindbergh’s age was no cause for worry. They took off at 10:28 after the weather cleared and flew four hundred miles into Japanese territory to the enemy airstrips where they had hoped to catch Japanese planes in the air. No such luck, and the antiaircraft fire around the fields was so intense and accurate (black bursts of flak appeared all around them at 9,000 feet) that they decided to go barge hunting instead. American air and sea power had reduced the Japanese to resupplying their troops at night by barges, for they dared not use their large ships anymore.

Flying up the coast Lindbergh’s patrol sighted a barge almost immediately, anchored about two hundred yards offshore and camouflaged with branches and leaves. The enemy had cleverly placed its barges in coves close to towering cliffs so that Allied pilots would have to either fire while banking or do a chandelle—a climbing 180-degree turn—and “any error in judgment would leave you crashed on a mountain,” Lindbergh observed.

It was risky and dangerous business, but they destroyed the barge and moved to the next cove, where there were two more barges, one of them much larger than the others. Lindbergh made an accurate hit with both his .50-caliber guns and his 20 millimeter cannon, and the thing burst into flame as its fuel tanks exploded. They continued on, destroying more enemy barges and occasionally being shot at by antiaircraft guns in what Colonel MacDonald had described as an “anti-boredom mission,” until their fuel ran low and they returned to base six hours and twenty minutes after they had departed. That night in the operations shack, “Lindbergh was no longer a visitor,” Colonel MacDonald said. “He was a fighter pilot and he talked like one.” Lindbergh further surprised the 475th veterans by revealing that he had flown fifteen combat missions with the marines during the Solomon Islands campaign. “He wasn’t the novice we had thought him to be,” MacDonald wrote later.”
¹⁰

Next morning, June 28, there was no mission, so Lindbergh decided to take a walk in the woods. No one wanted to go with him, and he was strongly advised, “You’d better take a .45,” as there were still Japanese stragglers roaming the jungle. Sometimes, they even came sneaking into the American encampments intending to steal food. On the upside, word was that the jungle had long since rusted their guns, so they were not as dangerous.

Lindbergh took his pistol, canteen, compass, and a chocolate bar and marched off down one of the trails that led into the camp. Soon he was swallowed up by the triple-canopy equatorial undergrowth—lush, steaming, dim, green, and alive with a riot of magnificently colored birds squawking in the treetops. After about half a mile he came upon the ruins of an ancient Dutch mill beside a bubbling jungle stream that pooled into clear water shallows. He followed the trail for nearly two more miles and finally found a large rock to sit on where he munched his candy bar and ruminated over troublesome sights and conversations he had encountered ever since he’d arrived in the South Pacific.

He lamented the way American troops treated the bodies of dead Japanese, such as sticking their severed heads on posts, as he had witnessed in the Solomons, and the cavalier attitude by the average foot soldier toward mistreating or killing Japanese prisoners of war. A marine general, no less, had approvingly told the story of two old jungle hands slitting the throat of a prisoner after offering him a cigarette, merely to impress a noncombat sergeant. Such savagery repelled Lindbergh, who felt there was something racial about it. On the other hand, he was continuously told by experienced troops that “they do the same thing to us.” He was appalled when American pilots discussed machine-gunning Japanese pilots dangling in parachutes after bailing out of their planes, but the same rationale applied: “They do it to us.”

It was not Lindbergh’s idea of war. Perhaps he was naive, or perhaps a lot of the stories he’d heard were merely soldiers’ billingsgate. Whatever it was, he had not heard, or seen, the last of it. “They have no respect for death,” he wrote of the troops, “the courage of the enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life. They think nothing of robbing the body of a dead Jap and call him a ‘son-of-a-bitch’ while they do so. I do not see how we can claim we represent a civilized state if we killed them with torture.”

Before he left the jungle, Lindbergh found time to stop and strip naked and swim for half an hour in one of the clear pools; it made him feel cleaner.

The 475th’s next mission was to bomb the airstrip on a Japanese-held island, but they turned out to be poor marksmen. A flight of twin-engine Douglas A-20 medium bombers were dropping their loads and causing havoc on the enemy runways when the 475th arrived on the scene. When it became Lindbergh’s turn—he was the only one among them with any recent dive-bombing experience—he “rolled off the edge of a squall,” came in steady and level, then dove, releasing the bomb at 2,500 feet, and then he pulled out with a big blast on the runway behind him. But most of the others’ bombs landed in the jungle or the ocean and they returned to Hollandia amid much grumbling and dissatisfaction, mostly arguing along the lines that the P-38 was designed as a fighter, not a bomber. However, the P-38s would be “hauling freight,” as the men derisively called bombing, for much of the rest of the war.
¹¹

Next day a report came in that thirteen bogies had flown out of the Japanese base at Jefman Island and the 475th went up to intercept, with Lindbergh now leading one of the sections. They flew at treetop level in case the Japanese had radar (by 1944 the Japanese had developed a rough version of the Allied radar) but saw no Japanese planes in the air or on the ground, and no barges to shoot up. All they had to show for their effort were several holes shot in the plane of Lindbergh’s wingman and a plane from another squadron was missing. The only bright aspect was revealed when Lindbergh returned from the nearly seven-hour adventure with 210 gallons of fuel remaining in his tanks, while everyone else was near empty.

All the while he had been flying missions in the P-38s, Lindbergh had been fiddling with ways to get improved fuel consumption. By a combination of adjusting the throttle, the fuel mixture, and the manifold pressure and lowering the revolutions per minute, Lindbergh had managed to increase the plane’s range by an average of nearly three hundred miles—a tremendous improvement.

Some of the crew chiefs took notice of this and soon, at the behest of Colonel MacDonald, Lindbergh was giving lectures to the assembled squadrons of the 475th on how to manage fuel. By raising manifold pressure and lowering rpms, the pilot could save up to one-third of his usual fuel consumption, which broadened the effective range of the P-38 up to eight hundred miles, Lindbergh told them.

Many of the younger pilots were skeptical, complaining that holding manifold pressure that high would foul their spark plugs and scorch their cylinders. But Lindbergh stood his ground: “These are military engines, built to take punishments, so punish them.” He added that “you must make your own decisions. You are the captains of your ships.” In the coming days, pilots and mechanics came over to Lindbergh’s P-38 after he had finished a mission to inspect what they were sure would be damage and fouling, but to their amazement his engine was perfectly normal. Lindbergh’s advice eventually worked its way in to all three squadrons of the Satan’s Angels group, and men who previously were limited to six-hour missions were now soaring over enemy territory for eight to ten hours, far in advance of anything the Japanese expected.
¹²

Charles Lindbergh had all but become a full-fledged member of the 475th Fighter Group. “Lindbergh was indefatigable,” said Colonel MacDonald. “He flew more missions than was normally expected of a combat pilot. He dive-bombed positions, sank barges, and patrolled our landing forces on Noemfoor Island. He was shot at by almost every antiaircraft gun the Nips had in western New Guinea.”
¹³

The camaraderie among the men of fighter-plane or pursuit squadrons had been famous ever since their appearance in the First World War. It was most especially so in the 475th, stuck as it was between the edge of a hostile jungle and the endless sea. There was no Paris, nor the diversions of Paris, to turn to for leave. Lindbergh was a natural leader, and far from being merely the “old boy” that McGuire had initially taken him for, Lindbergh was soon looked up to by the youthful pilots for guidance and, occasionally, consolation. Because of their age they might have been a bit faster on the stick or the trigger, but Lindbergh had many thousands of flying hours to their hundreds, and even the aces soon came to regard his aeronautical engineering wizardry with a respect bordering on awe. They were flying with Charles A. Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, they told each other. That he had come to their squadron was a gift from Providence. Then it all seemed to unravel.

The trouble began when Colonel Robert L. Morrissey, Lindbergh’s contact at U.S. Army Air Forces headquarters, South West Pacific, told him that a rumor had come in from the Australian army that Lindbergh was flying combat in New Guinea, and if that was true “there should be no more of it.” Pressed for more information, Morrissey had none. To Lindbergh, it “look[ed] like politics.” Had Roosevelt or someone in his cabinet found out?

Next morning he took off in a P-38 for headquarters at Nadzab to see the commanding general. Once there, the situation began to brighten. It seemed that Lindbergh’s orders had been misplaced and it was merely a technical snag. While he was waiting for clarification, Lindbergh used the opportunity to visit with his longtime friend Lieutenant Colonel Archie Roosevelt, one of TR’s sons, who was recuperating from a shrapnel wound suffered during the invasion of Biak Island two months earlier. The two old America Firsters got a laugh, he said, as they compared the combat records of “those of us who opposed getting into it,” Lindbergh said, “[which] are far better than those who demanded intervention.”

After dinner and an early turn-in, Lindbergh prepared to rejoin his comrades in the 475th in the morning. Instead, he was awakened at midnight by an army colonel with a message that had just arrived from Brisbane requesting him to come immediately to Allied headquarters. It was signed, simply, “MacArthur.”

L
INDBERGH TOOK OFF FOR
B
RISBANE
at the crack of dawn next day. First he visited General Kenney, who was friendly but firm. Apparently the problem arose when rumors had filtered back to headquarters that Lindbergh “had somehow managed to get into the forward areas in New Guinea without their knowing about it” (a serious offense in itself) but, worse, that Lindbergh “was flying combat missions with the army squadrons,” which violated every regulation in the book.

If the Japanese caught him, Kenney fulminated, then Lindbergh, as a civilian in combat, “would have [his] head chopped off immediately.” Kenney then began to carp about the navy giving Lindbergh orders to come into the theater without going through MacArthur’s headquarters. Lindbergh responded that he had turned his orders over to the proper authorities when he arrived, and “had been under the impression that all formalities had been satisfactorily met.” Further, he told General Kenney that the last thing he wanted to do was cause trouble.

Kenney was “very decent” about it, Lindbergh said, and told him he would cut orders so that he could remain in New Guinea but asked him to refrain from any more combat flying. Lindbergh replied that he didn’t want to go back to the front and just sit around, that the best way for him to properly evaluate the problems associated with the P-38 would be to test the plane under combat conditions, and that his recommendations might save lives. Wasn’t there some way around the regulations?

Suddenly Kenney “became thoughtful and his eyes twinkled,” Lindbergh said, and “the ice was broken.” Kenney told Lindbergh he would put him on observer status, which allowed flying but no shooting, adding with a wink that “no one back in the States will know whether you use your guns or not.”

Kenney picked up the phone and raised General Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff. He explained the situation and recommended letting Lindbergh continue his assessment of the army’s fighter aircraft at the front. Sutherland’s response was to ask to see Lindbergh personally.

The chief of staff received Charles very warmly, inquiring about their mutual friend Colonel (now General) Truman Smith. At one point Lindbergh mentioned what he was doing vis-à-vis fuel conservation and the fighter planes, and the crusty chief of staff not only perked up but immediately suggested they go in to see General MacArthur, whom Lindbergh had once met when he was the army’s chief of staff in the 1930s.