The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (72 page)

In the following weeks Rickenbacker visited the various Russian combat fronts, including the Kursk front, where he was present when the Germans launched their third unsuccessful attack with thousands of tanks. Though the battle was five miles away it sounded like the end of the world. The ground was shaking violently, the entire sky was lit up, and the guns increased to a continuous roar. Rickenbacker was thoroughly impressed by the fortitude and sense of confidence of the Soviet army commanders and their determination not only to defend Russian territory but to “tear [the German army] to shreds.” In his report to Stimson Rickenbacker emphasized that nothing he had seen indicated that the Russians would cave in and sign a separate peace with Germany as they had in 1917 during the First World War.

Back in Moscow, Eddie was given a Lend-Lease C-47, a personal pilot and interpreter, and an escort of five Yak fighters. When he protested to the Russian air force general that he didn’t think a fighter escort was necessary, the answer was, “If something should happen to you, what do you think would happen to me?” Eddie had the kind of personality, backed up by his well-known flying and racing record, that made people want to take him into their confidence. This, coupled with the copious amounts of vodka that the Soviet officers consumed, made for interesting and enlightening conversations. When Eddie once asked a group of high-ranking Russian officers why they were being so frank in discussing with him what surely must have been secret technical details, he was told, “There are two kinds of foreigners we entertain. One kind is those we must. The other is those we like.”

In the meantime, Rickenbacker learned something about Russian communism, including, to his surprise, that work was performed on “the incentive plan”—the higher the quality and quantity of the product, the more pay the worker received, or other emoluments such as better food and housing. “What kind of Communism is
that?
” Rickenbacker demanded. It sounded more like capitalism to him. Also he learned that only those who worked received ration cards and housing. People who, for one reason or another, were unable to perform either begged or starved.

By mid-July Rickenbacker departed after having spent nearly two months in the Soviet Union. Stopping briefly in London, he stayed, as always, at the Savoy, where Winston Churchill sent a car to bring him to Chequers, Churchill’s country estate, for a briefing. Afterward Eddie returned to the United States by the circle route that Lindbergh had pioneered in 1927, arriving over the Long Island Sound. Below him he noted the hundreds of sailboats and thousands of beachgoers enjoying a Saturday afternoon, while halfway around the world millions of Russians were fighting for their lives.

Initially, the visit to Russia softened Rickenbacker’s harsh opinion of communism, and he published a well-received book about his experiences, with the somewhat grandiose title
World Mission
. In it, he theorized that when the war ended Russia, China, and the United States would emerge as world leaders, while the British and French empires crumbled. Eddie was impressed by the Russian people and considered them friendly to the United States. He had not met Stalin, but he did meet his chief deputy Vyacheslav Molotov (of “cocktail” fame), but in the end he had badly misjudged the intentions of the Soviet regime. Likewise, his experience in China had discounted the rise and takeover of Maoist communism. He said that the Russians had shed the old Bolshevik version of Marxism, and they were no longer concerned with taking over other nations and might even emerge from the war as “the greatest democracy in the world.” None of this occurred, of course, but at the time his views were reassuring.
^‡

In 1946 Eddie’s mother, Elizabeth, died in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-three. That same year his friend Damon Runyon passed away from throat cancer. Eddie had promised to scatter his ashes by plane over lower Manhattan, a pledge he kept even though it was against the law.

In the meantime, Rickenbacker returned to his Eastern Air Lines offices in Rockefeller Center and all of the critical decisions that needed making—purchasing of new planes, training of pilots, new air routes, maintenance, dealing with government regulation, passenger comfort, safety, and the like.
^§

Commercial airline safety after World War II remained questionable at best. The war had advanced aviation considerably, but there were still terrible issues with the large passenger planes. Wings fell off at an alarming rate, there were midair collisions, crashes on takeoffs and landings, bodies falling from the sky, all gruesomely recorded by photographers and splattered across the pages of newspapers and magazines. The science of metal fatigue had not yet overtaken the forces of thousands of horsepower, pressurized cabins, and the strain of flying at hundreds of miles per hour.

Eddie was justly proud, however, that Eastern was the only airline that had been maintained at a healthy profit and without government subsidy throughout the war and on into the decade of the 1950s.
Time
magazine featured Eddie on its cover in 1950 as a “captain of industry,” and like Doolittle he began to gather all sorts of honors and salutations from everything from American Legion branches to Rotary Clubs. He hobnobbed with other captains of industry, as well as movie stars, politicians, and sports figures, and he had his own table at New York’s 21 Club.

He and Adelaide had grown somewhat apart, mainly because Eddie was constantly traveling. As their boys, David and Bill, moved out, married, and began families of their own, Eddie and Adelaide began an almost nomadic existence, living in hotel apartments all over New York’s Upper East Side. At times they occupied suites at the Carlyle, Park Lane, Stanhope, Dorset, Regency, and the Waldorf Astoria. Eddie also bought a 2,700-acre ranch in Texas, complete with an imposing hacienda, but after eight years he donated the entire spread to the Boy Scouts because he said he wasn’t using it enough.
⁴

In 1959, at the age of seventy, and with Eastern still showing considerable profits, Eddie stepped down as president, though he remained chairman of the board of directors. Thus began a period of the airline’s decline, as it slipped into unprofitability because of union strikes, inflation, rising labor costs, and increased competition and regulations from the Civil Aeronautics Board. Physically, Eddie’s health was remarkable (during the New York City blackout of 1965 he walked up twenty-one flights of stairs to his apartment at the Regency on Park Avenue), considering that for much of his life he smoked several packs of cigarettes a day and drank copious amounts of bourbon.
^‖
His friends were now dying away at an alarming rate and one day, without even a vow, he simply stopped drinking and smoking because “it no longer did anything for him.”
⁵

Neither did New York, so he moved to Florida. He and Adelaide had for some time maintained a large home in Coral Gables but sold it for a private villa in the old Key Biscayne Hotel, which was located on the ocean just down the Rickenbacker Causeway from Coral Gables. It was a little island paradise with a golf course, pool, broad lawns, and palm trees swaying in the ocean breezes. In October 1972, only weeks after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary, Eddie suffered a major stroke, which required a dangerous operation. He survived it, however, as well as kidney damage, but he had lost the ability to talk. This latter he quickly regained with the aid of a speech therapist at a nursing home.

The following summer he told Adelaide he wanted to go to Switzerland and see where his parents had been born. She agreed to go, too, because there was also hope Swiss doctors could find some relief for her fading eyesight. In Zurich, before they could get into the countryside, Eddie suffered a period of irregular breathing. The doctors diagnosed pneumonia. Three days later he was dead. At eighty-two he had used up the lives of a dozen cats but couldn’t escape what he always referred to as “the old man with the knife on the stick.”

His body was cremated and even though as a Medal of Honor recipient he could have been buried at Arlington he had chosen to be laid to rest in Columbus, Ohio, beside his parents. General Jimmy Doolittle gave the eulogy at the funeral service, praising Eddie for his “courage, humanity, patriotism, and integrity.”

“I have known him for over half a century,” Doolittle said, “and I cannot conceive of his ‘warping a fact,’ ” adding that “he believed he was his brother’s keeper.”

After the interment, four sleek jet fighters from the 94th Aero came out of the clouds, and as they reached the cemetery the lead ship zoomed straight up and out of sight in the missing leader formation. At the reception afterward, family and friends remarked on it, agreeing, “Captain Eddie would have liked that.”

T
HROUGHOUT THE FINAL YEAR
of the war Lindbergh continued working with United Aircraft as a test pilot. He likewise retained his status as a military technician, and less than two weeks after Germany surrendered in May of 1945 he was once more pressed into duty in concert with the U.S. Navy to study German advances in rocketry and jet propulsion. On May 17 he arrived in Mannheim, which had been wrecked so badly by Allied bombing that it reminded Lindbergh of a Dalí painting.

For security’s sake he was dressed like a GI, complete with boots and overseas cap, and for protection he carried a .38 automatic in a shoulder holster.
^a
In Munich he found more of the same, so that “you felt it would take a century to rebuild and reorganize.” Everywhere, there were hungry or starving Germans—men, women, and children—but Allied regulations forbade “fraternization,” which included handing out food, cigarettes, or candy. Lindbergh thought that was not only cruel but stupid and frequently broke the rules.

In a military jeep Lindbergh visited Berghof, in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The house had been bombed to rubble, the kitchen floor blanketed with shards of broken china, and there was the distinctly unpleasant odor of dead bodies. He had dinner with officers of the occupying U.S. Army at one of Göring’s houses on a lake.
^b
He even drank some of Göring’s Rhine wine, which he found had “an exceptionally fine flavor.”

He located the redoubtable professor Willy Messerschmitt, designer of the famous German Messerschmitt warplanes, living in a hovel. Messerschmitt had developed the world’s first jet engine, and the appearance of German jet fighters in combat late in the war had seriously alarmed the Allies because of their speed and agility. Both Doolittle and Rickenbacker, in fact, had gone into great detail on them in their reports. Messerschmitt told Lindbergh that the Me 262 twin-engine jet had been ready for production in 1938 but Hitler wasn’t interested. He prophesied that in the future travel time for passenger jets between Europe and the United States would be one to two hours. Lindbergh asked if Messerschmitt was interested in working in America. He was.

Likewise, the head of German jet and rocket development, Dr. Helmut Schelp, was living in a nondescript single-story house near Munich, surrounded by an American rifle platoon bristling with automatic weapons. A team of Russians, it seemed, had moved in next door to Schelp and it was feared they intended to kidnap him into their territory, as they had been doing with other top German scientists. Lindbergh tried to persuade Schelp to come to America also, but he was frightened because his wife and child were in Dresden, which was within the Russian zone.

Lindbergh located a BMW factory that had been manufacturing jet engines and arranged for a number of them to be shipped to the United States. While he was there a man came up and said that as the Allied armies neared he had been given the plans and drawings for numerous jet engines and told to destroy them. Instead he had buried them in the woods. This man was put in Lindbergh’s jeep and driven to the forest where they soon dug up a treasure trove of secret German engine plans.

Lindbergh drove through the Harz Mountains, notorious for harboring former SS snipers, to Nordhausen where the Germans made the V-2 rockets that had so traumatized London. In the process he stumbled on a Nazi death camp known as Dora. There he saw the furnaces and a vast pit of ashes and charred human bones. One of the former inmates told him they killed “twenty-five thousand in a year and a half.” A rotting body of a man, left lying on a stretcher beside the ovens by Germans fleeing the Russian onslaught, testified to the gravity of the inmate’s claim.

During his stay in Germany, which was before the Russians could occupy all of the German territory to which they were entitled under the surrender agreement, Lindbergh helped arrange for dozens of German rocket and jet propulsion scientists and their families to evacuate to the American side and later to the United States, where they brought their expertise in the fields of jet passenger travel, ballistic missiles, and, eventually, the moon rocket. Wherever the Soviets had consolidated their occupation, they machine-gunned anyone trying to cross into American territory. The riverbanks on the Russia side were littered with bodies, including that of a little girl, age about seven, according to the U.S. Navy commander in charge of the occupation.
⁶

For years after the war Charles was haunted by the death and destruction he had seen, the dead, mutilated corpses of Japanese soldiers, the rubble of so many historic German cities, the Nazi concentration camp with its grisly furnaces and pit of bones. He regularly prayed for the soul of the Zero pilot he had killed. At Nordhausen in the enormous whitewashed catacombs that the Germans had carved into the Harz, he had seen the V-2 rockets, nearly five stories tall, that had been launched at England by the thousands with enough explosives to shatter a city block. “Who would imagine finding this demon of sheer space hiding in a mountain like a giant grub?” he asked afterward, reflecting that Nazism had been “a strange mixture of blindness and vision, patriotism and hatred, ignorance and knowledge.”