The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (47 page)

L
IFE, IN
L
INDBERGH
’
S WORDS
, had become “intolerable,” and he at last decided to take his family abroad until by some happy circumstance conditions would change enough in the United States to allow him and his family a measure of personal privacy.

Cloaked in deep secrecy, Lindbergh made arrangements for the family to be smuggled out of the country aboard the
American Importer
, one of the better-appointed cargo vessels owned by United States Lines, which would carry them to England and which, Lindbergh declared, “had greater regard for law and order” than other nations.

Under cover of darkness on the night of December 21, 1935, Anne, Charles, and Jon Lindbergh bade farewell to Betty Morrow and the staff at Next Day Hill and drove to Manhattan’s West Side docks where, shortly before midnight, they quietly boarded
American Importer
as its only passengers.
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After nearly ten days at sea, mostly cabinbound because of North Atlantic winter gales, they arrived on New Year’s Eve morning in Liverpool where they were aghast to find a swarm of photographers and reporters awaiting them, chomping at the gangplank to have their story and photographs.

Before he left, Lindbergh had contacted a reporter at the
New York Times
, the only newspaper he had any small measure of respect for—even after the phony first-person account of his flight to Paris—and offered to explain why he was leaving in exchange for the paper holding the story until he and the family were at sea. The reporter agreed and Lindbergh proceeded to spell out his reasons, basically, the safety of his family, including “demands for money, threats of kidnapping and murder.” He omitted, however, the fact that his angst over the unwanted intrusions of the press had an awful lot to do with it. He assured the reporter that he and his family would remain American citizens. The scoop would win the reporter and the
New York Times
a Pulitzer Prize.
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When the newspaper hit the streets the morning after the ship sailed a new national uproar commenced. Everyone was shocked and horrified that a man of Lindbergh’s stature had been driven from his own country, by his own people. A pall had been cast across the nation. The Hearst newspapers hypocritically lamented that Lindbergh’s departure was “distressing,” in light of the fact that America was filled with so many “cranks, criminals and Communists” and that it drove away “a splendid citizen like Colonel Lindbergh.” The Hearst papers had been among the worst offenders, especially its photographers.

From Liverpool, the Lindberghs went immediately to Wales where Charles and Anne’s brother-in-law Aubrey Morgan had a grand manor near Cardiff. There they stayed for several months, relaxing, acclimating to the country, and weighing their options. In late January the Lindberghs traveled to London where Charles was both astonished and delighted when he did not get mobbed in the streets. They stayed at the Ritz; Betty Morrow was now there also, consulting with Harold Nicolson on his biography of her late husband. On January 20, King George V, with whom Lindbergh had a memorable audience in 1927, had died, and Charles and Anne watched his long and elegant funeral procession from their hotel window, Big Ben chiming, the minute guns firing, a cold, gray day, and the British nation draped in mourning; he was much beloved, the king who had led England through World War I. It was a stirring sight as the casket went by, on a gun caisson drawn by horses with only a wreath and the fabulous royal crown resting on top, surrounded by the regiment of guards in their red tunics, preceded by cavalry with white ostrich plumes on their golden helmets, followed by the heads of state of many nations, afoot in mourning clothes.

That night the Lindberghs dined with Mrs. Morrow and the Nicolsons and a discussion arose about their plans. Lindbergh had been vague since their arrival; there were so many choices—Sweden, France, England. Nicolson’s mother-in-law had recently died, leaving his wife, Vita Sackville-West, a small fortune and eliminating the need for the couple to sell Long Barn, a “tumbled-down cottage” they owned in the tiny Weald of Kent, a quiet garden district about twenty-five miles southeast of London. Nicolson offered to lease it to the Lindberghs.

Long Barn was quite larger than the ordinary American definition of a cottage, and “tumbled-down” or not it was a comfortable, warm home, dating back to the 1420s. It reportedly came with its own ghost, according to Sackville-West, but it also provided a welcome safe haven. Harold Nicolson had phoned the local postmistress asking her to put out word that the Lindberghs should not be disturbed. There was, however, one ugly incident after Charles refused to bring the family out for news photographs, and photographers then “threw rocks at our dog,” apparently to bring the Lindberghs out to see what was the matter. But the dog “caught some of the stones in his bleeding mouth,” Lindbergh said, and “several of his teeth were broken.”
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In the meantime, after several stays of execution, Governor Hoffman of New Jersey at last stopped meddling in the Hauptmann case, and on the evening of April 3, 1936, the German carpenter was strapped into the electric chair at the state prison in Trenton and electrocuted. Not only did he never confess to the kidnapping but after his death a statement prepared by him was released, proclaiming his innocence, which has provided fodder for crime sleuths from that day to this. The press naturally sent inquires to Lindbergh seeking comment, but from Long Barn came only silence.

It was not as if Charles and Anne spent all their nights at Long Barn reading by the fireside. To the contrary, they had an active social life in England; they were frequent guests at the American ambassador’s dinners and became friends with Lady Astor and her set at Cliveden. They even stood for an audience—and later a dinner—with the new king, Edward VIII, and his lady friend Mrs. Wallis Simpson of Baltimore, Maryland.

In May, Lindbergh received a letter from Major Truman Smith, a U.S. Army military attaché at the American embassy in Berlin. Like all military attachés, the tall, handsome Smith was basically a spy, expected to report regularly to his superiors on the conduct of Germany’s army, including its airpower. Smith was an infantryman by training who knew his limitations in estimating something so complicated as aircraft, but he was intelligent enough to know that the Germans—against the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno—were going all out to build the most modern and destructive kinds of planes.
^‖
When Smith heard tell that Lindbergh had moved to England, he asked if Charles would be willing to come to Germany if he, Smith, could put together a tour of Nazi aircraft facilities.

That summer Charles and Anne flew to Berlin. The Germans arranged for the Lindberghs to attend the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic Games the last week in July—as the special guest of Hermann Göring, Germany’s air minister. Charles A. Lindbergh in Berlin! It was too grand a propaganda opportunity to waste. Meanwhile, it took only a few days for Lindbergh to make his preliminary assessment of German air strength, which, as it had Doolittle and Rickenbacker before him, must have sent a shiver up his spine.
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“I realized,” he said, “that Nazi Germany intended to become the greatest air power in the world.… Obviously, Germany was preparing for war on a major scale with the most modern equipment … I got the impression the Germans were looking Eastward [toward the Soviet Union],” Lindbergh said, “but it was obvious that bombing planes would not find the Maginot Line a formidable obstacle.”
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8

At the Berlin Air Club Lindbergh made a speech that was reprinted around the world—even in Germany, purportedly on the orders of Hitler—in which he called for martial restraint, particularly in the air. “Aviation, I believe,” Lindbergh told the guests, “created the most fundamental change ever made in war. It has turned defense into attack. We can no longer protect our families with an army. Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value is laid bare to bombardment.” The fact that the speech was made in Germany, and sounded somewhat like an appeal to the Germans to stop building an invincible air force, suited the Nazis fine, because even as early as 1936 it made them sound fearsome and dangerous. Nevertheless, it was a respectable speech and praised around the world except by some Jewish publications, which even then were pulling for intervention over the Nazis’ mistreatment of their fellow Jews.

Lindbergh made a point of writing his friend Harry Guggenheim, saying, “There is no need for me to tell you that I am not in accord with the Jewish situation in Germany.”
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He apparently wanted to reassure Guggenheim, who of course was Jewish, that while he did not directly condemn the Nazis in his speech he disapproved of their methods. It was, in fact, an apology to Guggenheim for not condemning them, which would have been extremely awkward for Lindbergh to have done as a guest of the Berlin Air Club in 1936.

Göring, in his usual ebullient, glad-handing way, resplendent in a white gold-braided and bemedaled uniform, had the Lindberghs to lunch at his sumptuous Berlin home with its richly decorated table “in a room lined with mirrors and many carved madonnas ‘borrowed,’ ” Lindbergh emphasized, “from German museums.”

Following lunch, the party went into some sort of large drawing room when Göring’s pet lion wandered in and jumped up on the couch, sprawling beside him. A servant followed the young beast carrying a litter box, but this proved unnecessary because the lion proceeded to urinate on the field marshal’s splendid uniform. From Anne’s diary: “Someone laughs … Göring leaps up and throws [the lion] away. All laugh. [Göring] mock-scolds the lion.” After he had retired for a change of clothing, Göring proudly began to tick off Germany’s aviation accomplishments in an attempt to show that the Nazis were invincible, as he had done with Rickenbacker. He displayed for Lindbergh photographs of the scores of new German airfields under construction; Lindbergh already knew from his recent inspections that “warplanes were being built for those fields.”

Lindbergh knew perfectly well what modern bombs could do to cities but, seeing Nazi Germany for the first time, the idea of a new and very dangerous war became real to him. The streets of Berlin were draped in the red-and-black banners of the Nazi swastika; uniforms were everywhere, on adults and children alike. The German officers that Lindbergh met were not “preparing for a game. Their discussions gave me a sense of blood and bullets, and I realized how destructive my profession of aviation had become.”

But beyond that Lindbergh found himself impressed by the robustness and organization of Germany—the ceaseless activity of its citizens and the explosive creation of new manufactories and scientific laboratories—all products of a dictatorial fascist government. In stark contrast was the lethargy of England, which had been so worn down by the last war that it merely shambled on without direction or purpose. “Germany,” Lindbergh said, “had the ambitious drive of America, but that drive was headed for war.” He was even more discouraged about France, warning, “There is [in France] an air of discouragement and neglect on every hand … such fear of military invasion, such depression, such instability.”
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Flying back to England, Lindbergh’s thoughts turned to the helplessness of cities and their citizens to planes carrying high-explosive bombs. As the coast of Great Britain appeared ahead, he contrasted the image of Napoleon standing with his great army of conquest on the shores of Normandy, wondering how he could possibly get across the English Channel, to the present fifteen minutes it would take a modern bomber to cross over.

Back in England, Lindbergh told people what he had seen and what he deduced from it, but he was usually met with stony silence; the British were war weary. A generation of their boys—more than a million of them—had been wiped out on the fields of France and Flanders. Only Churchill warned of Hitler, and no one paid him much attention. Lindbergh helped Major Truman Smith prepare his report on the German military, with special emphasis on the mighty air force the Nazis were building. Back in Washington, it was received and noted by the U.S. Army Air Corps authorities, but because of the Depression little was done in the way of rearmament.

Harold Nicolson, an ardent Nazi hater, summed up Lindbergh’s position in his diary entry for September 8, 1936; he wrote, “He has obviously been much impressed by Nazi Germany. He admires their energy, virility, spirit, organization, architecture, planning and physique. He considers that they possess the most powerful air-force in the world, with which they could do terrible damage to any other country … He admits that they are a great menace but denies that they are a menace to us … he contends the future will see a great separation between Fascism and Communism. He believes that if Britain supports the decadent French and the red Russians against Germany there will be an end to European civilization.”

Apparently Lindbergh had gone on to say that Great Britain had to take a stand—make a choice—whether to be on the side of fascism or of communism, since there was no middle way between the two. In this, Nicolson conceded. “I very much fear that he is correct in this diagnosis, and that our passions for compromise will lead us to a position of isolation, internal disunity, and eventual collapse … Never have we been faced with so appalling a problem.”

It was the unhappiest of notes to end the year on, but Lindbergh had big plans. He had a fast new low-wing monoplane built for him, a Miles Mohawk, and he intended to break it in by flying to India.

A
NNE FOUND OUT SHE WAS PREGNANT AGAIN
, but she never let a thing like that stop her from flying. In the winter of 1937 the couple took off for Calcutta via Rome where, like Rickenbacker, they watched Mussolini’s Blackshirts in action, then flew over the old world of Carthage, Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, and Jerusalem and landed in a sandstorm at an oasis in the desert near the Dead Sea. They made various stops in India where Lindbergh tried to divine the secrets of the swamis and yogis and other holy men who were said to have mystical powers.
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