The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (16 page)

“I stood on the field all morning,” Lindbergh said, “watching riggers attach wings and ‘hook up’ ailerons, flippers, and rudder; watching mechanics strain in fuel, drain the sediment bulb, tune up the engine, watching the engineer test cable tautness with his fingers and measure wing droop with his knowing eye. Behind every movement, word and detail, one felt the strength of life, the presence of death.”

The mechanic jerked the propeller and the engine sputtered to life.

“Wings begin to tremble—the roar becomes deafening—the plane lurches forward—the ground recedes—over treetops—across a ravine like a hawk—a hidden, topsy-turvy stage with height to draw its curtains.”

Lindbergh wrote these dramatic words in 1952—thirty years after he first took off in an airplane—so it is easy to conclude that the experience of flight left him almost in shock.

“Trees become bushes; barns, toys as we climb. I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal place, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.”

It was around this time that Lindbergh picked up the nickname “Slim,” apt enough, since there were only 168 pounds on his lanky frame. His flying instructor was Ira “Biff” Biffle, an ex–Army Air Corps man—querulous, salty, profane, cynical. He had apparently seen one too many crack-up or, as Lindbergh put it, “lost the love of his art,” for when Charles looked eagerly for the flying lessons he’d paid for Biffle was generally nowhere to be found.

In the meantime, Lindbergh hung around the factory, absorbing the hundreds of details necessary to care for a plane, since a pilot in those times also needed to be a mechanic, tailor, carpenter, and rigger. There was always talk of crashes at the factory, of who had died, and why. One of Biffle’s close friends had “spun in” recently, they said. “Slim” Lindbergh had received only eight hours of flying time when Biffle told him he was ready to solo.

There was a hitch, though. Ray Page refused to let him solo in one of his planes unless he posted a bond to cover the possibility of crash. At that point Lindbergh was down to his last dollars and in May he departed Lincoln Standard Aircraft to become the flunky of a barnstorming pilot named Erold Bahl. At first he was consigned to spin the prop, clean the plane, and repair canvas but soon he graduated to the exalted position of “wing walker,” to please the barnstorming crowds.

One day a parachute maker appeared in Lincoln to demonstrate his product, which he did by jumping out of a perfectly good airplane from two thousand feet in the air. Lindbergh was so impressed that he had to try it himself. He made the jump next day, a life-changing event, at least for Lindbergh. In fact, he made a “double jump,” in which halfway through the fall he collapses his first chute, free falls to give the crowd a thrill, then opens a second chute. If flying was a daredevil’s avocation, Lindbergh had just become a double daredevil and discovered that he liked it.

F
OR CIVILIAN PILOTS AT THE BEGINNING
of the 1920s there were few moneymaking opportunities aside from barnstorming, that is, doing tricks or stunts for money at county fairs or taking passengers up for five dollars a ride. Commercial airlines were still somewhere in the future, even flying the post by airmail was in the future. Lindbergh knew he needed more flying lessons before he could solo. He’d saved up money over the years to buy his own plane and, not wanting to spend it, he bought himself a silk chute and began offering wing walking and parachute jumps and mechanical help to pilots in exchange for lessons.

Flying, by then, had become an almost mystical experience for Lindbergh, a sort of holy grail, which he explained philosophically—and somewhat arrogantly: “In flying, I tasted the wine of the gods of which [the earthbound] could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”

Thus Slim entered the world of barnstorming where, it was said, “if flying was considered dangerous, wing walking and parachuting were regarded as suicidal.” Lindbergh practiced exhaustively, though, and he didn’t consider it daredevil because he’d worked out every technicality beforehand on the theory that “most accidents were caused by errors which could be avoided.”

Others, however, claimed to be unconvinced. On posters throughout the rural Midwest he was featured prominently as
DAREDEVIL LINDBERGH
. Exhilarating as it was, however, barnstorming as a daredevil, with its circus-like atmosphere, seemed to be a dead end so far as Lindbergh’s aspirations for becoming a pilot were concerned. He got some flying lessons but, as airplanes were uninsurable in those days, no one would let him use his plane to solo. Then he heard tell from his father that the army had auctioned off a number of surplus war aircraft down in Americus, Georgia, and word was out they could be bought cheap. Upon further investigation, Lindbergh discovered he could purchase a used, twin-seat Jenny with a brand-new eight-cylinder Curtiss OX-5 engine for a mere five hundred dollars.

In Americus, however, Slim was confronted with an awkward predicament—namely, how to fly the plane off the airfield. He tried taxiing around for a while to get the feel of it. Once, he accidently left the ground and sailed along about four feet above the grass before he managed to bounce down on one wheel. A knot of pilots who happened to be loafing around a hangar witnessed this embarrassing demonstration, and one of them, named Henderson, generously offered to help Lindbergh do some takeoffs and landings. Fortunately the dual controls on the Jenny were still in place, and Slim and Henderson spent the better part of an hour doing takeoffs and touchdowns. Right before sundown, Slim Lindbergh made his first solo flight, and he slept that night under the wing of his airplane, peaceful as a baby.

L
INDBERGH SPENT A WEEK
at the Americus field practicing more takeoffs and landings before he felt comfortable enough to fly off on his own. When he did, it was a long, overland hop across Alabama and into Mississippi where, at Meridian, he found his first paying passenger. Slim had landed in a farmer’s field, where he spent the night under the plane, and next day as he was preparing to leave a fat man waddled up and, claiming to have been a pilot during the war, produced a five-dollar bill if Lindbergh would take him for a ride.

It was a tough haul. First, the OX-5 developed only about 80 or 90 horsepower, which meant the plane was essentially underpowered; secondly, Lindbergh had not accounted for the weight of his passenger, said to have been some three hundred pounds. The plane barely got off the ground on an uphill takeoff but, “in true Jenny style,” escaped a crash and Slim kept his passenger in the air for twenty minutes, chasing a buzzard.

After that, Lindbergh took off for Texas. It was indeed seat-of-the-pants flying. There were numerous storms. Lindbergh had purchased a compass but failed to install it on the dashboard. The only chart he owned was an oil company map of the entire United States, which naturally contained few ground reference points. He became lost almost immediately and stayed lost until dusk, when he put down in a friendly-looking farm field. The landing went well, but as he was taxiing to a fence corner a large ditch suddenly appeared in front of him.

He hit it fairly hard. As the plane nosed in the prop splintered. Then as the landing gear rolled down the tail reared up until Lindbergh feared the plane might flip. Instead, it settled back down. Now he could add to his list of “firsts” his first crack-up.

The nearest town to the field where he’d crashed was Maben, Mississippi. He wired Americus for a new prop and made so many friends waiting for it that he had hundreds of dollars’ worth of paying customers by the time he got the plane fixed. At this point in his life Lindbergh was perfectly comfortable around admiring spectators and anxious to educate them about aviation. Puddle hopping northward through Texas and Nebraska, Slim stopped off at the old factory to show his new plane to the guys, then headed home to Minnesota.

C.A., it seemed, had decided to run for an open seat in the U.S. Senate, and so Charles offered to fly him around the state. Unfortunately, no sooner had he arrived within its boundaries than he cracked up again, landing in a swamp and splintering another propeller to matchsticks.

Despite the novelty of a candidate flying into his stump speeches, C.A.’s political career was over, and he finished a distant third. He had not been himself recently either; he had extreme reactions toward heat and cold and memory loss as well. Slim stayed in the area, barnstorming in Minnesota and Iowa, and he was earning a respectable living. One day a car drove up to the airfield with several young officers who had recently graduated from the army flight training school. They were snappy-looking in their silver wings, polished boots, and Sam Browne belts.

One of them suggested to Lindbergh that he come into the army as a military aviator. After thinking it over Slim decided it wasn’t a bad idea; he had always wanted to fly powerful, modern planes, and perhaps become a fighter pilot, and the only way he could do any of that was via the U.S. Army. That night, in his hotel room, he wrote a letter to the chief of Air Service at the War Department in Washington, D.C., and the upshot was that on March 16, 1924, he reported, as ordered, to the army pilot training school at Brooks Field, near San Antonio, Texas.

*
He later added the
h
.

†
See A. Scott Berg’s masterful biography
Lindbergh.

‡
The institution attended by the two daughters of President Barack Obama.

§
See Harrison Salisbury’s memoir
A Journey for Our Times.

C
HAPTER
5

AIR COMBAT IS NOT SPORT,
IT IS SCIENTIFIC MURDER

D
URING THE LAST MONTH OF
1916 Eddie Rickenbacker had another epiphany. He was riding east on the Santa Fe Railway’s
Super Chief
from California, headed for Wolverhampton, England, to join the Sunbeam Automotive Company as an engineering and design adviser at the behest of its president, Louis Coatalen, who had approached him in California. Actually, he had been working up to this moment for several months, so perhaps it wasn’t an epiphany after all, but it was still a very big decision. Rickenbacker was through with automobile racing.

In his private compartment on the train, Rickenbacker emptied out his coat and pants pockets of all the amulets, talismans, jujus, and other good-luck charms he’d collected over the years and laid them by the washbasin. What good had they done him, anyway, he thought? Only recently, a falling object had nearly brained him as he avoided walking under a ladder. It was superstition versus religion—and religion was the real thing from now on, he decided.
¹
He was still holding good to his abstinence pledge of no liquor and no cigarettes; he didn’t need those “lucky” crutches either.

During his decade-long racing career he had seen his friends and competitors one by one killed or horribly injured. Car racing was far and away the world’s most dangerous sport, with something of a Roman circus aura about it.

As the train rolled across the cold Southwest desert, Eddie lifted the lid of the commode and dropped his lucky charms into the bowl—rabbits’ feet, dried four-leaf clovers, a rattlesnake’s rattles, miniature Billiken dolls,
^*
buckeyes, wishbones, and bear claws; also included were several tiny, shriveled-up bats’ hearts—“the weirdest collection of charms ever carried in the clothing of one person”—and pulled the chain, watching as they were flushed out onto the bare gravel and cross ties rushing by below.

That year the American Automobile Association championship list ranked him the third best driver in the nation, an extraordinary achievement, and that year also he had netted nearly $40,000.
^†
Rickenbacker would always be connected with car racing, he felt, as a backer or even an owner, but no longer a driver.

When the train reached Indianapolis he stopped to pick up some documents at the Motor Speedway, then continued on to Washington where he applied for a passport, using officially for the first time the new spelling of his name, substituting the more anglicized
k
for the Germanic
h
.

At the time, the Germans had not yet begun unrestricted sea warfare, but U-boat commanders were known to stop ships on the ocean and check their cargo and passenger lists, so the voyage took on an edgy mood. In New York Rickenbacker boarded the ocean liner
St. Louis
, bound for Liverpool. Among the passengers aboard was William Thaw II, from the prominent Pittsburgh family, who had learned to fly at Yale. In 1914, despite poor vision, defective hearing, and a bad knee, Thaw had volunteered himself, and his plane, to fight the Germans in what became the Lafayette Escadrille, a fighter squadron in the French army consisting of mostly American pilots. Eddie and Major Thaw found that they had engines and speed in common, and Thaw suggested to Rickenbacker that because of his racing experience he would be a good candidate for the Escadrille. For the first time Eddie actually began to consider the dimensions and consequences of the war that was tearing much of the world apart but had not yet affected America. Yet he wasn’t ready to jump out of the racing kettle and into a shooting fire.