The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight
ALSO BY WINSTON GROOM
Nonfiction
Conversations with the Enemy, (1982, with Duncan Spencer)
Shrouds of Glory (1995)
The Crimson Tide (2002)
A Storm in Flanders (2002)
1942 (2004)
Patriotic Fire (2006)
Vicksburg, 1863 (2009)
Kearny’s March (2011)
Shiloh, 1862 (2012)
Fiction
Better Times Than These (1978)
As Summers Die (1980)
Only (1984)
Forrest Gump (1986)
Gone the Sun (1988)
Gump and Co. (1995)
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl (1998)
Published by the National Geographic Society
1145 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
Copyright © 2013 Winston Groom. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or part of the contents without written permission is strictly prohibited.
E-book ISBN: 978-1-4262-1157-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Groom, Winston, 1944-
The aviators : Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the epic age of flight / Winston Groom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4262-1156-0 (hardback : alkaline paper)
1. Rickenbacker, Eddie, 1890-1973. 2. Doolittle, James Harold, 1896-1993. 3. Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus), 1902-1974. 4. Air pilots–United States–Biography. 5. Air pilots, Military–United States–Biography. 6. Heroes–United States–Biography. 7. Adventure and adventurers–United States–Biography. 8. Aeronautics–United States–History–20th century. 9. Aeronautics, Military–United States–History–20th century. 10. United States–History, Military–20th century. I. Title.
TL539.G73 2013
629.13092′273–dc23
2013015171
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Interior design: Melissa Farris
13/QGF-CML/1
v3.1
For Theron Raines (1925–2012),
author’s representative.
For thirty-five years, a mentor, confidant,
business partner, and friend: Well done.
Oh Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won.
—WALT WHITMAN (1865)
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809–1892)
We loop in the purple twilight
We spin in the silvery dawn
With a trail of smoke behind us
To show where our comrades have gone.
So stand to your glasses steady,
This world is a world full of lies.
Here’s a toast to those dead already,
And here’s to the next man to die.
—WORLD WAR I–ERA AVIATOR’S TOAST
In flying’s Hall of Fame
There’s a special breed of men,
The Old Gray Eagle
Is among the best of them.
You see him totter on his cane
As he goes walking to his plane
So old you wouldn’t think they’d let him fly.
But when he gets into the air,
And if you ever meet him there
You’ll know that he’s a master of the sky.
His snowy hair is so much whiter
Than all the rest of them,
The Old Gray Eagle
Among the best of men.
—COMBAT PILOT’S DRINKING SONG
(SUNG TO THE TUNE OF “THE OLD LAMPLIGHTER”)
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Image Gallery
Map of Pacific Theater in World War II
ONE: These Three Men
TWO: The King of Dirt
THREE: The Man with the Outside Loop
FOUR: Can Those Be Stars?
FIVE: Air Combat Is Not Sport, It Is Scientific Murder
SIX: New York to Paris
SEVEN: Man’s Greatest Enemy in the Air
EIGHT: I Was Saved for Some Good Purpose
NINE: An Inspiration in a Grubby World
TEN: His Halo Turned into a Noose
ELEVEN: The Raid
TWELVE: We Were Slowly Rotting Away
THIRTEEN: The Lone Eagle Goes to War
FOURTEEN: Masters of the Sky
Notes
Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Illustrations Credits
Eddie Rickenbacker, known as “Captain Eddie,” 1918, stands beside his plane emblazoned with the Hat in the Ring squadron emblem.
Rickenbacker ca. 1903, approximately the time he quit school to help support his family.
Illustration Credit 1.1
The Rickenbacker home, built by Eddie’s father on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio.
Illustration Credit 1.2
Eddie Rickenbacker ca. 1915. By age twenty-one he was one of the top race car drivers in the United States.
Illustration Credit 1.3
Eddie and his future wife, Adelaide, in 1922.
Illustration Credit 1.4
In 1938 Rickenbacker bought Eastern Air Lines, which flew the innovative DC-3 and the Lockheed Electra pictured here.
Illustration Credit 1.5
Following a 1941 plane crash Rickenbacker was initially given up for dead.
Illustration Credit 1.6
Jimmy Doolittle as a young boy.
Illustration Credit 1.7
Jimmy and Joe Doolittle in 1918, shortly after their marriage.
Illustratio
n Credit 1.8
Doolittle beside the Consolidated NY-2 he used for his famous “blind flying” experiment in 1929.
Illustration Credit 1.9
Doolittle flew the stubby Gee Bee to win the Thompson Trophy in 1932.
Illustration Credit 1.10
Jimmy and Joe Doolittle pose with the Vultee aircraft in which Doolittle set a transcontinental record in 1935.
Illustration Credit 1.11
Charles Augustus Lindbergh with his father, a U.S. congressman.
Illustration Credit 1.12
Charles at age six with his mother, Evangeline, ca. 1908.
Illustration Credit 1.13
“Slim” Lindbergh in his early flying days, ca. 1925.
Illustration Credit 1.14
Second Lieutenant Lindbergh graduated top of his class at the U.S. Army’s flying school.
Illustration Credit 1.15
In England crowds mobbed the Spirit of St. Louis following Lindbergh’s historic 1927 New York to Paris flight.
Illustration Credit 1.16
The Spirit of St. Louis soars past the Eiffel Tower.
Illustration Credit 1.17
Lindbergh receives a warm welcome home with a Wall Street ticker tape parade.
Illustration Credit 1.18
Charles and Anne, whom Lindbergh married in 1929, became famous as a flying team with around-the-world aerial explorations.
Illustration Credit 1.19
One-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. at Highfields, the Lindbergh estate.
Illustration Credit 1.20
Accused kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann is led into court, January 1935.
Illustration Credit 1.21
A B-25 bomber takes off from the deck of the USS Hornet, April 18, 1942.
Illustration Credit 1.22
News of the Doolittle raid made front-page headlines around the world.
Illustration Credit 1.23
Doolittle and some of his raiders and their Chinese friends. All sixteen planes either crash-landed or were abandoned by bail out.
Illustration Credit 1.24
A forlorn Doolittle beside the wreckage of his B-25. He was convinced he would be court-martialed for losing all the planes.
Illustration Credit 1.25
President Franklin D. Roosevelt decorates Doolittle with the Medal of Honor, with Joe, U. S. Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold, and Chief of Staff George C. Marshall looking on.
Illustration Credit 1.26
Now at the Smithsonian, Joe Doolittle’s tablecloth features the names of hundreds of celebrities.
Illustration Credit 1.27
President Ronald Reagan and Senator Barry Goldwater pin the fourth star of a full general on Doolittle in 1985.
Illustration Credit 1.28
Rickenbacker shortly after his rescue following twenty-four days lost in the South Pacific in 1942.
Illustration Credit 1.29
Rickenbacker and the crew were confined to small life rafts, virtually lying atop one another.
Illustration Credit 1.30
In 1943 Rickenbacker wrote a best-selling book about the experience. This pamphlet, based on a speech Rickenbacker gave, also described the ordeal.
Illustration Credit 1.31
After two weeks’ recuperation, Rickenbacker completed his secret mission in the South Pacific and continued to support the war effort.
Illustration Credit 1.32
After the war, Rickenbacker resumed his duties with Eastern Air Lines.
Illustration Credit 1.33
Lindbergh is escorted through a South Sea base on an inspection tour for an American plane manufacturer in 1944.
Illustration Credit 1.34
Lindbergh used himself as a guinea pig to test the effects of altitude on pilots.
Illustration Credit 1.35
In 1944 Lindbergh, pictured here with fighter pilots in Emirau Island, talked his way into battle in the South Pacific as an “aviation technician.”
Illustration Credit 1.36
Lindbergh and the Apollo 8 astronauts sign their autographs to a commemorative document that will hang in the White House Treaty Room as President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey look on, 1968.
Illustration Credit 1.37
After the war, Lindbergh roamed the world in the service of environmental projects.
Illustration Credit 1.38
Veterans of Doolittle’s raid inspect a B-25. The raiders’ final public reunion was held in April 2013, seventy-one years after their history-making flight.
Illustration Credit 1.39
CHAPTER 1
THESE THREE MEN
IN THE MURKY, EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century, when flight was still in its infancy, Americans flocked to air shows and “flying circuses” to marvel at flying machines and ponder man’s conquest of the air. To the deafening, thrilling roar of racing engines they gaped in awe at displays of aerial dexterity: loops, rolls, dives, and zooms and the stunts of barnstorming daredevils that included wing walking, parachute jumping, and balancing acts in the sky. The pilots were dashing figures in their aviator’s caps, goggles, white silk scarves, and high polished boots, and their airplanes, barely more than wooden frames held together with glue and cotton canvas, were wonders of the modern world.
In the years immediately after the Wright brothers’ remarkable flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903, a frenzy of airplane makers cropped up, experimenting with different styles of planes: biplanes with two sets of wings, triplanes with three sets, and even quadra-planes. So-called pusher engines, with propellers located behind the wings, gave way to forward-mounted engines, and by the end of the decade contraptions had advanced from the Wrights’ measly 12 horsepower to as much as 100 horsepower.
There was, however, before World War I, little practical use for aviation beyond curiosity. Early daredevils set records for nearly every flight, often competing for trophies and prize money put forth by businessmen and civic organizations. But flying remained an exceptionally dangerous occupation. Take the case of Cal Rodgers.
Rodgers was a daredevil bon vivant with only sixty flying hours to his name. On September 17, 1911, the ex–University of Virginia football star attempted a coast-to-coast flight in quest of a $50,000 prize offered by the newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst to the first person to fly from New York to California in thirty days or less. Wearing a business suit and tie, and with a cigar clamped between his teeth, the handsome thirty-two-year-old Rodgers climbed into the bucket seat on the forward edge of the wings and took off from the infield of a horse track in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Most people thought he was mad and the line from the New York bookies said he wouldn’t make it past the Hudson River.
Backed by the scion of the Chicago Armour meatpacking house, Rodgers named his 35-horsepower, cloth-covered biplane Vin Fiz, for a grape soda manufactured by an Armour subsidiary, and plastered the name all over the wings and tail—thus becoming America’s first flying billboard. Airports did not exist in those days, and pilots landed in farmers’ fields. There were no fueling stations or navigational aids either, so flying was strictly seat of the pants.
Rodgers planned to follow railroad tracks (what pilots of the day called the “iron compass”) to California. To improve his chances, he persuaded Armour to arrange for a special three-car train to accompany the Vin Fiz, complete with a Pullman for sleeping, a dining and lounge car, and a special shop car, with two mechanics, which carried fuel and spare parts for everything. The entourage included Rodgers’s wife and mother.
After successfully flying a hundred miles on the first day, next morning Rodgers caught a wing on a tree while taking off and crashed into a chicken coop, sheering off the wing and lacerating his skull. The following day he was forced down in Binghamton, New York, trying to avoid a flock of crows. Over Elmira he was nearly killed in a lightning storm, and while he was trying to locate Akron, Ohio, strong winds blew him into a cow pasture, where he spent th
e night fending off cows that wanted to lick the glue off his plane’s fabric.
In Huntington, Indiana, he crashed into a fence, smashing both propellers, a wing, and the landing gear. After a week’s repair he flew on to Chicago, where he performed aerial stunts for inmates gathered in the yard of the Joliet penitentiary. At Kansas City, he flew southwest to avoid the Rocky Mountains, taking fourteen days and twenty-three landings—half of them unplanned—just to get out of the state of Texas. By then his thirty-day window for the prize was exhausted but he flew on anyway to prove a point.
On his arrival in Arizona, Rodgers crashed and broke a leg. After it was set in a cast he flew on over the California desert, but when Vin Fiz exploded a cylinder and sent hot steel shrapnel tearing into his arm and boiling oil spraying in his face he managed a controlled crash in a dry lake bed. Flying through the six-thousand-foot San Gorgonio Pass into coastal California the radiator sprung a leak and wires of the magneto began to unravel. He put down in a plowed field, but by now the only parts remaining from the original flying machine were the vertical rudder, the oil drip pan, and a single wing strut.
At last, on November 5, 1911, forty-nine days out of New York City, Rodgers landed Vin Fiz on a racetrack in Pasadena to the delight of a crowd of twenty thousand alerted to his arrival by the Hearst press. They hauled him from the plane, wrapped him in an American flag, and paraded him through the streets. Three days afterward he flew on to the Pacific shore where his engine failed and he crashed on the beach, breaking both legs, several ribs, and his collarbone. Five months later, in April 1912, he decided to chase a flock of seagulls over Long Beach when one got stuck in his rudder, disabling it and throwing Vin Fiz out of control. In the ensuing crash Rodgers’s neck was broken, killing him.