15
“There are occasions when incidents combine to outline basic laws
of life and nature with extraordinary clearness—incidents of birth and death, of peace and war, of beauty and hardship.”
—C.A.L.
OTHER DEBATES IN AMERICAN HISTORY WOULD LATER BE recalled with at least an appreciation for the high-mindedness of their ideas; and other members of America First would bear no stigma for having been allied with that particular cause. But America First swiftly entered the annals of public discourse tainted; and Charles Lindbergh would thenceforth be contaminated, considered by many wrong-headed at best and traitorous at worst. “Imagine,” Anne’s sister Constance would later comment on Lindbergh’s reputation, “in just fifteen years he had gone from Jesus to Judas!”
Lindbergh himself wanted little more than to spend a year or two in quiet contemplation—“thinking and reading and writing”—alone with his wife and three children. But his own sense of duty got the better of him. “Now that we are at war I want to contribute as best I can to my country’s war effort,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal on December 12, 1941. “It is vital for us to carry on this war as intelligently, as constructively, and as successfully as we can, and I want to do my part.”
America First’s National Committee called a meeting to determine the organization’s future, which included the possibility of opposing entry into the European war. Hours before the meeting was held in Chicago, that option was made moot, as Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The committee dissolved; and Lindbergh hoped to follow most of its leadership into the armed services. General Robert Wood volunteered as soon as war was declared and was accepted by the Ordnance District in Chicago; Bob Stuart had an ROTC commission and reported to Fort Sill as an artillery officer. Most of his contemporaries from the original committee at Yale also volunteered for active duty. Having surrendered his Army Air Corps commission in a most public display, Lindbergh lacked the luxury of so easy a decision.
His first inclination was to write directly to the President, explaining “that while I had opposed him in the past and had not changed my convictions, I was ready in time of war to submerge my personal viewpoint in the general welfare and unity of the country.” He demurred, however. “If I wrote to him at this time,” Lindbergh entered in his journal less than a week after Pearl Harbor, “he would probably make what use he could of my offer from a standpoint of politics and publicity and assign me to some position where I would be completely ineffective and out of the way.” Lindbergh regretted having resigned his commission; “but whenever I turn the circumstances over in my mind,” he noted, “I feel I took the right action. There was, I think, no honorable alternative.”
In late December 1941, Lindbergh decided to approach his highest-ranking military friend, General “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces. After failing to get past his aide, Major Eugene Beebe, just to schedule an appointment, Lindbergh sent a handwritten note to the General himself. He offered his services to the Air Corps, all the while understanding the “complications” created by his recent political stand.
Lindbergh received a courteous reply, appreciation for his overture but nothing more. A week later, General Arnold made public Lindbergh’s offer over the radio, which made Lindbergh hopeful. “Is it an indication that my offer will be accepted?” he asked his journal. “And if so, will it be as a civilian or as an officer?” Even The New York Times was supportive, writing on its editorial page, “There cannot be the slightest doubt that Mr. Lindbergh’s offer should be and will be accepted. It will be accepted not only as a symbol of our newfound unity and an effective means of burying the dead past; it will be accepted also because Mr. Lindbergh can be useful to his country. He is a superb air man, and this is primarily and essentially an air war. Whether he has passed the age when he can be used for active service in the field is a matter for competent authorities to decide. But there can be no question of his great knowledge of aircraft and his immense experience as a flier. Nor have we any doubt that he will serve in the line of duty with credit to himself and to his country.”
The rest of the American press was not that kindly disposed. Lindbergh attended a dinner party in New York at the home of Edwin Webster, whom he had known from America First, just days after the organization had dissolved. Although Lindbergh did not wish to make a speech, the other guests—mostly America Firsters—imposed upon him to say a few words. Lindbergh held forth for five minutes, trying to explain that the recent decision to disband was “really to the best interests of the country, and that no matter what we did or advocated or stood for, we would have been viciously and bitterly attacked if we had continued our activities after the start of the war.” He added that it was “unfortunate that the white race was divided in this war.”
As a result of Lindbergh’s offhanded comments, many newspapers reported that the America First movement was alive and well. The New York Post said that “its nucleus of native fascist, anti-Semitic and, in some cases, pro-German organizations, continue to speak and publish material close to the line of treason, if not across it.” Washington columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen wrote that Lindbergh was still blaming Britain for the war, while a radio broadcaster said that Lindbergh was still insisting that “Germany should have been appeased and tied to us as an ally against Japan and China.” The New York World-Telegram reported that Lindbergh said “it was too bad that we were divided on the question of the yellow race,” and PM ran a series of provocative quotations plucked from Lindbergh’s America First speeches under the headline: “Do You Want the Man Who Said These Things … To Have a Hand in Your Fight Against Fascism?”
The next day, Lindbergh tried to reach General Arnold but again got the runaround from Major Beebe, who advised his going directly to the Secretary of War. Beebe’s tone of voice made Lindbergh realize that the matter of his future military service had been discussed at the highest levels of U.S. government and that “everything had been arranged” for Lindbergh to have a showdown with Secretary Henry L. Stimson.
Spending the weekend in Washington, he telephoned Stimson’s office on Monday, January twelfth, and was given an appointment for that afternoon. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Lindbergh told Stimson outright that with his country at war, he hoped to find the way in which he could “make the greatest personal contribution.” He said he had been considering the possibility of working in the aviation industry, but not without first seeing if there was any way he could assist the Army Air Corps. Stimson replied in diplomatic double-talk until Lindbergh pressed him to talk turkey.
Stimson told Lindbergh outright that he was loath to put him in any position of command because of his public prewar opinions. He said he did not think anyone of such persuasion should be in a position of command in the war because he did not believe such a person “could carry on the war with sufficient aggressiveness!” And he said he doubted that Lindbergh had changed his views since.
Lindbergh replied that he felt it had been a mistake for America to enter the war; but that decision now made, he stood behind it—eager to help in whatever way he could be most effective. Stimson said he had no idea what that might be, as Lindbergh’s speeches raised a question of loyalty. He proceeded to misstate Lindbergh’s positions, saying they included his advocating an alliance with Germany and his expressing antagonism toward China—two opinions Lindbergh had never espoused.
Stimson called in his Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Robert A. Lovett, to discuss the possibilities of Lindbergh’s helping the government in a position of non-command. At their suggestion, Lindbergh met with General Arnold the next day in Lovett’s office in the Munitions Building. Arnold and Lovett said there were many ways in which Lindbergh could serve the Air Corps, but they were “not sure what the public and press reaction” would be at that time. After talking in circles for half an hour, Lindbergh said he was “not sure that the situation which worried them could be straightened out satisfactorily,” because he “was not willing to retract” what he had said in his addresses. Before leaving, Lindbergh asked Lovett whether he thought the Administration would object to his working with a commercial company. Lovett said he did not think so, and “that as far as the War Department was concerned he thought they would support such a move.” Encouragingly, Arnold told his friend, “I think you can find some way to straighten all this out.”
Lindbergh had no idea to what extent politics had been the controlling factor in his Washington meetings. He was not privy to memoranda about him that were circulating through the executive branch of the government. The same day Lindbergh volunteered for the Air Corps, for example, his old foe Harold Ickes wrote the President, “it is of the utmost importance that his offer should not be accepted.” Poring over Lindbergh’s speeches and articles had convinced him, he wrote FDR, “that he is a ruthless and conscious fascist, motivated by a hatred for you personally and a contempt for democracy in general…. His actions have been coldly calculated with a view to attaining ultimate power for himself—what he calls ‘new leadership.’ Hence it is important for him to have a military service record.” Ickes said accepting Lindbergh’s offer would be granting “this loyal friend of Hitler’s a precious opportunity on a golden platter. It would be … a tragic disservice to American democracy to give one of its bitterest and most ruthless enemies a chance to gain a military record. I ardently hope that this convinced fascist will not be given the opportunity to wear the uniform of the United States. He should be buried in merciful oblivion.” Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox felt the same. “If it were … put up to me,” he wrote the President, “I would offer Lindberg [sic] an opportunity to enlist as an air cadet, like anybody else would have to do. He has had no training as an officer and ought to earn his commission.” Roosevelt concurred with both men, especially Ickes, whom he wrote, “What you say about Lindbergh and the potential danger of the man, I agree with wholeheartedly.”
Stimson wrote the President after his meeting with Lindbergh that despite the “really valuable service” he had rendered the government when he had been assessing German air power, he had told Lindbergh that he was “unwilling to place in command of our troops as a commissioned officer any man who had such a lack of faith in our cause as he had shown in his speeches.” The next day, the Secretary disingenuously told the press that Lindbergh would be doing “research on a commercial project in which the War Department is interested.” He also announced the Air Corps’ goal of enlisting two million men in 1942. Lindbergh would not be one of them.
Searching for his first job in almost twenty years, Lindbergh proved as naïve in war as he had been in peace. “I believe my difference in outlook would make me of more value rather than less,” he wrote General Wood while he was figuring out his future. “It seems to me that the unity and strength necessary for a successful war, demand that all viewpoints be represented in Washington. However, the discussions I have had to date indicate that definite limits exist to the Administration’s desire for ‘unity’, and that those limits do not extend very far into the group of people who have disagreed with the policies of the President.” In January, he turned to what he considered his fallback—a position in the aviation industry. Having spent considerable effort over the years trying to avoid just such a situation, he found this new pursuit “rather strange,” all the harder having to “stand by and do nothing while one’s country is at war.” Only later did Lindbergh learn that his name had come up at a recent meeting between the President and several senators, and FDR had said, “I’ll clip that young man’s wings.”
Lindbergh wasted no time in contacting his friends Juan Trippe at Pan American and Guy Vaughan at Curtiss-Wright. Although Lindbergh had not drawn his retainer as an adviser from Pan Am for many years, he had never severed his connection with either the company or its management. At a meeting in the Chrysler Building in New York City on January nineteenth, Trippe enthusiastically told him there were many things he could do for the company. Vaughan responded similarly, offering Lindbergh any position he wanted, hoping he would study their prototype aircraft.
Within days of each meeting, both prospects evaporated. Trippe telephoned Lindbergh that “obstacles had been put in the way”; and in person the next day, he privately explained, “The White House was angry with him for even bringing up the subject and told him ‘they’ did not want [Lindbergh] to be connected with Pan American in any capacity.” Vaughan informed Lindbergh that the situation there was suddenly “loaded with dynamite.” Lindbergh knew that no company with a government contract could afford to take him on without getting clearance from the Administration. “I am beginning to wonder whether I will be blocked in every attempt I make to take part in this war,” Lindbergh mused in his diary.
He put out more feelers. His cousin Rear Admiral Emory Scott “Jerry” Land, Chairman of the U. S. Maritime Commission, brokered for him a fifteen-minute meeting with Colonel William A. Donovan, who was about to become Director of the Office of Strategic Services. They discussed the possibilities of Lindbergh’s studying international air transportation, but nothing more came of the meeting. At the same time, Phil Love, his friend since Kelly Field, offered to investigate the possibilities of bringing Lindbergh back into the Air Corps through its Fiftieth Wing, which Love would be commanding. Love’s superior officer dismissed the very notion.
Then another friend in high aviation circles leapt at the chance of hiring Lindbergh. Over dinner at his house in Hartford, Eugene Wilson, president of United Aircraft, outlined several projects in which he thought Lindbergh could take part, particularly a study of comparative aircraft performances. Ten days later, it came to the public’s attention that United had sold aviation equipment to Japan and Germany before the war; and Wilson now felt that it would be “inadvisable” for Lindbergh to join the company. Lindbergh agreed. “The war is going badly for us,” he noted, “and people will be looking for a scapegoat.”
Nine months earlier, Major Reuben Fleet—a pioneer airmail pilot who had organized the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation—had tried to lure Lindbergh to his company by offering him an annual salary of $100,000 and a research facility built anywhere in the southwest that Lindbergh pleased. On March 12, 1942, Lindbergh met with Fleet in New York City, hat in hand. He hoped the research and development position was still available, which he would accept only if the salary were not more than $10,000. Fleet was thrilled to present the proposition to his company’s new management board, only to have the embarrassing task, not two weeks later, of withdrawing the offer. As Fleet would later explain, they were simply unwilling to employ him for fear of reprisal from Roosevelt. With billions of dollars in defense contracts waiting to be dispensed, no manufacturing company in America could afford to offend the Administration. Except one.
Before receiving Reuben Fleet’s regrets, Lindbergh heard from Harry Bennett, director of personnel, labor relations, and plant security for Ford Motor Company. After learning of Lindbergh’s futile attempts at securing a job, Bennett reported, Henry Ford wanted to discuss the possibility of Lindbergh’s working at his bomber factory. On March twenty-third, Lindbergh boarded a seven P.M. train from Boston to Detroit.
After lunch the next day with Ford and Bennett at the Dearborn plant, they drove a few minutes to the west, where Ford had performed a minor manufacturing miracle. Four miles to the southeast of Ypsilanti, Ford owned acres of forest and farmland, through which trickled a stream called Willow Run. In early 1941, on Ford’s promise to produce one B-24 Liberator bomber—a four-engine, high-wing monoplane—per hour, the government had agreed to spend some $200,000,000 on a plant and equipment. Three square miles were cleared in three weeks; and in a year’s time, the manufactory for the B-24 was built. It included what was called “the most enormous room in the history of man”—an L-shaped structure that ran 3,200 feet before elbowing another 1,279 feet—plus almost five million square feet of hangars and 850 acres of landing field, complete with seven concrete runways. At that, the new operation at Willow Run was but one cog in the gigantic Ford wheel, which included three main plants in the Detroit area and another sixty branches spread across the country. Modifying its ability to produce cars for civilian use toward meeting the demand for engines and planes and tanks and jeeps and staff cars necessary to fight the war, Ford Motor Company adopted a twenty-four-hour/seven-day workweek.
While driving from Willow Run to the company’s River Rouge plant, Ford and Charles Sorenson, one of his production chiefs, asked Lindbergh if he would “come out to Detroit and help them with their aviation program.” Lindbergh grabbed the offer, though he advised their first clearing it with the War Department. The very suggestion that he should have to ask anyone about what he did in his own factory irritated Ford; but Lindbergh reasoned “that we would have to have much contact with them in the future and that a good start would be of great advantage.” Neither Ford nor Lindbergh feared that this job offer would be rescinded; and, after spending the night with his mother and uncle, Lindbergh returned to Willow Run to acquaint himself with designs, procurement programs, and the layout of the factory. The next day he trained to Washington, where he met with Air Secretary Lovett, who expressed his approval of Lindbergh’s plan to work for Ford.
Lindbergh proceeded to Martha’s Vineyard for a long weekend, to pack his bags, play with his children, and discuss the immediate future with his wife. She was torn between following her husband and setting up another home or remaining in Martha’s Vineyard with her three children. Having just learned that another baby was on the way, they agreed that Charles should get situated in Detroit and return for visits until he had found a proper place for all of them to live. “Another husband would assume that I would come with him to Detroit,” she wrote in her diary, “but he sees my side too clearly. He wants too much for me. He wants me to live my own life. He wants this so passionately that it angers him when he sees anything frustrating it. Household duties, cooks that can’t cook, nurses that won’t leave me alone. Friends and family obligations which take my time. Depressions which rob me of confidence. I think almost all our quarrels arise from this passionate desire of his to see me freed to fulfill what there is in me.”
Lindbergh rose at 4:30 on the morning of April 1, 1942, crossed on the 5:45 ferry and just kept driving, stopping only for gasoline and sandwiches, which he ate in the car. Twenty-eight and a half hours later, he arrived at the Dearborn Inn. After bathing, Lindbergh drove to Willow Run and spent most of the day meeting personnel and inspecting the plant—“acres upon acres of machinery and jigs and tarred wood floors and busy workmen…. a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.” That afternoon he made an hour-long test flight in a B-24C, the Liberator bomber which they would mass-produce and which Lindbergh already saw ways of improving. He spent the next day acquainting himself with the Willow Run and River Rouge plants—“studying production and procurement data, drawings of plane assembly, going through the plane itself, and in general getting to know the Ford organization and its methods.”
The government’s attempts to stifle Lindbergh’s wartime career increased his desire to prove himself a good soldier. He shifted his high-octane work ethic into an even higher gear, never allowing anybody to accuse him of goldbricking. He usually left for work before daybreak and did not return home until long after dark. He became his own harsh taskmaster, creating assignments for himself when he had exhausted those put before him.
Lindbergh could have asked Ford for almost any salary he wanted; and he did—$666.66 per month, which he would have earned as a colonel in the Air Corps. Except when work demanded, he never took advantage of his access to priority flights, generally insisting on riding the train or driving himself. Although he had not marched to the beat of anyone else’s drum since leaving the Air Mail in 1926, Lindbergh put on his best face, grateful for even this mundane opportunity to serve. After little more than a week on the job—which had already included a trip to Washington to meet with Merrill Meigs, director of the aircraft section of the War Production Board—Lindbergh told himself that “this change is probably good for me, and there are elements that I enjoy—getting to know the inside of a great industrial organization, for instance.” He kept his nose to the grindstone, avoiding eye contact with the public whenever possible. He refused newspaper interviews.
Shortly after his new job began, a false rumor circulated that Lindbergh was being hissed and booed when he walked through the aisles of the assembly line. When the University of Michigan’s student newspaper ran an editorial, “People Should Prohibit Lindbergh From Defense,” based on the fiction, Lindbergh chose to ignore it, though others wrote to the editor in his defense. Liberty ran an open letter to Lindbergh in July 1942 entitled “Have You Changed Your Mind?” challenging him to affirm that he was “publicly and wholeheartedly behind our government and the President in the struggle to win this war!” The editor in chief even sent Lindbergh a suggested outline for his reply.
Lindbergh handwrote his own response to the article, refusing to retract any of his prewar statements and, in fact, reiterating his belief that the alternative to a negotiated peace in Europe was “either a Hitler victory or a prostrate Europe and possibly a prostrate America as well.” He believed the Roosevelt administration had thus far pursued a course which had “led to a series of failures and disasters almost unparalleled in history.” Upon rereading his reply, Lindbergh chose to ignore the article, retreating to his policy of refusing to deny rumors or answer critics. He politely rejected offers from news services around the world to write similar articles; and he continued to ignore all calls upon him to return medals he had received from Germany, Japan, and other Axis nations. He sent the Missouri Historical Society a check for increased protection at the museum; but, with the rising war hysteria, he instructed the curator to do nothing that “draws unusual attention to the Collection.”
Suffering more than he expected from the end of the public’s great love affair with him, Lindbergh found himself drawn deeper into his marriage. His immediate family (and friend Jim Newton) remained his emotional spars; his wife became his mainstay. As a result of their separations, which would lengthen as the war continued, Lindbergh had never been so emotionally needy. In his hotel room, when he was not making the most of an unfulfilling job, he lived for Anne’s letters. “You have in your pen a touch of divinity that I cannot describe beyond saying that it is there,” he wrote her in April 1942. “But in your writing you take one above the ordinary levels of the earth. You show not only the best of life but something above life, something better than life. And for ordinary people you form a bridge to that something—a bridge for people who could not otherwise approach it…. In writing and in living, you are the only person I have ever known in whom lies the ability to be in contact with life and with what lies beyond it at the same time—to gain the one you have not found it necessary to turn your back on the other. By what gift or effort you have accomplished this, I do not know, but in your writing you help other people to do what you have done.”
For the first time, Lindbergh found himself articulating some of his deepest feelings. In June, he told Anne that her letters brought nothing less than “calmness and beauty and spirit to a life in which these elements are hardly known. And in bringing these elements, they carry great strength and encouragement. They create a spiritual horizon that is all too easily lost, and without which life loses more than half its values. Your letters tell me, over and over again, like the ringing of clear bells on a spring evening, that love exists and always will, that there is something to look forward to beyond this war, something far greater, infinitely more worth while.” Some of his replies ran on for more than twenty pages.
In his spare time that spring, Charles house-hunted in Detroit. Despite the scarcity of large family dwellings for rent, Lindbergh remained as choosy as possible, mindful that his wife “has already spent too much of her time fixing up the many houses we have rented in our nomadic existence…. Anne has books to write, children to take care of, a baby to bear, a move to make,” he told himself. “To refurnish a house now is just too much.”
The best he could find was a large house in the Bloomfield Hills area, north of the city and a long drive to Willow Run, but literally in the backyard of Detroit’s artistic colony, the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The house was not decorated according to either of their tastes, in golds and greens and various shades of pink, with thick carpets, satin and velvet upholstery, and faux-Impressionist paintings in gilded frames—all set amid manicured lawns and formal hedges. But it came equipped with the most modern conveniences—a sprinkler system for the garden, a water-softening system, a fancooling system, an intercommunication system, even lights on the porch that attracted insects then electrocuted them. Charles thought the house made up in convenience what it lacked in style and would allow Anne to function comfortably, especially during the absences his war work would demand. After living alone for three months on the second floor of the Dearborn Inn, he found the three wooded acres “exceptionally attractive.” He signed a one-year lease, at $300 per month.
“Very Hollywood!” Anne thought, when she saw the house for the first time in July. The “ersatz elegance” of the place depressed her at first, making her long for the severity of Illiec. But Charles told her it was “mental prostitution” even to dwell on the subject of the house, that she must settle in to these temporary quarters and proceed with life, extinguishing any negative thoughts with “mental discipline.” He stressed that they must “learn to live lightly.” To prove his point, he removed all his clothes from his bureau and put them in a suitcase he kept in the closet.
Charles was in New York on August 12, 1942—after a trip to Washington, where he had discussed with General Arnold the merits of the B-17 (a Boeing four-engine bomber) over the B-24s Ford was producing—when Anne went into labor. He rushed home to Detroit and was by her side at the Henry Ford Hospital at 5:12 the following morning, when she gave birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound boy.
It would be four months before they completed his birth certificate. In this instance it was Anne who kept stalling—not just because she was waiting for the “perfect name” to present itself, but also because it marked in her mind the end of an era. “The age of child bearing is over,” she wrote her sister Constance; “& I think I realize with some reluctance that though I have Jon, Land, Anne and (?) Mark, I shall never have Christopher, Michael and Peter; Hylla, Reeve, Ursula and Fidelity will not be my little girls.” Shortly before Christmas, they selected Scott, a name that had passed through the Land family tree for two centuries.
With the birth of the fifth Lindbergh baby came the death of a family member who had been with them longer than any of the other children. Thor, the great German shepherd Charles had bought to protect his family shortly after the body of young Charlie was found dead, had been faltering from age for weeks. In the dog’s final days, Lindbergh noticed its sole interest in life had been reduced to squiring Anne. “He struggles pitifully to get up and follow her whenever she goes by,” Lindbergh wrote in his journals; “and sometimes he is able to get to his feet and walk along behind her—dragging his rear legs stiffly over the grass—but with an expression of great joy in his eyes at being near her. When he is lying down, his eyes follow her as long as she is in sight.”
He died quietly under a hickory tree on the lawn in Bloomfield Hills and was buried in a grave Lindbergh dug. “He had no pain, and I think he died as the old should die, not lingering so long that all joy is gone from the living,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. It is among the most moving passages in all his years of diaries, more emotional than anything he ever wrote about a human being. “I think Thor found something worth while in life to the very day he died, and yet I think he was ready and willing to go. But now, for us, there is a great empty, lonely feeling in the places he used to be.” The death reduced Anne to tears. She could not think of Englewood, New York, Long Barn, Illiec, Lloyd Neck, or Martha’s Vineyard without thinking of her brave “wolf” galloping to the family’s protection. “Thor was a symbol of something,” she wrote, “—of devotion and love and family unity. A great unity of my life—the child-bearing years. His going ends a chapter.”
The Lindberghs settled into suburban life. Charles went to his office or on business trips every weekday, while his wife cared for the house and children; weekends, they visited Charles’s sixty-six-year-old mother, who had recently developed a tremor. Lindbergh would use this early symptom of Parkinson’s disease to persuade her that, after a quarter-century of teaching, she should retire. For the next few months, however, Evangeline Lindbergh would persist in commuting by bus to downtown Detroit, all the while caring for herself, her house, and her brother, who continued to tinker with new inventions.
Lindbergh made the move to Detroit complete with one unusual addition. Shortly after mentioning to Harry Bennett at Ford that he was interested in purchasing a trailer, Lindbergh was asked to the company garage in Dearborn to inspect a seven-year-old (but practically unused) trailer Henry Ford himself had bought for his Edison Institute Museum. It was a Stagecoach Model, built by the Ideal Manufacturing Company, a “huge brown elephant” on wheels, outfitted with a divan that doubled as a bed, a combination icebox unit and kitchen sink, a dining area, lavatory, draped windows, electric lamps, and a linoleum floor. Lindbergh wanted to buy it on the spot; but Ford insisted that he simply take it. He explained that he had put the trailer in his museum to “show the future of road transportation, and that since the future was ‘here,’ there was no use keeping it in the Museum any longer. He said that someday they might want to show the past of road transportation, and in that case the trailer would be worth more if it had been used.” A week later, Lindbergh attached the trailer to his car and drove it home, parking it in their back woods. The Lindberghs would use the trailer for its intended purpose on several road trips; but over the next fifteen years it would follow them wherever they moved, its primary function becoming a quiet place for Anne to write, her “room of one’s own.”
A few months later, Lindbergh sent Ford’s production chief, Charles Sorenson, a confidential letter in which he questioned his own job performance. “I came here in the hope that I might offer suggestions and advice, based on some years of experience in various fields of aviation, which would be of assistance in the Ford Company’s aeronautical activities,” Lindbergh wrote. “I find, however, that the Company’s policies and methods are so different from those I have followed in the past that until I learn to understand them better I must consider myself more a student than an adviser.” Lindbergh’s discontent stemmed from more than his inexperience playing on a large team or from his first encounters with office politics. (One day he witnessed Ford executives Bennett and Sorenson literally come to blows.) Lindbergh’s greater frustration came in seeing Ford mass-producing planes that were inferior to those they should have been producing, simply because it would be too costly to retool the factories. “I feel quite sure that Ford officers did not realize the mediocrity of the B-24 when they set up such elaborate jigs and machinery for its production,” Lindbergh would later tell a Ford Company historian. “However, even if they had shared my personal estimate of the B-24, I am not sure they would have made any change in their procedure—or that they should have. A very high production of bombers was desired at the earliest possible date …”
In an effort to spread his wings, Lindbergh suggested a relationship with Ford similar to those he had maintained in the past with Pan American and TWA. He wished to be struck from the payroll so that he might engage in “aviation developments elsewhere in the country.” While he would continue to devote much of his time to Ford—testing planes and representing the company at meetings across the country—he would allow himself to be reimbursed only for company-related expenses. He refused Ford’s offer to cover his rent while he was living in Detroit, and he came to accept Ford’s gift of the trailer only by justifying it in his mind as payment for the work he was doing at Willow Run.
In the summer of 1942, before Lindbergh could find new outlets for his energy and expertise, he got dragged into the news. William Dudley Pelley, organizer of the Fascistic Silver Shirts storm troopers, went on trial in August for sedition; and the defense subpoenaed Lindbergh to testify. Lindbergh had no idea why, as he had never had any contact with Pelley or any member of his organization. He appeared at the courthouse on August 4, 1942, where a crowd of reporters and photographers met him at the door. He said nothing to them and almost as little under oath. The defense attorneys proved to have no good reason for having summoned him; and Lindbergh could testify little more than that “the majority of the people of this country were opposed to getting into war—that is, before we were attacked.” The government chose not even to cross-examine him, and Lindbergh was off the stand within twelve minutes.
From those paying close attention to the trial, Lindbergh picked up public sympathy. Newspapers that had not supported his prewar positions rushed to his defense. The Roanoke Times, for example, editorialized: “The effort of Pelley’s counsel to drag Lindbergh into the proceedings was unfair to Lindbergh and does not seem to have helped their client in the least. We have taken the view all along that Lindbergh was a misguided and mistaken young man, but we have never had the slightest reason to doubt the patriotism or to feel that he would for one moment put any other country’s interests above that of his own country.” Even the crotchety Theodore Dreiser observed that Lindbergh was “a babe at politics & finance and gets his foot in something of a political or socio-economic trap every time he opens his mouth.” And yet, he added, “all this has nothing to do with my admiration for Lindbergh for what he is and has done. He offered his services to our Army, didn’t he? And I am not one to assume that they would have been disloyal services. Rather, I think he would have fought the enemy to the deathline—his own or its.” But alongside news of Germany bombing England and threatening Stalingrad, and first reports of the planned extermination of all Jews in Europe, the Pelley story never commanded great public attention, just enough for people to remember yet another headline linking Lindbergh to Fascists.
Lindbergh remained a bogy to the nation at large and anathema to Jews, who would instinctively recoil at the mention of his name for generations to come. During the war, to cite but one example, the John P. Marquands were staying with the George S. Kaufmans at their country house in Bucks County. One morning Anne Lindbergh called, hoping to reach her longtime friend Adelaide Marquand. When the message was delivered a few hours later, Beatrice Kaufman said to her guest, “You may call her back if you wish, but you may not do so from this house.” Mrs. Marquand, who strongly supported both Lindberghs, asked her husband to drive her to the train station, which he did.
In September 1942, President Roosevelt visited Willow Run. The company product line—from jeeps to planes—was put on display for his inspection. Lindbergh thought it best to absent himself from work that afternoon. Only days later, he set his sights on a new aspect of military aviation, which would allow him to combine his interests in aviation and medicine, taxing both his mind and body. On September 22, 1942, Lindbergh and a half-dozen colleagues from Ford flew to Rochester, Minnesota—in one of the company’s B-24 “clunkers,” which sprang a near-fatal gasoline leak along the way.
Dr. Walter M. Boothby, a Harvard-educated pioneer in aviation medicine, welcomed them. He chaired the Aeromedical Unit for Research in Aviation Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, where Lindbergh hoped to advance the practice of high-altitude test flying. With new planes reaching altitudes over forty thousand feet, aviatic warfare encountered unexplored medical problems, particularly hypoxia—inadequte oxygenation of the blood. Lindbergh was eager to examine the altitude chamber the Mayo experimental laboratories had built.
The large steel chamber had two compartments—one in which the tests were conducted, the other an air lock, which permitted entrance, exit, and observation without changing the pressure within the test chamber. Lindbergh sat right down and strapped on oxygen hoses and a mask that had microphones attached. A motor-driven vacuum pump changed the cabin pressure to simulate an altitude of forty thousand feet. The relatively small body of conflicting statistics as to the point at which “blood vapor pressure becomes dangerous and the effect of frequent and prolonged anoxia on brain tissue” made Lindbergh think that he could contribute to this increasingly important study.
For the next ten days, he became a human guinea pig. The experiments in which he partook at the aeromedical laboratory required intense physical activity and mental acuity. Before entering the chamber he had to “desaturate” for half an hour—riding an exercise bicycle or walking on a treadmill while breathing pure oxygen through a rubber face mask—to wash the nitrogen out of his body and prevent the formation of nitrogen bubbles under decreased pressure. Inside the chamber, measuring temperature changes against alertness, he performed numerous tests, simulating parachute jumps from high altitudes. More than once he strained himself to unconsciousness. During his stay in Rochester, he attempted one especially dangerous test of a descent at a speed twice that of any prior attempts. He determined that the Army’s emergency-oxygen equipment was inadequate.
Before Lindbergh’s tests, the prevailing opinion among flying personnel in 1942 was that “you could not train your senses to become aware of a hypoxic condition in time to take conscious action to overcome it.” Lindbergh challenged that supposition. Working with Dr. Boothby and his staff, he devised a system whereby the oxygen supply to his mask would be cut off without his knowledge, while another mask with a full supply of oxygen was laid at his side in the chamber. “It was my job to learn to detect hypoxia quickly enough to change the masks without assistance,” he would later write. “Several trials taught me to make the change with a number of the originally available seconds of consciousness still in reserve.” Lindbergh’s subsequent report would affect the future of high-altitude flying, as he recommended that the use of emergency bailout oxygen equipment in a low-pressure chamber become a part of the indoctrination program for all high-altitude aviators.
Upon his return to Ford, Lindbergh put his study to practical use. He flew P-47s—the single-engine, low-wing “Thunderbolts”—Air Force fighters capable of reaching forty thousand feet at a speed of 430 m.p.h., with their Ford-built 2000 h.p. Pratt & Whitney engines. For weeks he tested the planes so that he could formulate emergency procedures. Then he ordered changes in the design of the plane’s hatch, and he instructed other test pilots as to how they might reach higher altitudes. As a result of Lindbergh’s study, Ford modified its oxygen equipment, thereby saving countless lives.
On one of his flights, Lindbergh ran short of oxygen without warning—at thirty-six thousand feet. The gages indicated otherwise; but he sensed too late that something was happening “to clarity of air, to pulse of life, perception of eye.” He grew aware, he would later write, “of that vagueness of mind and emptiness of breath which warn a pilot of serious lack of oxygen.”
As the dials in front of him faded and he began to black out, he shoved the stick forward, diving as quickly as possible. Senseless, except for a vague awareness of a shriek outside his cockpit, he fell twenty thousand feet before full consciousness returned and his thought process was restored with the increasing density of air. Shortly after landing, a mechanic informed Lindbergh that the plane’s pressure gage was reading fifty pounds too high and that his oxygen tank had simply run empty at thirty-six thousand feet. “That had caused all my trouble—a quarter-inch error of a needle,” Lindbergh would note and never forget.
Lindbergh’s interest in high-altitude flying brought him to East Hartford, to inspect United Aircraft’s new twenty-eight-cylinder engine. After his visit, Eugene Wilson, president of the company, wrote Lindbergh that “considerable water has gone under the bridge since we last talked with you,” and he wondered if Lindbergh might be “in a position to help us in the direction of research and development.” Lindbergh pounced upon the invitation, explaining that his only commitments to Ford were of a personal nature, once he finished a few more weeks of tests and modifications on the P-47s.
As those Thunderbolts entered production—becoming the most effective bomber escort planes in the European Theater—Lindbergh steadily devoted more time to United’s development of the Navy Marine Corsair (Vought F4U), which would be used as both a carrier fighter and a land-based plane. Between December 1942 and July 1943, Lindbergh made eight trips to Hartford, where he taught pilots the fine points of flying the plane, with its unique, upturned-wing design. Trained as a fighter pilot and frustrated at not having seen action, Lindbergh participated in maneuvers and mock combat. Deak Lyman, formerly of The New York Times, then working as an executive for United Aircraft, recalled Lindbergh’s taking his plane up and engaging in a high-altitude gunnery contest against two of the Marines’ best pilots. Lyman said the forty-one-year-old civilian “outguessed, outflew, and out-shot” both his opponents, each practically half his age.
Lyman visited Anne Lindbergh in Detroit during one of her husband’s trips to Connecticut; and she commented that Charles’s new work “had made a new man of him, made him boyish again and had done much to remove the sting of his relations with Washington just following the declaration.” His work at United had become so engrossing, he even gave up the diary he had scrupulously maintained for almost five years. “If it weren’t for his family,” Anne said, “I am sure he would never come to Detroit. He would like to devote every minute seven days a week to United.” Or even better …
On January 5, 1944, Lindbergh conferred with Brigadier General Louis E. Wood of the Marines, in Washington, about the possibility of going to the South Pacific for a survey of Corsair operating bases in the combat zone. United was receiving conflicting reports regarding the relative value of single- versus twin-engine fighters; and Lindbergh wanted to gather facts that would assist in designing the next generation of such planes. He had a personal agenda as well: After two years being sidelined, he yearned to see action at the front. The General said he would take the matter up with his superiors; and the next day Lindbergh was told he could proceed.
Until the arrangements were made, Lindbergh continued to test planes, mostly single-seater or two-place planes at military bases. The work was dangerous, as some of the planes were experimental and others were obsolete, many with untried or overworked parts. During four days in January at Eglin Field in Florida, Lindbergh flew eight different planes—including the Boeing B-29, which America was about to release into the skies. This superfortress—capable of flying 350 m.p.h., with a radius of over two thousand miles, and a maximum bomb-load of twenty thousand pounds—was the pride of the nearly one hundred thousand planes the United States would produce that year, a vast improvement in speed, range, and load over any of the 2,200 planes America had produced in 1939, when Lindbergh had first sounded his alarm.
Largely because of the exponential growth of American aviation, and the resultant superiority in the air, the war turned in favor of the Allies. Germany was all but ejected from Russia and Africa; and the Allies had bombed the daylights out of the industrial Ruhr Valley and Hamburg and were beginning to raid Berlin. In the Pacific, Japan was retreating as well, losing control of the steppingstones to her borders—the Solomon Islands, Kwajalein Island, and the Gilberts. The Allies moved on to the Marshall Islands and then the Kurile Islands.
Lindbergh spent the first days of April 1944 in New York City. He went to Brooks Brothers to buy his uniforms, which were required in combat areas. Traveling on “technician status,” former-Colonel Lindbergh would be required to wear a Naval officer’s uniform but without any insignia or rank. In the event of his capture, he would be a man without a country.
On April 22, 1944, the Allies invaded Hollandia, New Guinea, catching the Japanese offguard and allowing eighty-four thousand Allied troops to establish themselves there. Two days later, just as that news made the American headlines, “tech rep” Lindbergh left from North Island, San Diego, on the first leg of his trip to that precise dot on the map.
It would take two months for him to reach the north coast of New Guinea, as he stopped in Hawaii, Midway, Palmyra, Funafuti, Bougainville, and Green Island en route. Approaching the war zones, Lindbergh kept redefining the duties of his singular job. He flew on dawn patrols and joined rescue missions into the jungle and over the seas; wherever he went, he asked to go to the front lines. Upon learning that Lindbergh had actually fired his guns when he was over Japanese-held Rabaul, a Marine colonel dressed him down. “You have a right to observe combat as a technician, but not to fire guns,” he told the unranked civilian. “Of course,” another Marine officer chimed in, with a wink, “it would be all right for him to engage in target practice on the way home.” From then on, the military looked the other way whenever Lindbergh chose to assert himself as a soldier.
“The more I see of the Marines the more I like them,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal. The obverse was just as true. Grumblings among the troops were heard whenever Lindbergh’s presence was detected, men questioning his loyalty if not his competence. But just as often he would encounter former members of America First; and he invariably left everybody impressed with his skill, fortitude, and modesty.
On May twenty-ninth, Lindbergh dropped a five-hundred-pound high-explosive bomb on Kavieng, hitting a strip of buildings along the beach where anti-aircraft guns had been reported. “I don’t like this bombing and machine-gunning of unknown targets,” he had to admit to his diary. “You press a button and death flies down. One second the bomb is hanging harmlessly in your racks, completely under your control. The next it is hurtling down through the air, and nothing in your power can revoke what you have done. The cards are dealt. If there is life where that bomb will hit, you have taken it.” He flew more than a dozen combat missions with Marine squadrons against Japanese targets on New Ireland and New Britain. “The missions,” reported one Army Air Force Colonel, “consisted of strafing and dive bombing Japanese troops remaining at the once strong bases of Rabaul and Kavieng.” Although Lindbergh had yet to encounter enemy planes in the air, he had become an expert bombardier.
Effective though the single-engine Corsairs had been, many were beginning to act up. And so, before returning Stateside, Lindbergh wanted combat experience with the twin-engine P-38s, which the Army Air Force was flying, so that he could compare them. An old friend, General Ennis White-head, waved him on to Hollandia, where P-38s were being flown.
On the afternoon of June twenty-sixth, Lindbergh knocked on the shack door of Colonel Charles MacDonald, the commander of “Satan’s Angels,” the celebrated 475th Fighter Group of the Fifth Air Force. Entering the Colonel’s quarters, Lindbergh offered his name; but MacDonald, engrossed in a game of checkers, did not catch it. Lindbergh explained that he was interested in learning about combat operations with P-38s, and that General Donald Hutchinson, the Task Force Commander, had said MacDonald was the man to see. The Colonel and the Deputy Commander remained guarded in their conversation and focused on their game, while the tall intruder dressed in khakis just stood there. At last MacDonald asked, “What did you say your name was, and what phases of operations are you particularly interested in?”
“Lindbergh,” he replied, “and I’m very much interested in comparing range, fire power and your airplane’s general characteristics with those of single engine fighters.” His eyes still on the checkerboard, MacDonald realized that the only way the intruder could get his answers was by flying the plane; and the tall man was not wearing any kind of wings. After a few more moves, he asked, “Are you a pilot?”
“Yes,” he said, which prompted MacDonald to take a closer look at the forty-two-year-old man with the receding hairline standing there. “Not Charles Lindbergh?”
“That’s my name,” he replied. MacDonald forgot his checkerboard and began talking airplanes. The men quickly became friends; and Lindbergh, who had but eight hours of flying time in a P-38, was invited on a “four-plane anti-boredom flight” the next day to Jefman and Samate. Once Lindbergh left the shack, MacDonald’s deputy said, “My God! He shouldn’t go on a combat mission. When did he fly the Atlantic? … [He’s] too old for this kind of stuff.” MacDonald thought their visitor seemed fit; besides, commented Major Thomas B. McGuire, Jr., the Air Force’s second-leading ace, who would be flying on his wing, “I’d like to see how the old boy does.”
The next day they all saw, as Lindbergh not only mastered his plane but, four hundred miles deep into Japanese territory—weaving through black puffs of ack-ack—also successfully strafed an enemy barge in Kaiboes Bay.
After several more days of bombing missions, the crew chief of the 475th had noticed that Lindbergh’s plane invariably returned with much more fuel than any of the others. One evening, MacDonald introduced the new recruit to the rest of the pilots at a briefing in the thatch-roofed group recreation hut; and he asked Lindbergh to explain why that was the case. In his flat Midwestern tones, Lindbergh said that by raising manifold pressure and lowering revolutions per minute, the engines would consume less gasoline, gallons that could be translated into time in the air and an increase in combat radius. The initial reaction from his young audience was of disbelief and disrespect, cracks about grinding their engines down. “These are military engines,” Lindbergh replied, “built to take punishments. So punish them.” Then he added that if any man felt uncomfortable about adopting his methods, he should not. “You’re the captains of your own ships,” he said. “You must make the decisions. After all, you know more about flying your planes than I do.” But over the next few weeks, the three squadrons of Satan’s Angels learned otherwise, as they stretched their six-to-eight-hour missions to ten hours, allowing them to surprise the Japanese with attacks deeper into their territory than expected.
“In the days that followed,” MacDonald would later recount, “Lindbergh was indefatigable. He flew more missions than was normally expected of a regular combat pilot. He dive-bombed enemy positions, sank barges and patrolled our landing forces on Noemfoor Island. He was shot at by almost every anti-aircraft gun the Nips had in western New Guinea.” By then Lindbergh had logged more than twenty-five combat missions and close to ninety hours of combat time. On July 10, 1944, Lindbergh received a message from Australia requesting his presence. It was signed “MacArthur.”
He left two mornings later and was met at American Army headquarters in Brisbane by General George C. Kenney, who commanded the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. Kenney had heard rumors that Lindbergh had been flying combat with Army squadrons, which was against regulations. Lindbergh said he did not want to create any embarrassment, but he did not want to “go back up to New Guinea and sit on the ground while the other pilots were flying combat.” He asked if there was not some way around the regulations. “Well,” the General replied, his eyes lighting up, “it might be possible to put you on observer’s status … [which still] would not make it legal for you to do any shooting. But if you are on observer’s status, no one back in the States will know whether you use your guns or not.”
Lindbergh was introduced to General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s Chief of Staff, with whom he discussed his method for increasing the combat radius of the P-38s. Sutherland was so astonished by Lindbergh’s report—that a radius of seven hundred miles could be reached—he insisted that Lindbergh talk immediately to General MacArthur himself. After exchanging cordial salutations, MacArthur—looking younger than Lindbergh expected—asked if what Sutherland had just told him was true. Lindbergh replied that only instruction and training were necessary. “MacArthur said it would be a gift from heaven if that could be done,” Lindbergh wrote in that day’s journal entry, “and asked me if I were in a position to go back up to New Guinea to instruct the squadrons in the methods of fuel economy which would make such a radius possible.” MacArthur also said Lindbergh could do any kind of flying in any plane he wanted. He showed Lindbergh his map of the South Pacific and outlined his general plan of action—the immediate steps, the future steps, “and the limitations which were imposed by present fighter combat radii.”
Lindbergh returned to New Guinea, where he spent much of his time teaching fuel consumption. He reteamed with some of his friends from the 475th the following week on Biak, a Japanese stronghold three miles across the water. When weather kept him grounded, Lindbergh explored the brilliant coral reefs surrounding the islands.
Biak also provided Lindbergh with the most grotesque images of war he had ever seen, visions that would haunt him forever. On Monday, July 24, 1944, Lindbergh and several officers drove a jeep to the Mokmer west caves, where the enemy had waged one of its most stubborn stands. They went as far as they could up a crude military road, then walked the next few hundred feet toward the caves. Going down a hill, they came to a pass with bodies of a Japanese officer and a dozen soldiers “lying sprawled about in the gruesome positions which only mangled bodies can take.” Several weeks of weather and ants had eaten most of the flesh from the skeletons. The sight of skulls smashed to fragments prompted one officer to say, “I see that the infantry have been up to their favorite occupation,” namely, knocking out gold-filled teeth for souvenirs.
At the side of the road, they passed a bomb crater in which lay the bodies of another half-dozen Japanese soldiers, partly covered with a truckload of garbage Allied troops had dumped on top of them. “I have never felt more ashamed of my people,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal. “To kill, I understand; that is an essential part of war. Whatever method of killing your enemy is most effective is, I believe, justified. But for our people to kill by torture and to descend to throwing the bodies of our enemies into a bomb crater and dumping garbage on top of them nauseates me.” The caves themselves looked and smelled so hideous—what with burned bodies of Japanese soldiers scattered among mud and filth—that Lindbergh and the other men lasted there but a moment. Two days later, Lindbergh drove to another cliff cave, where he encountered the standing body of a Japanese soldier in uniform, roped tightly to a post set in the ground, headless.
On July 28, 1944, Lindbergh joined up with the 433rd Fighter Squadron, as observer in the No. 3 position of an eight-plane sweep. Their mission was to bomb and strafe “targets of opportunity” on Amboina, a small, Japanese-held island off the southwest coast of Ceram. As the horizon brightened, Lindbergh took off with other P-38s on Mission #3-407. One of his fellow combat pilots could not help noticing that he had been slow in retracting his wheels upon takeoff. “Lindbergh from Doakes,” those on the mission heard over their radios. “Get your wheels up! You’re not flying the Spirit of St. Louis.”
Although the Japanese were rumored to have strong flying forces in the area, the skies were clear. Suddenly, the radio squawked that another fighter group had spotted enemy aircraft nearby, a “Sonia” that was successfully eluding two American P-38s, whose pilots had run out of ammunition. As Lindbergh, Colonel MacDonald, and Captain Danforth Miller dove through a white cloud and black anti-aircraft bursts of smoke, Lindbergh got his first sight of a Japanese plane in the air—closing in head-on, with their combined speed close to six hundred miles per hour. “Of all the attacks it is possible to make on a Japanese plane,” MacDonald would later explain, “the one liked least is the head-on pass, for here you and the enemy approach with tremendous speed, each with guns blazing. There is always a good chance for collision, even though both of you try to avoid it, and against a Japanese one could never be sure to what lengths his suicidal tendencies would push him.” Lindbergh fired for several seconds, seeing his machine gun tracer bullets and 20 mm. cannon shells pelt the Sonia; but a collision seemed unavoidable. As the Sonia zoomed closer to Lindbergh, he pulled back on his controls with as much force as he could exert. There was a violent jolt, with but a five-foot cushion of air between them, as Lindbergh successfully banked to safety and the Sonia succumbed to a vertical dive into the sea.
Not long after the Americans had returned to Mokmer strip on Biak Island, word spread that “Lindbergh got a Jap.” Lindbergh himself never made much of the story. If anybody brought it up, he would merely explain, “I shot in self-defense.” Other soldiers remembered gathering in the lantern-lit mess tent to listen to Lindbergh speak that night. Expecting to hear a good war story from this “god-figure of all pilots everywhere,” the men only heard a soft, Midwestern voice droning on about throttle setting and r.p.m.
Missions were canceled on August 1, 1944, because weather was bad in all enemy directions except north toward the Palau Islands. Before Lindbergh’s arrival, that next step toward Japan, across the equator into the North Pacific, had been routinely considered beyond range. Armed with Lindbergh’s instruction, Colonel MacDonald asked him and two others if they wanted to fly there. Their enthusiasm overcame MacDonald’s warning that the mission would be dangerous, what with enemy fighter strength far outnumbering theirs.
They announced their arrival in the hostile area by strafing a ship. The men soon sighted three enemy planes, which Colonel MacDonald and Lieutenant Colonel Meryl Smith destroyed. Suddenly Lindbergh noticed an enemy fighter diving on Smith; and by the time he had turned back in Smith’s defense, that same Japanese Zero had shifted its attack toward Lindbergh, then within gun range. As the Zero dove down, firing on Lindbergh’s tail, MacDonald tried to force it off with a deflection burst, as did the mission’s two other planes. Too low to dive, Lindbergh could only bank toward MacDonald, who saw him crouching in front of the plane’s armor plate, waiting for bullets to hit, as he “commended his soul to God.”
“I think of Anne—of the children,” Lindbergh would later write of the moment. “My body is braced and tense. There is an eternity of time. The world was never clearer. But there is no sputtering of an engine, no fragments flying off a wing, no shattering of glass on the instrument board in front of me.” One of the deflection shots had set fire to the Zero, whose pilot had simply proved to be a blessedly poor shot. All four Americans returned to Biak unharmed.
Bombers had been requesting fighter cover over Palau for some time, but they had repeatedly been refused on the grounds “that the distance was too great and the weather too bad.” This mission with Lindbergh refuted such excuses. Within days, the top brass had done an about-face on sending other fighters there; within weeks United States forces landed at Palau; and within three months, MacArthur would wade ashore at Leyte, his triumphal return to the Philippines.
Shortly after the mission to Palau, MacDonald was granted a leave to the States. He tried to talk Lindbergh into returning with him—now that he had tempted fate twice. But Lindbergh refused, saying, “I haven’t finished yet.” He rejoined the Marines on Biak, where he shared a tent with Major McGuire. From New Guinea, Lindbergh moved on to Kwajalein and Roi Island, where he instructed fighter squadrons in long-range cruising procedures and, despite admonitions, flew on combat missions. Several officers talked to Lindbergh about resecuring his colonelcy and returning to the Pacific to serve with MacArthur; but Lindbergh said he wanted to complete his present study first. Besides, he intimated to his diary, “There are political complications, and I am hesitant to accept a commission under Roosevelt, even if I could obtain one.”
At another private meeting with MacArthur in Brisbane, the General told Lindbergh of his recent conference with the President in Hawaii. MacArthur said Roosevelt’s mind and voice were as commanding as ever, but he was amazed at how sickly he looked. He said that FDR would almost certainly be reelected that fall, “unless the people learned of his actual state of health.” MacArthur was otherwise interested in all Lindbergh had to say about his mission to the Pacific, especially in his success increasing the combat radius of the P-38 by almost two hundred miles. MacArthur asked how many Japanese planes he had shot down, and Lindbergh told him of his experience off the south coast of Ceram. “Good,” said the swaggering commander of the Pacific, “I’m glad you got one.”
On his way home, Lindbergh conducted one more series of tests at Kwa-jalein and Roi islands. Flying again in the F4Us that had brought him to the Pacific, Lindbergh wanted to see how heavy a bombload the Corsairs could carry. The first week of September 1944, he engaged in exercises over the Japanese-held atolls of Taroa, Maloelap, and Wotje. He began his trials by carrying the standard thousand-pound bomb, and over the next week trebled that weight. He even built a special belly rack for a large bomb. By the end of his second week, Lindbergh navigated his Corsair through tricky winds while carrying a two-thousand-pound bomb and two thousand-pound bombs—the heaviest bombload ever attached to an F4U. On September thirteenth, he dropped that load on Wotje Island, completely wiping out the southern portion of a Japanese gun position. “The take-off and drop with 4,000 lbs. of bombs completes the test program I laid out several days ago,” Lindbergh told his journal. After flying fifty combat missions, he was ready to return home. In the end, Lindbergh considered the F4U “the best Navy fighter built during the war.”
That afternoon he flew to Kwajalein, and the next day to Hawaii, where he arranged his return to California. Late on the night of Saturday, September 16, 1944—after stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles—Lindbergh taxied to the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego for the night. The next morning, he telephoned his wife and his mother, to tell them he would be making the final leg of his trip home as soon as transportation came available.
As was the case for millions of women “left behind,” the war had at least as deep an impact on Anne as it did on Charles. During those years, she had moved into two different houses in Bloomfield Hills and raised four children, living with shortages and ration coupons. Without robbing her of her tenderness, the war had toughened her—forcing her to build her own “world of people.” Fortunately, the local artistic community offered a number of stimulating minds—Lily and Eero Saarinen, the Finnish architect, whose father Eliel Saarinen had built and directed the Cranbrook Academy of Art; Carl Milles, the Swedish sculptor; and several teachers from Cranbrook, including sculptors Svea Kline and Janet de Coux. She enjoyed her art classes, especially sculpting; and she spent as much time as possible in her trailer, writing.
While recuperating after the birth of Scott, in August 1942, Anne recalled an outline of a flying episode she had written before the war. One year later, it had become a thirty-thousand-word novella about the ordeal of a pregnant wife flying in a two-seater across the Alps with her husband, a daring English pilot. While she was in the middle of writing it, Charles expressed his cold opinion that he did not believe the story could be published for some time, because of the way the public still felt about them. Her publisher, Alfred Harcourt, felt otherwise.
In some ways, Lindbergh proved to be right. The Book-of-the-Month Club turned down The Steep Ascent, citing a number of fanatical letters from members who, upon reading its announcement, said they would resign if the club endorsed it; Reader’s Digestsaid it was too difficult to excerpt; and Harcourt, Brace set its first printing at twenty-five thousand copies, half that of Listen! The Wind. The first reviews confirmed the publishers’ cautious position. While they were largely positive, enough of them dipped into personal criticism—“It is no accident that these two fliers dangerously lost in the Alps found safety on Mussolini’s soil”—to hurt the book’s sales. Immersing herself in her diaries and ever-widening correspondences with new friends—which included many lonely, worshipful women—Anne Lindbergh would not publish another book for eleven years.
Just as Anne was adapting to Bloomfield Hills, she learned that their landlord was unable to renew their lease. She wrote Charles that they would have to be packed up and moved into a new house by September 1, 1944, even though he would still be away. “I do not like to leave the decision about the winter on your shoulders,” he had written her while in New Guinea, “but there seems no wise alternative, and you know there is no one I trust as much.”
“As far as the Ford Company is concerned,” he told her, “I have done about all I can in that connection. Their aviation problems are now primarily connected with mass production, in which I am only secondarily interested, and which they understand far better than I.” As a result of his work in the South Pacific, Lindbergh said he would have to spend much of his time in Connecticut, in connection with United Aircraft’s fighter program. “This is work I am interested in,” he said, “but which I have no intention of carrying on indefinitely. I entered it because of the war, and I remain in it for that reason only.” That said, Lindbergh was prepared to move to any section of the country that appealed to Anne; “there is nothing I would rather do than spend a few months studying and writing in a beautiful and quiet place,” he wrote, echoing his sentiments of three years earlier.
She found such a place in Westport, Connecticut—just an hour by train from New York and twenty minutes from the United factory in Bridgeport. It came unfurnished, but Anne felt “it looks rather like us—settled down among trees and a field and a brook,” with good schools, swimming, and boats nearby. She toiled for weeks to make Charles’s homecoming as perfect as possible.
Amid her packing, Anne’s eyes had almost passed over a short paragraph in the Detroit Free Press: “AUTHOR-PILOT MISSING OVER SOUTHERN FRANCE—SAINT-EXUPÉRY.” After months on the ground teaching pilots, the forty-four-year-old writer had just returned to action and had been alone on this reconnaissance flight.
Anne had fearfully combed the newspapers for years, always half expecting to find such a headline. Throughout the war she had carried him in her thoughts, poring over every article and book he wrote. She even considered The Steep Ascent an offering to him, which might somehow reunite them. “I am sad we never met again,” Anne admitted to her diary. “I am sad he never tried to see us, though I understand it; I am sad that politics and the fierceness of the anti-war fight and the glare of publicity and the calumny and mixed-up pain and hurt and wrong of my book kept us from meeting again. I am sad that I never had the luxury of knowing whether or not he forgave us for our stand, forgave me for my book [The Wave of the Future].” Anne could hardly bear the irony that Saint-Exupéry had been called upon to make “the supreme sacrifice” for his country just as France was being liberated. Anne had felt such grief only twice before, upon the deaths of her sister Elisabeth and her first baby.
She counted her blessings. “I have a husband I love,” she wrote. “Nowhere could I find, could I have found, a better husband—a husband to whom I could give so much, who gives me so much—no marriage as good. A husband, a good marriage, is earth. Charles is earth to me, the whole world, life.” And yet, she had to confess, Saint-Exupéry was “a sun or a moon or stars which light earth, which make the whole world and life more beautiful. Now the earth is unlit and it is no longer so beautiful. I go ahead in it stumbling and without joy.”
On the night of September 18, 1944, Lindbergh left San Diego on TWA Flight 40. After almost a dozen stops, he reached Pittsburgh the following afternoon and boarded the night train to New York. When he arrived at the station the next morning a group of photographers and reporters were waiting on the platform. He put on his lensless eyeglasses and walked past them with the rest of the passengers until someone called out “that old, familiar, and annoying cry: ‘There he is.’” They chased him up the escalators, onto the street, and even opened his taxi door after he had closed himself in—so they could snap one more picture as he leaned out to shut it. He insisted he had nothing to say about his trip.
He taxied into the city, breakfasted at the Engineers Club, and called Anne at Next Day Hill. She would go directly to Westport to make at least one room in the house ready; and the children would join them two days later. Then he caught the next train to Hartford. After spending the day with the officers of United Aircraft, he took the train to Westport. The cabdriver had to stop twice to get precise directions to the “Tompkins House” on Long Lots Road. Lindbergh liked what he saw—a large house set back from the road, surrounded by trees.
Before she had a chance to prepare herself, Anne heard the taxi and then her husband’s familiar fast steps. “And there he was, lean and brown, very young and taut looking, bursting into the room,” she would record, “—like life always.”
Despite the differences in their experiences, Anne liked to think that the war had not separated her from her husband so much as drawn them closer. “Is this just a miracle of understanding?” she wondered. “Or simply love. Or do we really both of us now stand at the same point, at the end of something, at the beginning of something?”
She was not sure, knowing only, “Both of us are groping and a little lost—but we are together.”