The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (48 page)

Engine problems in Nagpur forced them to take a train to Calcutta. When they arrived at their private compartment they found that British friends had arranged for a “huge block of ice to be placed in the center of the floor. ‘Without ice, the heat on these Indian trains becomes unbearable,’ the friends said. ‘This ice will keep you a little cooler. Be sure that the window stays closed.’ ”

The Lindberghs were appalled by Calcutta. “Human life here had sunk to levels we had never seen before,” Charles wrote. “Ragged hungry people milled about on filthy streets. At night we stepped around stretched-out sleeping bodies on the sidewalks close to our luxurious European-style hotel. ‘You never know the difference,’ we were told, ‘but sometimes one of them is dead.’ I could hardly believe this country had once produced a civilization of art and architecture and religion—or that conditions were even worse before the British took over,” Charles said.

They were back at Long Barn by April, and on May 12 Anne presented Charles with another baby boy—the same day as the coronation of George VI, after the abdication of Edward VIII over the scandal regarding his lady friend Mrs. Simpson. They named the boy Land, after Evangeline’s family. “A coronation baby!” Anne exclaimed in her diary.

Life in England, however, had grown tedious for Charles. Even though it had created “the greatest empire ever to exist on earth,” Lindbergh felt “a sense of heaviness of life in England that pressed like a London Fog.… England did not look to the future, but to the past,” Lindbergh said, and refused to acknowledge scientific advances such as the fact that warplanes could now fly over long distances and wreak unimaginable destruction. Too much of the conversation ran to grouse shooting, the “hunt,” the royal family, and their collections of everything under the sun and not to military preparedness and the specter of a rearmed and aggressive Germany.

In the fall of 1937 the Lindberghs were invited once more to Germany, a trip again quietly arranged by Truman Smith, the military attaché. This time, it was ostensibly to participate in the Lilienthal Aeronautical Society conference in Munich.

They arrived on October 11 in the Mohawk, and Charles spent five days visiting airfields, factories, and installations. His guide was none other than the ubiquitous Ernst Udet, erstwhile Luftwaffe air ace and self-styled
pistolero
, who was by then a major general in charge of German aircraft production. Udet let Lindbergh fly the new Messerschmitt 109 pursuit, or interceptor—perhaps the most modern plane of the day—and escorted him to top secret bases where he was allowed to examine German bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance planes.
^b

At the end of the tour, based on Lindbergh’s information, Charles and Truman Smith wrote a report for Washington titled “General Estimate” of Germany’s airpower, in which Lindbergh concluded that Germany was “once more a world power in the air,” that her air industry—though approximately three years from full maturity—was technically ahead of both France and Great Britain. Based on what Udet and others had told him, Lindbergh estimated that Germany had ten thousand aircraft (she had fewer than half that many) and that German factories were turning out twice the number of planes they in fact were.

Much has been made of this report. It has even been suggested that Lindbergh’s estimate was the direct cause of the appeasement of Hitler by Great Britain and France at the notorious Munich Conference of 1938.
^c
This author has found no such direct connection, although Lindbergh had in fact repeatedly made clear to many high-ranking British officials that in his judgment Germany was far ahead of England, France, and Russia in airpower.
^d
After Lindbergh joined the anti-interventionist America First movement, some even suggested Lindbergh’s overestimation of German air strength was a deliberate attempt to sabotage diplomacy; others called him a willing dupe of the Nazis. None of that is accurate. He was trusting of the Nazis who hosted him, that much is true. As late as 1937, the National Socialists had yet to prove themselves as duplicitous as they certainly were. There is reason to think, however, that Göring and other high-ranking Nazis lied to Lindbergh (and to Rickenbacker and to Doolittle) about the progress of their aircraft production, and that Lindbergh believed them. Any trained intelligence officer, however, would have known to discount those parts of Lindbergh’s report that he indicated came from foreign (Nazi) officials. They teach you that during the first week of intelligence school.

When, in March of 1938, Hitler invaded Austria there was concern but not alarm in England. What worried Lindbergh most was that the British seemed to disregard the danger of German aviation—acting as if the Germans were still flying the boxy little fabric-covered crates of the previous war. What all of it added up to was that Lindbergh got out. He gave up his lease on Long Barn and bought an island off the coast of France, of all places, a nation he had come to despise.

Illiec was one of hundreds of small, rocky islets scattered off the northern coast of the Brittany peninsula. Barely four acres, it lay less than a mile from a much larger island owned by Dr. Alexis Carrel and his wife. Twice daily the receding tide swept all of the water away, leaving only tidal pools and a sandy bottom filled with clams, oysters, abalone, and seaweed to walk across to the other islands or the mainland. Illiec was a starkly beautiful isolated slip of sun-burnished, storm-tossed rocks, with craggy formations spiraling forty feet above the sea and trees gnarled by the wind. It came with a three-story, slate-roofed stone manor house, “like a scaled-down castle,” Lindbergh said, with a large turret and a chapel—but no plumbing, electricity, or running water—built in the 1860s by the author of the
opéra comique Mignon
.

Lindbergh snapped it up for $16,000, even though he was fully aware of the deteriorating conditions in Europe. “Even one summer at Illiec would almost justify buying it,” he said with the air of a man who knew how to spend money.

During the spring and summer of 1938, still in England at Long Barn while the Illiec house was being made livable, the Lindberghs embarked on a whirlwind social spree, lunching with the playwright George Bernard Shaw and former prime minister David Lloyd George; dining with the Astors and such luminaries as the duke and duchess of Kent and U.S. ambassadors William C. Bullitt and Joseph Kennedy; attending formal balls with the king and queen of England—the latter, when asked for a dance with Lindbergh, was told, “I’ve never danced a day in my life,” and so the two of them (Lindbergh in white tails and satin knee breeches) sat and talked of many things: of worlds gone mad, and privacy, and what next year might bring.

It might have been a poignant time for Anne, leaving this glittering existence for life on an isolated rock in the English Channel, but actually she was unaffected. She’d discovered that for all its intense socializing English society was essentially closed. Before she left Next Day Hill a friend of the family told her, “You will find your own group wherever you are, anywhere.” “But I haven’t,” she confided to her diary, right before they left. “I haven’t found anyone in England—not one single soul. I have been here almost two and a half years and I have not made a single friend.”

It was during this time that Harold Nicolson penned in his diary an erroneous, if not treacherous, entry that would cause Lindbergh much trouble later on when the diaries were published. On May 2, at a luncheon party at Sissinghurst, the Nicolsons’ estate, Lindbergh had recited his appraisal that England would lose if she challenged Germany in the air. Nicolson, second only to Churchill in Nazi hating, had apparently tired of hearing Lindbergh’s gloomy talk about German power and his open admiration for some aspects of Nazism (which included the organization and growth of modern Germany out of the chaos that had followed World War I). Lindbergh did not find anything admirable about the Nazis’ brutal treatment of the Jews, or Nazism’s regimentation, thuggery, or its draconian dealings with nonconformers, and had said so on many occasions. Nicolson nevertheless wrote in his diary that Lindbergh “believes in the Nazi theology, all tied up with his hatred of degeneracy and his hatred of democracy as represented by the free Press and the American public.”

It was a damning statement when it was released, in 1966, because it reopened all the old sores about Lindbergh’s loyalties, a matter we shall come to presently. But by then Nicolson was in his eighties and dying, and Lindbergh was unable to engage him enough to retract the assertion. It was a gross and overblown exaggeration of Lindbergh’s actual sentiments, but Charles knew nothing about the diary entry at the time and continued to consider Nicolson a friend.

In Washington, meanwhile, the Smith-Lindbergh report on German airpower had caught the attention of Hap Arnold, commander of the Air Corps, who began to circulate it widely, though with top secret clearance, to high officials, including embassies around the world. This prompted interest by some air attachés, including the one in Moscow, in having Lindbergh visit their host countries and provide his opinion of their air capabilities. Unfortunately, the Smith-Lindbergh report apparently had little or no effect on the U.S. Congress, which actually
lowered
the Air Corps appropriation for the following year.

The notion of visiting the Soviet Union appealed to Lindbergh even after there were reports of the Stalin regime’s wholesale slaughter of its population. He accepted the invitation, but obtaining a visa took six weeks. Nevertheless, in mid-August 1938, he and Anne flew the Mohawk to Russia, where they were shown “two museums, a new subway, a ballet, an operetta, a shoe factory, an ice cream factory, a trip on a canal, a collective farm, and a Young Pioneers’ camp.” What they were not shown was any appreciable portion of the Soviet air force and its manufacturing arm—whether out of secrecy or embarrassment. Lindbergh stated afterward, “We were shown so little of the Soviet aviation industry that I could make no estimate of its production capacity.”
¹²

What he did see, however, convinced him that Soviet air capabilities were second-rate, if that. The workers were “neither highly trained nor skillful. The bombers under construction were inferior in design” to those built by the democracies. Factories were not well laid out or organized, tools were out of date, production was sloppy, and the Russians were dependent on foreign sources for machine tools—“a serious limitation.”

Likewise, at the flying school Lindbergh visited, he found the buildings “run down,” and in one barracks he was startled to see “embroidered pillows on sixty lined-up cadet bunks.” The Russians, it seemed, were training women to fly, and in fact when Lindbergh met some of the female cadets he found that they were on the whole neater and snappier than their male counterparts.

Though he could make no proper estimate of Soviet airpower, Lindbergh ventured that the government possessed several thousand planes that “were no match for the Luftwaffe in either quantity or quality.”

His impression of the Soviet Union itself was not promising—a scarcity of goods in the stores, people who seemed browbeaten, and the ice cream factory they visited was full of flies. “The system they lived under,” he concluded, “was destructive of life and incompatible with ideas of personal freedom so basic to the American mind.”

For the next several months Lindbergh became a major figure at the highest levels among the European powers attempting to avert war. On September 22, the American ambassador to Great Britain Kennedy asked him to draw up the aforementioned letter outlining German air strength, in which Lindbergh concluded: “It seems to me essential to avoid a general European war in the near future at almost any cost. I believe that a war now might easily result in the end of European civilization. I am by no means convinced that England and France could win a war against Germany at the present time, but, whether they win or lose, all of the participating countries would probably be prostrated by their efforts.”

Around the same time, William Bullitt, America’s ambassador to France, tried to embroil Lindbergh in a scheme to circumvent the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1935 by procuring U.S.-made warplanes for the French air force through Canada. Lindbergh countered with the apparently ridiculous proposition that the French might consider buying warplanes from the Germans, since they had so many of them. Bullitt thought he was joking, but Lindbergh was deadly serious. If he could convince the Germans to sell, and the French to buy airplanes, a line of prosperous trade would be opened that Germany would be loath to close. Perhaps a balance of power could be struck. For Lindbergh, these were desperate times that called for desperate measures, and he would grasp at any straw.

At the end of September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference waving a note signed by Hitler that promised “peace in our time,” which temporarily halted the digging of air raid trenches and handing out of gas masks in Hyde Park. A few days later, the Lindberghs made their third trip to Germany, officially to attend an aeronautical conference, but again there were higher stakes in play.

At a dinner in Berlin, Lindbergh sat next to Erhard Milch, then inspector general of the Luftwaffe, and used the occasion to drum up visits to all the big German aircraft production plants—Heinkel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Dornier—and, with Göring’s blessings, flew many of these types of planes, including some secret prototypes with amazing capabilities. It convinced him more than ever that the democracies would be overwhelmed in a war with Germany, and that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Prague if she wishes to do so.”

Before leaving Germany, Lindbergh attended a stag dinner at the U.S. embassy for Hermann Göring that was thrown by the new American ambassador, Hugh R. Wilson. The hope was to soften Göring up so he would loosen the restrictions on Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany. The room was sprinkled with Nazi demigods such as Milch, Udet, Dr. Willy Messerschmitt, and Dr. Ernst Heinkel, as well as the Italian ambassador and various U.S. officers and embassy officials. As usual, Göring arrived last and marched up to Lindbergh, beaming like a harvest moon. He was dressed in a hideous sky-blue uniform of his own design and carrying a small velveteen red box, which he handed to Lindbergh with a short disquisition in German. Lindbergh did not understand German, but when he opened the box he found that it contained the Order of the German Eagle, one of the most prestigious decorations of the German government—“by order of der Führer,” Göring said proudly. The accompanying document stated that the award was for Lindbergh’s advancement of the field of aviation and for the 1927 New York to Paris flight.