The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (5 page)

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
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Illustration Credit 1.37

After the war, Lindbergh roamed the world in the service of environmental projects
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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
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Illustration Credit 1.39

C
HAPTER
1

THESE THREE MEN

I
N 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 the 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.

Some might argue that Cal Rodgers’s case was an exception but they would be wrong. Pilots were killed somewhere every day in crashes caused by mechanical or structural failure and pilot error. Airmen—and a few airwomen—were just then learning what the airplane could and could not do, and about the only way to learn it was through trial and sometimes fatal error.
^*

The successes—and failures—of these early aviators were front-page news. Pilots featured especially prominently in boys’ magazines and comics, fueling young imaginations at a time when America and the world had awakened to the awesome changes happening as automobiles replaced horses, electricity spread into homes, the new motion pictures vied with vaudeville, and the telephone came into widespread use.

But the airplanes of the early days had no flying instruments to speak of, which probably would have been superfluous anyway because so many pilots took to the air with precious few hours of training under their belts. More than one flew into a cloud, spun out the bottom, and crashed and burned without ever understanding the causes of vertigo. Nor was there weather forecasting worthy of the name. If a pilot saw a storm he tried to fly around it; if that proved impossible he found a farm field to land in—or tried to. Luckily, the relatively slow aircraft speeds of the day allowed many pilots to survive crashes.

There was no aeronautics board to investigate the causes of accidents and regulate improvements. Nevertheless, every experience of danger or crashing, or aerial uncertainty, was passed on from pilot to pilot or from mechanic to pilot. The accident rate, however, remained such that the actuarial life of an aviator was depressingly short.

In these early years three American boys would be among the many thousands who marveled at the spectacle of flight. They almost certainly would have followed the day-to-day flying travails of Cal Rodgers, as his cross-country flight was big news in most papers. They could not have known, as crowds cheered to stunts like the barrel roll or figure-eight loop, that one day crowds would roar for them, catapulting them to the highest levels of aviation proficiency in the twentieth century, to a point where they weren’t merely great pilots but visionaries, gurus, entrepreneurs, and ultimately heroes of the highest order. They would become masters of the sky and hold a place in history that was never before and may never again be equaled.

Their names were James H. Doolittle, Edward V. Rickenbacker, and Charles A. Lindbergh. In their time no one received the sort of frenzied admiration bestowed on these three men. In 1918 Rickenbacker was America’s number one World War I airman—known as the Ace of Aces; Lindbergh, a captain in the U.S. Army, electrified the world in 1927 when he flew alone nonstop across the Atlantic; Doolittle, then a lieutenant in the army, paved the way for modern airpower in 1929 by flying a plane completely “blind”—on instruments alone. In addition to their other accolades each was awarded the Medal of Honor.

This story is about those worthy feats and how these men affected America, but their stories do not end there. When World War II erupted all three were middle-aged, married with families, rich, and highly accomplished, having earned the right to rest on their laurels. The amazing thing is that instead they volunteered to put their lives on the line once more and took to the air on what would be their most dangerous missions ever.

They had vastly different personalities, these three, but strikingly similar backgrounds. Each was raised on the edge of poverty (Lindbergh’s family, the most well-off, was middle class at best). Each was estranged from his father early on and each formed a lifelong attachment to his mother. All were attracted at a young age to the notion of flight, and each in his own way became a pioneer of aeronautical science.

All three visited Hitler’s Germany during the late 1930s and warned American military authorities of the menacing buildup of German airpower. As experienced military pilots they were acutely aware of the growing danger from Nazi Germany’s air superiority. Yet their admonitions seemed to fall on deaf ears. Airpower had not been a significant factor in the First World War, and most people, including world leaders and politicians, saw no reason why it should present a threat in the escalating crisis between Germany and the Western democracies.