6
“How are we to distinguish the difference between
reality and dream? Dreams result from a relationship
of atoms. So do our bodies.”
—C.A.L.
ALL HE WANTED WAS TO SLEEP, BUT WHEN LINDBERGH REturned to the Garden City Hotel just before midnight, he found it bustling with activity. An army of reporters clattering away at typewriters had appropriated the lobby, and they were all eager to interview him. Lindbergh politely excused himself from their questions, insisting that he had to go to bed. Even a long nap, he felt, would sustain him for the thirty-six-hour ordeal that lay ahead.
The journalists let him retire in peace, as even the hardest-boiled members of the press no longer attempted to hide their admiration. Lindbergh’s modest manner “won the hearts of every one who came near him”—as Russell Owens phrased it in his next front-page piece for the Times—partly because he stood in such sharp contrast to the rest of the current newsmakers—bootleggers, racketeers, and millionaire playboys. That very day the press carried a story about oilman Harry Sinclair’s jail sentence for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal and another about an anarchistic maniac who dynamited a school, killing forty-two children. Charles Augustus Lindbergh seemed the perfect antidote to toxic times.
It had rained on the opening of the horse-racing season at nearby Belmont Park that day, but journalists had the derby of the century to write about. Although Lindbergh did not know it, Clarence Chamberlin had received the same optimistic weather report that he had; and Kenneth Boedecker from the Wright Company was preparing the Bellanca Columbia for a morning departure as well. Although there seemed to be no sign of activity from the Byrd stable, it struck Lindbergh that the Fokker, America, hangared at Roosevelt Field, was in pole position. It could roll right onto the runway, while the Spirit of St. Louis would have to be towed there from Curtiss Field.
Lindbergh’s backers in St. Louis had thoughtfully sent a member of their Chamber of Commerce, a Missouri National Guardsman named George Stumpf, to Long Island to serve as an aide-de-camp. Lindbergh had no duties for him until that moment, when he asked him to see that he was not disturbed until 2:15, at which time he wished to be awakened.
He was just drifting off when he heard several loud knocks on the door. It was Stumpf. “Slim,” the young man asked, “what am I going to do when you’re gone?”
“I don’t know,” Lindbergh managed to say politely. “There are plenty of other problems to solve before we have to think about that one.” Now wide awake, he began to consider them all. By 1:40, he realized he would not be getting any sleep that night.
At 2:30, he was back downstairs, dressed in his flying outfit—Army breeches and boots, a light jacket over his shirt, a blue-and-red diagonally striped tie from Vandervoort’s in St. Louis. Frank Tichenor and Jessie Horsfall, the publisher and editor of Aero Digest, drove him to Curtiss Field. They arrived a little before three in a slow-dripping rain. Through the dark mist Lindbergh saw a crowd of more than five hundred onlookers.
As the steady drizzle kept him inside, there was nothing to do but recheck all the preparations. He and his instrument specialist realized that it would be difficult to read the compass that had been affixed over the pilot’s wicker chair and that it should somehow have been incorporated into the instrument panel. A young woman in the waiting crowd came to the rescue with a round compact mirror; a man chewing gum provided the adhesive.
At 4:15, the rain had practically stopped, and weather reports from Massachusetts, Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland all reported clearings. A few members of the press were allowed to sit inside the hangar while Lindbergh ate a sandwich. When he finished, he ordered his plane wheeled outside. When the soaked crowd of faithfuls discerned the tall, lanky figure, it let out a cheer.
There were no indications of anybody else’s taking off that morning as the tailskid of the Spirit of St. Louis was lifted and lashed to the back of a motor truck and the engine was shrouded in a tarpaulin. With an escort of six Nassau County motorcycle patrolmen, the plane was hauled to Roosevelt Field. By then word had it that Byrd’s backer still believed his plane needed more testing, and the courts were still restraining Chamberlin from taking Levine’s Bellanca. The drizzle persisted as the plane was tugged up a gravel road toward the runway. At one point in the muddy journey, they reached ruts deep enough to damage the plane; the caravan waited until some boards were set down to bridge them. Carefully watching his plane, Lindbergh thought, “It’s more like a funeral procession than the beginning of a flight to Paris.”
The Spirit of St. Louis was positioned at the western end of the runway at Roosevelt Field, its nose pointing toward Paris. It would have five thousand feet in which to leave the ground and gain enough altitude to clear telephone wires at the end of the field. Were it a less soggy day, Lindbergh would not have questioned his ability to take off. But with a field turned to mire, no headwinds, and air so heavy that it would lower the engine’s r.p.m., the fate of prior overburdened planes raced through his mind.
A truck carrying barrels of the Spirit of St. Louis’s fuel supply pulled up, and a small bucket brigade formed. Over the next few hours—just yards from where two members of Fonck’s crew had taxied to a fiery death eight months earlier—Ken Lane stood on the engine cowl, slowly pouring gasoline from red five-gallon cans through chamois, filtering the fuel as he filled the plane’s five tanks. An ambulance from the Nassau County Hospital rolled onto the field, down to that point at the runway from which the plane was meant to leave the ground.
Hundreds were drawn to Roosevelt Field that morning. People on their way to work joined the all-night revelers on their way home. Besides Lindbergh, they could glimpse some of the most important figures in aviation, including rivals Byrd and Chamberlin along with Bernt Balchen, Bert Acosta, René Fonck, and the attractive “lady flyer” Ruth Nichols. The Dutch manufacturer Anthony Fokker was there, as was a recent Yale graduate named Juan Trippe, the managing director of Colonial Air Transport, which held the airmail contract between New York, Hartford, and Boston. As if to prove that he could have made the journey that day, Byrd asked Lindbergh if he might borrow his own runway to make a trial flight in the America. For almost two hours, Byrd put his three-motored Fokker through its paces, cutting in and out of the fog, landing just as Lindbergh’s plane was made ready.
By 7:30 on the morning of May 20, 1927, each of the Spirit’s tanks was filled to its brim—451 gallons of gasoline, weighing some 2,750 pounds. In addition to the empty plane’s basic weight (including equipment and instruments) of 2,150 pounds, there were 140 pounds (twenty gallons) of oil, Lindbergh’s 170 pounds (fully clothed), and forty miscellaneous pounds, which included his letters of introduction from Colonel Roosevelt and a bank draft arranged by the St. Louis backers from the Equitable Trust Company of New York for 12,755.10 francs, the equivalent of $500. Frank Tichenor of Aero Digest asked if the five sandwiches he was taking were enough. “If I get to Paris,” Lindbergh said, “I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more, either.” One bystander offered Lindbergh a kitten as a mascot, and several others pressed talismans upon him. Several newspapers would report his taking them, but a pilot who had refused to take navigational equipment, had torn unnecessary pages from his notebook, and had trimmed the margins from his maps to save weight was hardly about to stow a cat—to say nothing of rabbits’ feet, wishbones, and horseshoes.
Unwittingly, however, he did pocket a St. Christopher medal. Lindbergh, in his flying suit and leather helmet, had just settled in the cockpit, when he suddenly jumped out. He thought he had forgotten his passport. A member of his crew pointed out the small rack behind him, which held his flashlight and papers. For another moment he paused, looked at the leaden sky, then at the bulging wheels of the Spirit sinking into the muddy runway. While he stood there, a woman named Katie Butler, who had come out that morning with a group of Glen Cove schoolteachers, called a policeman over. She removed her St. Christopher from around her neck and whispered some instructions to him. “The officer nodded, took the gift over to the aviator, and put it in his hand,” remembered one of the teachers, who then distinctly saw Lindbergh “accept it distractedly and slip it into his pocket without examining it.”
At 7:40, Lindbergh reapproached his plane, shook hands with Richard Byrd, and boarded. Ed Mulligan spun the propeller, and Kenneth “Boady” Boedecker twisted the booster magneto, designed to provide a hotter spark. The engine let out a roar, and the chocked airplane tried to buck loose. Lindbergh saw all the gauges before him spin into action, but the tachometer registered only 1,470 r.p.m., thirty revolutions low as a result of the weather.
Ten minutes passed, while the pilot collected himself, pulling together all his flying experience of the past four years: 7,189 flights, 1,790 hours and ten minutes in the air, thirty-two flights in the Spirit without incident. He knew conditions were less than favorable. The slight tailwind could be dangerous when taking off from west to east; the humid air had the skin of his plane covered in cold sweat; the horizon was veiled in mist; the engine still had not revved up to 1,500 r.p.m.; and the Spirit had never been tested carrying so much weight.
At 7:51 A.M., Lindbergh buckled his safety belt, stuffed each ear with a wad of cotton, strapped on his wool-lined helmet, and pulled his goggles down over his eyes. Turning to Mulligan and Boedecker, he said, “What do you say—let’s try it.” They went to the blocks, and he nodded. As the wheels were freed, Lindbergh eased his throttle wide open.
In covering the event for the entire world to see, the Fox Film Corporation employed a brand-new technique for their newsreels, a sound-on-film process which they called “Movietone.” As the engine spluttered louder and louder, several men under each wing pushed on the struts, finally getting the two-ton, winged gasoline tank to move. It picked up speed, but inside the plane Lindbergh felt the stick wobble, assuming none of the outside pressure required to give the plane lift. At last the vehicle was sloshing forward fast enough to leave the men in its muddy wake, as it fishtailed down the runway.
After more than a thousand feet had passed beneath him, Lindbergh felt play then strength in the stick. At the halfway mark on the runway—the point at which he had to decide whether or not to abort the flight—the Spirit still had not reached flying speed, but he felt “the load shifting from wheels to wings.” Coordinating his hand-on-throttle and foot-on-rudder movements with the view of the approaching telephone lines, which he could see only by leaning out the side windows, Lindbergh felt the plane leave the ground, only to return again. With less than two thousand feet of runway before him, he picked up speed and, now whooshing through puddles, managed to get the plane to jump off the ground again, only to bounce a second time. With less than a thousand feet, he attempted to lift the plane sharply enough to clear the web of wires in front of it.
At 7:54, the plane was airborne—ten feet above a tractor on the field, over a gully into which he easily could have crashed, and clearing the telephone wires by twenty feet. The cheer of the crowd ripped the air.
The plane headed toward open country, over a golf course and a line of trees. As if catching its breath, it descended slightly, only to regain altitude and slowly climb ever higher. Its wing dipped and caught a glint of the day’s first sunlight. “God be with him,” said Richard Byrd standing by his plane on the runway. “I think he has a 3-to-1 chance.” Clarence Chamberlin said, “My heart was in my throat,” as he pulled for the plane to get off the ground. “It was a splendid start,” he added, “one of the most thrilling I’ve ever seen. It took guts.” Bert Acosta, who had joined the Byrd team, said he thought Lindbergh was “taking a long chance. You must remember he is alone and has only one motor. If I were inclined to be superstitious, however, I might say that he has a good chance, for he is above all things a lucky flier.” Floyd Bennett, who had accompanied Byrd to the North Pole and recently been injured testing the plane for the New York-to-Paris run, also had second thoughts about flying with only one engine; but, he reminded people, the venture depended at least as much on “whether he can keep awake thirty-six hours.” Over the AP wire from London came news that Lloyd’s was not quoting odds on Lindbergh’s chances, because they believed “the risk is too great.”
After two minutes in the air the Spirit of St. Louis had ascended to two hundred feet, a height safe enough from which to land if necessary; his airspeed was one hundred miles per hour, and the engine was cruising at 1,750 r.p.m. Past the worry of getting an untested amount of weight off the ground, Lindbergh was able at last to address the next challenge of his journey—navigation. He got his bearings, banking his plane until the needle of his earth-inductor compass reached the center line, 65 degrees, the compass heading for the first segment he had marked on his chart back in San Diego only weeks earlier. He pulled out his map of New York state, to check as often as possible for corresponding landmarks.
Over the grand estates of Long Island he flew low, watching the haze lift over Connecticut. Only then did Lindbergh notice that he was being pursued by Casey Jones, flying a Curtiss Oriole filled with reporters and photographers. He resented their presence. But upon reaching the Sound, the escort plane dipped its wing and turned back, leaving the next thirty-six hundred miles of sky to Lindbergh alone.
Within the hour Richard Blythe sent a wire to Evangeline Lindbergh at Cass Technical High School in Detroit: “CHARLES LEFT AT SEVEN FIFTY ONE THIS MORNING AFTER WONDERFUL TAKE OFF HE WAS FEELING RESTED AND VERY FIT HE WILL BE IN PARIS NEXT.” Trying to go about her business as usual, Mrs. Lindbergh asked her principal to make no mention of her son’s trip during school hours. She lunched at a small restaurant on Woodward Avenue, as was her custom; but the mob of well-wishing students, strangers on the street, and the press corps made it impossible for her not to issue a statement. Although she knew Charles would want her to say as little as possible, some of her anxiety surfaced. “Tomorrow, Saturday, a holiday for me,” she said, “will be either the happiest day in my whole life, or the saddest. Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock I shall begin looking for word from Paris—not before that.” Until then, said Evangeline—hurrying home toward the house at 178 Ashland Avenue that she shared with her brother—“My heart and soul is with my boy on his perilous journey.”
New Yorkers instinctively congregated in Times Square, where they hoped to find bulletins about Lindbergh’s progress posted on the Broadway side of the Times Square Building. That day alone, the Times received more than six hundred telephone inquiries for information.
The American Embassy in Paris had earlier indicated that the French government might frown upon an American attempt at the Orteig Prize while Nungesser and Coli were still missing, but that proved to be misinformation. Their Minister of Marine ordered the big air beacon at Cherbourg lighted to guide Captain Lindbergh inland from the French coast. And the Police Commissioner of Aubervilliers met with aviation authorities at nearby Le Bourget to discuss the possibility of providing extra gendarmes to police the main street leading to the small landing field.
That same day, another attempt at a record-breaking flight commenced. Two members of the Royal Air Force, C. R. Carr and L. S. M. Gillman, took off in a Hawker-Horsley bomber from the Crandley Airdrome outside London bound for Karachi, India, four thousand miles away. The British proudly focused on their own airmen, attempting what was, after all, a longer flight than Lindbergh’s; the Associated Press reported that the general English impression of Lindbergh’s flight was that it was “foolhardy.” But after a few sniffs of disdain, they would be won over by the young American’s gallantry, impressed that he was flying alone—over water, which offered little hope of salvation if his plane went down. By day’s end, Lindbergh’s flight, not Carr and Gillman’s, commanded their attention.
Sixty-five vessels traveled the North Atlantic sea lanes that day, but fewer than twenty were believed to be anywhere near Lindbergh’s route. Shipping Board statisticians said that “because of uncertainty as to the time of sailing or speed of some of the vessels,” none of them could be relied upon for sightings of Lindbergh’s plane. Nonetheless, the captain of the S. S. President Roosevelt, then sailing from Bremen to New York, altered its course to the north so that it might parallel Lindbergh’s; he ordered a searchlight to scan the sky from midnight until dawn.
The flight’s first great risk, that of his plane being overloaded with fuel, was behind him. There still remained, however, the possibility of engine failure. Although his Wright Whirlwind had thus far performed precisely, it had never been put to so severe a test—thirty-six nonstop hours of operation, probably through a variety of dangerous weather conditions. “The engine had to make 14,472,000 explosions perfectly and smoothly,” noted Lieutenant L. B. Umlauf, aviation engineer for Vacuum Oil. “Even a minor engine problem might bring a sudden and fatal end to a brave and thrilling adventure.”
One hour and one hundred miles out of Roosevelt Field, the curtain of mist over Long Island Sound rose. Thirty-five miles obliquely across the Sound to the mouth of the Connecticut River—the most water he had ever flown over—set the stage for what lay ahead—“the trackless wastes, the great solitude, the desertlike beauty of the ocean.” Alone in the cockpit, Lindbergh had been at work constantly since his departure. Every fifteen minutes, he had manipulated the system of petcocks regulating gasoline flow, so that a little fuel was used from each tank. He started his second hour by switching to the fuselage fuel tank, off which the plane would feed for an hour. For the duration of the flight he would change tanks every hour, marking a score on his instrument panel at each change-over. He also entered hourly notations in pencil on a white-paper log-sheet he had drawn up in black India ink—a grid in which he would fill in data pulled from each of the dials on the panel before him. At the start of his third hour, he had no more use for his fourth state map—New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts lay behind him, unlimited visibility ahead.
Over the Atlantic Ocean, Lindbergh faced his “first real test” of navigation—250 miles without a landmark, just water in every direction. Not until he approached Nova Scotia would he be able to determine how accurate his chart-work back in San Diego had been. He had told himself before commencing the flight that if Nova Scotia were too obscured by fog for him to measure his position, he would turn back to New York. If, on the other hand, he had proceeded accurately enough to compensate for any errors made thus far, he would proceed to the next checkpoint.
With the late-morning sun beating through the Spirit’s plastic skylight, Lindbergh felt uncomfortable in his thick flying suit. It occurred to him that it had been more than twenty-four hours since he had actually slept. His helmet and goggles long since removed, he unzipped the suit to cool himself and took a swig of water from his quart canteen. Then he began a discussion with himself insisting that he “must stay alert, and match quality of plane and engine with quality of piloting and navigation. I’d be ashamed to have anyone know I feel tired when I’m just starting.”
At noon Nova Scotia appeared. He was slightly dismayed that the large, hilly island had “crept in unobserved” in a quarter of an hour for which he could not account; but he was heartened when he realized that he was only six miles off his mark, a scant two degrees. Over the next four hours he traversed the province. Although he had not eaten in six hours, he forewent lunch, limiting himself to another drink of water. “Mustn’t take too much,” he told himself, “… suppose I’m forced down at sea!” And though the plane was carrying two plastic windows which could be easily inserted, he felt they would adversely curtail the ventilation within the cockpit. He preferred to sacrifice comfort for “the crystal clarity of communion with water, land, and sky.”
As the Nova Scotia countryside grew more rugged, the wind kicked up, dark clouds formed, and the air got choppy. Lindbergh made a few short detours but just as happily flew right through some squalls, finding the cold, wet air bracing. By the time he had reached Cape Breton Island, there were clear skies ahead and another two hundred miles of water until Newfoundland.
This was the last jump before making the great leap of faith across the Atlantic. The water was a welcome sight—until he began flying over it again. The virtually constant image of the waves took on a hypnotic monotony. With only eight hours behind him, Lindbergh’s eyes were feeling “dry and hard as stones.” He was already forcing himself to keep them open, then squeezing them closed as tightly as possible.
The blur below was suddenly sharpened by the appearance of an ice field—huge white cakes reflecting the sun setting behind him. The bright glare against the black sea jolted him to alertness. He realized that he could not rely on natural phenomenon to keep awake; he would have to devise his own means of keeping his senses keen—updating his log, occasionally sipping water. From Placentia Bay to Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, he flew toward the approaching night; and at twilight—7:15 by his clock, 8:15 local time—he deviated slightly from his great circle route so that he could fly low over the small city of St. John’s, neatly tucked into its deep harbor. It would be his last contact with land until Ireland, and he wanted people to know that he had traveled at least that far. One St. John’s merchant was almost close enough to the plane to read its serial number painted underwing; and a member of Newfoundland’s cabinet out motoring spotted the plane and followed it along the road as far as he could until … the Spirit of St. Louis had cleared the wharves below and reached the wide open sea.
In the final moments of dusk, Lindbergh was startled by the sight of an iceberg below. The one soon gave way to many—streaked in gray wisps. And in a moment Lindbergh faced a scrim of fog, followed by the curtain of night.
The second act of Lindbergh’s transatlantic journey began in complete darkness—a moonless black night above, a darker ocean below. He would still have a few hours in which to turn back. But while reachable land lay behind him, daylight did not.
For the next fifteen hours, there would be a complete blackout on news from the Spirit of St. Louis. Except for the minute chance of a ship at sea spotting him the next day, he was completely detached from the world—bound to the planet only by the gravity which he and his machine would have to resist for another twenty-four hours. While Lindbergh later wrote that no man before him had commanded such freedom of movement over earth, he failed to note that no man before him had ever been so much alone in the cosmos.
In that moment, when Lindbergh lost all contact with earth and climbed above the fog to ten thousand feet, he was also ascending in the public consciousness to Olympian heights. His success would reflect well on the entire human race, placing him in the unique position of overshadowing every other living hero. Indeed, the world had long been host to a succession of athletes, actors, artists, scientists, political and religious leaders, even kings, to whom people looked up; but such admiration was a matter of taste and beliefs. Everybody had a stake in Lindbergh. On May 20,1927—as night fell—modern man realized nobody had ever subjected himself to so extreme a test of human courage and capability as Lindbergh. Not even Columbus sailed alone.
Practically everybody who lived in America through Lindbergh’s flight would remember his or her precise feelings that first night. Forty years later, one housewife recalled how as “a little unattractive fat girl” who had lost most of her family, she had prayed for his safety, thus taking part in his endeavor. Countless millions did the same.
In Indiana, Pennsylvania, the nineteen-year-old son of the local hardware store owner had been laid low with scarlet fever that third week of May. He carved a wooden model of the Spirit of St. Louis, then asked his father for a large piece of beaverboard on which he drew a map of the North Atlantic. To the left he crayoned a silhouette of New York’s Woolworth Building, and to the right, the Eiffel Tower. Then he warped the board to show the curvature of the earth and tacked on his model of the plane. Young Jimmy displayed the diorama in the front window of J. M. Stewart & Company, inching the plane along with each radio update. “I don’t think I got any more sleep than Lindbergh did,” James Stewart would recount many years later. “Lindbergh’s problem was staying awake; mine was staying asleep that Friday night while he was unreported over the Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland.”
America’s most popular observer of the American scene, humorist Will Rogers, filed his nationally syndicated newspaper column that afternoon from Concord, New Hampshire. “No attempt at jokes today,” he wrote uncharacteristically. “A … slim, tall bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of Supreme Being that had a following. If he is lost it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.”
That night, forty thousand boxing fans made their way to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to see a fight between heavyweight favorite Jim Maloney and his rival from Boston, Jack Sharkey. The crowd included such prominent figures as banker Mortimer Schiff, publishing magnates Herbert and Ralph Pulitzer and Condé Nast, Averell Harriman and his tycoon father, industrialist Walter Chrysler, Frank Hague, the powerful Mayor of Jersey City, and John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the former Mayor of Boston. The conversation inside and outside the stadium was all about Lindbergh. Instead of peddling the latest tabloid headlines about the quarter-million-dollar fight about to commence, the newboys sold out their “Extra” editions that night shouting about “Lindy,” the sobriquet headline writers used because of its marquee appeal. “Forty thousand persons put Lindbergh first and Sharkey and Maloney second last night,” reported the staid New York Times, “and forty thousand persons can’t be wrong, whether Frenchmen or Americans. The remarkable thing about last night’s fight crowd was that they were all wondering how the transatlantic flight would come out and not who would be knocked out.”
Sharkey was the upset winner, with a kayo in the fifth round; but the most stirring moment occurred before the fight even began. Announcer Joe Humphries told the crowd that Lindbergh was at sea and by all reports all was well. His update was based on nothing more than hopeful speculation, but the fans went wild, refusing to be silenced. When his waving motions finally settled them down, a lone, loud voice from the crowd shouted, “He’s the greatest fighter of them all.” Another round of cheering followed, as Humphries beseeched the spectators for silence. Then he asked the forty thousand to offer a silent prayer that Lindbergh might land safely in France. The entire crowd rose as one, all heads bared.
Similar scenes played out across the country that night. At the Hotel Commodore in Manhattan, twelve hundred industrialists gathered for the American Iron and Steel Institute’s annual banquet. Before the chairman of United States Steel delivered the evening’s main address, another company head offered an impromptu benediction: “I am proud to live under that flag,” he said, pointing to a small star-spangled banner on the table. “I am thinking of a young American boy who left this morning for Paris with a sandwich in his pocket. May God deliver him there safely.” And the men in black tie cheered.
Anxiously, the world awakened Saturday to old news. In a three-line banner, The New York Times could but report that Lindbergh was speeding across the Atlantic and was last sighted over Newfoundland. A pencil portrait of the delicately featured young man, which made him look even younger than his years, accompanied the lead article. The “skyline” on page one promised a full page of photographs of the aviator, which the paper delivered on page five. Editorial cartoonists across America that day drew variations on the same theme—a picture of a turbulent sea covered by an even more ominous sky, with a tiny plane flying eastward through the clouds. Editorials offered praise and prayers. Thousands of requests streamed in for reprints of the editorial in the New YorkSun, written by Harold M. Anderson, called “Lindbergh Flies Alone.” It became one of the most famous newspaper pieces of its era:
Alone?
Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Emprise?
True, the fragile bodies of his fellows do not weigh down his plane; true, the fretful minds of weaker men are lacking from his crowded cabin; but as his airship keeps her course he holds communion with those rarer spirits that inspire to intrepidity and by their sustaining potency give strength to arm, resource to mind, content to soul.
Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?
Into the foggy night, Lindbergh sought companionship with the stars. Feeling the tailwinds and deciding that he could afford to expend some gasoline on altitude, he climbed to five thousand feet. “As long as I can hold on to them,” he thought, seeing the stars blink through the haze, “I’ll be safe.” Sleep remained his worst enemy.
Entering the fourteenth hour, cruising at ten thousand feet, the Spirit of St. Louis flew through a range of clouds Himalayan in height. With no hope of rising above them, Lindbergh became aware of how cold it was in the cockpit. He removed a leather mitten and put his arm out the window, only to have it stung by cold needles. He aimed his flashlight toward a strut of the plane, on which he saw ice.
He was aware of the danger, as it was already affecting his plane’s aerodynamics. “As far north as Newfoundland and in the cold of night,” Lindbergh analyzed, “icing conditions probably extend down to the waves themselves”; and if he descended and ice clogged his instruments, he would never be able to climb again. He thought of changing his course and flying south, around the storm; but he had to consider how much gasoline that would cost.
For the next few minutes, as the wind pulled his plane every which way, he followed the clearest path that presented itself, heading south whenever that option existed. At one point he found himself turned completely around, in quest of safe passage. Soon the coating of ice thinned. He observed that both his earth-inductor compass and his liquid compass overhead were malfunctioning. His only hope for getting across the watery abyss lay in the hairline needles of those compasses pointing the way. Lindbergh could only deduce that he was entering a magnetic storm, which he would have to ride out navigating by instinct.
Just then, heavenly assistance arrived. Not only did the expanses between the great thunderheads of the storm widen, but moonlight appeared. Its unexpected illumination disoriented Lindbergh at first, because in shortening the night—racing with the earth’s rotation—he had not correctly reckoned when it would show up. Taking off from Roosevelt Field in the early morning had assured Lindbergh the maximum of daylight hours; as it was, he faced but two hours of solid darkness. Entering his thousandth minute in theair, his plane ventured “where man has never been.” The last of the ice disappeared from his plane as Lindbergh crossed the halfway mark in his flight. “Now,” he thought, “I’ve burned the last bridge behind me.”
After seventeen hours in the air—almost forty since he had last slept—Lindbergh felt disembodied. He seemed able to see without his eyes, and he became numb to both hunger and the cold. He had drunk less than a pint of water. With the first break of light, Lindbergh realized that he had lost control of his eyelids. “My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart,” he wrote of his physical condition. “It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out—and sleep.”
Lindbergh’s body abdicated control to a “separate mind,” a kind of automatic pilot that took responsibility for putting his muscles through the motions of flying the plane. The Spirit of St. Louis was not a “stable” plane—a machine that might restore its own equilibrium when disturbed by some outside force; and that deficiency proved to be its saving grace. That instability continued to jerk Lindbergh into wakefulness.
During the next three hours of increasing daylight, fog appeared. Into one opening Lindbergh flew within one hundred feet of the ocean. When the ceiling lowered to zero, Lindbergh flew for two hours completely blind at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet. He found it difficult for his mind to function on any level but instinctive survival. He abandoned his log, choosing only to score the switching of gas tanks every hour, and sometimes arriving late to the task.
Into his twenty-second hour, Lindbergh realized that he was drifting into sleep. When the fog periodically dissipated, Lindbergh took his plane close enough to the ocean for the spray off the whitecaps to slap his face. Other times, he let light rain splash into the cockpit. Then, without warning, came another intrusion.
It would be almost three decades before Lindbergh would discuss it publicly, but after almost twenty-four hours of his ordeal—at around five o’clock in the morning by his clock—the fuselage behind him filled with phantoms—“vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane.” He later recorded that these ghosts were benign, vaporous presences. They permeated the fabric walls of the plane, coming and going at will. With human voices they spoke to him above the noise of the engine, advising him on his flight and giving him “messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.” They were human in shape but devoid of real form. With years of hindsight, Lindbergh would grant that these visions would normally have startled him; “but on this fantastic flight,” he would recall of the close encounter, “I’m so far separated from the earthly life I know that I accept whatever circumstance may come.”
In the next hour, he entertained another vision. Under his left wing, only five miles to the north, Lindbergh saw a coastline, complete with hills and trees and cliffs and islands. The very thought of land that close baffled him, for his calculations put Ireland almost a thousand miles away. Even considering that he had completely lost his bearings, he could not figure out what the land could possibly be—Greenland? Labrador? He shook his head and looked again, assuring himself that he was awake and that he still saw the shore ahead. He finally realized that they were mirages—“fog islands sprung up along my route; here for an hour only to disappear, mushrooms of the sea.” He approached one of the islands, only to have it vanish into thick air. Lindbergh wondered how he would ever be able to recognize Europe when he actually reached its shores.
Over the next hour, the fog evanesced. Although there were occasional showers, Lindbergh was able to fly below two hundred feet, often within ten feet of the waves. He felt reconnected to the planet, but he was not sure where he was. He continued to fight sleep and to follow his chart, but mental fatigue made simple computation an exhausting challenge. It was impossible to establish his location because too many variables had entered the equation—his detours over St. John’s and around the earlier thunderheads as well as the magnetic storm. He also could not calculate the velocity and direction of the wind for the past twelve hours.
Lindbergh knew only where he was meant to be and that he had been flying for an hour and a day. He reached into his flying-suit pocket for a handkerchief and was surprised to find, among his knife, pencils, and flashlight, the St. Christopher medal. This could not be a hallucination, for he could feel the silver disk showing a saint and child; but he had no idea where it came from. Within minutes, he looked down and saw a dark object swimming through the water. It was a porpoise, the first sign of life he had seen since Newfoundland. The next hour brought a gull.
Drawing on all his reserves to remain awake, Lindbergh remembered he was carrying smelling salts in his first-aid kit. He opened one of the capsules of aromatic ammonia, thinking it would revive him; but he smelled nothing and his eyes would not tear. He floated onward until another vision captured his attention—several small boats looking like dots on a giant canvas. It took another moment before his mind comprehended the significance of the sight. There was no denying that there were fishermen below, who must have shipped out from a nearby harbor. Lindbergh approached one of the boats and saw a man’s head poke through a porthole. Within fifty feet of the water and circling the boat, Lindbergh closed the throttle and leaned out his window, shouting, “WHICH WAY IS IRELAND!”
He passed the ship several times but got no response. The men below were no doubt as puzzled by the sight of him as he was of them, for Lindbergh figured he had at least another two and a half hours before reaching land. Flying through a brief rain, he saw another image on the horizon—only this time it seemed more fixed than his other visions. He discerned a jagged coastline, fjords giving way to green fields. He placed a map on his knees; and, looking back and forth between the crude earth outside and the fine lines on his lap, he saw how they corresponded. He had arrived at Dingle Bay on the southwestern coast of Ireland.
Lindbergh was sure this was no mirage. He spiraled down toward a village alive with people running into the streets, looking up, and waving. According to his chart, he was only six segments away from Paris, six hours, six hundred miles. After twenty-eight hours of perilous flight, he was less than three miles off course.
The sun began its descent for the second time since he had left Roosevelt Field. His flight path grazing the southern tip of Ireland, he put the greenery of county Kerry behind him. Revived, only the third act of his flight remained.
Across America, day was breaking, bringing reports from overseas. The steamer Hilversum had spotted the Spirit of St. Louis hours earlier, five hundred miles from the Irish coast; the steam collier Nogi had seen a low-flying gray plane near Valencia. In western Pennsylvania, Jimmy Stewart raced to his father’s store at dawn to move his model plane to the southern tip of Ireland, only to have his optimism confirmed by a radio bulletin later in the day.
Almost everybody felt bullish that morning. Wall Street had been prospering for months; and during that half day of business, stocks had their heaviest Saturday trading in a year and a half. Wright Aeronautical was the most impressive gainer, opening at 293/4and closing up 5 3/4 points. Throughout Lindbergh’s flight, the exchanges in Amsterdam and Berlin had interrupted their quotations to provide updates. At midnight in Tokyo, thousands of people flocked to the streets. Lloyd’s of London at last began issuing odds, 10 to 3 against Lindbergh’s making Paris.
The newspapers in France used their boldest typeface for the special editions that afternoon. Although still bemoaning the disappearance of Nungesser and Coli, France set about welcoming Lindbergh as it felt America would have greeted the French pilots. Once it appeared that he would not arrive in daylight, the government ordered the air-route illuminated, lighting the airfields between Cherbourg and Le Bourget.
Since dawn in New York, people descended upon newsstands, turning into mobs as each edition of the city’s dozen different newspapers was dropped off. The New York Times received over ten thousand calls that day.
“As I write this, you are flying over the wide ocean,” wrote Juno Lindbergh Butler—C.A.’s sister—unaware of Charles’s progress. “I do not like to think of it but can think of nothing else. When you receive this the ‘world will be yours.’ It is at your feet now and you cannot imagine how proud we are of you, both for your bravery and because you have kept a level head and a strong heart, with all the adulation that has been heaped upon you.” Despite the bad blood that had spilled between the Lindberghs and Charles’s mother, Aunt Juno had to grant that part of that day’s glory should go to her. “It takes a brave mother to wish her boy goodbye and Godspeed on such a journey with the calm confidence she displayed,” she wrote. Meantime, Evangeline sat in her small frame house in Detroit with “Brother,” police protection at the front and rear gates, her telephone off the hook.
Under a pleasant sky and over St. George’s Channel—one of the lesser gulfs into which the Atlantic dissolves—Lindbergh felt that the “great difficulties of the flight” were behind him. Having burned close to seventeen hundred pounds of fuel, the plane felt unburdened. He had nothing more than the equivalent of a roundtrip between St. Louis and Chicago to complete. Then, without warning, the entire plane shook, as the engine jerked against its mounting.
After twenty-nine hours of the steady rhythm of the Wright Whirlwind, it coughed erratically. As Lindbergh prepared for a forced landing, he considered that it was his hubris that was bringing him down—“Have I grown too confident, too arrogant, before my flight is done?” He realized that the problem was nothing more than his nose tank, the forwardmost of his five, running dry. He had only to turn some valves before gasoline was once again nourishing the thirsty motor.
Counting his pencil marks, Lindbergh reckoned his life was no longer at stake. Even if England or France were fogged in, he had enough gasoline to return to Ireland. Having caught his second wind, he considered flying over Paris, dipping his wings, and continuing on to Rome. Reason prevailed. When he passed over Plymouth, he could not help thinking of the Mayflower, which needed two months to reach America; this pilgrim had skirted by Plymouth Rock only thirty hours earlier. Just as the sun was setting, he crossed the English Channel to France, the very coast from where Nungesser and Coli were last sighted.
Looking down on Cherbourg, he took a moment to congratulate himself, realizing that he was at last over “the country of my destination” and that he had made the first nonstop airplane flight between the continents of America and Europe. Crossing the Baie de la Seine to the Normandy coast, with Le Havre off to his left, Lindbergh reached Deauville. He had flown thirty-five hundred miles, breaking the world’s distance record for a nonstop airplane flight.
At the mouth of the Seine, Lindbergh celebrated by reaching for food for the first time since he sat in the hangar at Curtiss Field. He vised the stick with his knees and reached under his wicker chair for the paper bag, from which he pulled one of the five wrapped sandwiches. He unscrewed the cap of his canteen and realized that he could at last drink all the water he wanted. The sandwich satisfied his hunger, but it had no taste. Swallowing was an effort, each bite requiring a mouthful of water. That was all he chose to eat. He stuffed the wrapping back into the bag, not wanting “the litter from a sandwich to symbolize my first contact with France.”
A few bright lights flashed in the distance, air beacons marking the approach to Paris. To gain greater perspective, Lindbergh climbed to four thousand feet. From that height the ground assumed the appearance of the galaxy above. Lights became more frequent as the country grew less rural; towns appeared as constellations; and bright clusters of cities shone through the clear night air. Ahead in the distance appeared a glow that brightened into something akin to the aurora borealis—“a patch of starlit earth under a starlit—sky—the lamps of Paris—straight lines of lights, curving lines of lights, squares of lights, black spaces in between.” He circled once above the Eiffel Tower—which displayed vertical sprays of lights as shooting stars, spelling out “CITROEN“—then headed northeast.
Although he had found Paris, Lindbergh could not locate Le Bourget. At the place he expected the landing field he discovered a black patch that was large enough for that purpose; but its perimetral lighting made no sense. Where an airport should be outlined by regularly spaced lights, this was surrounded by an erratic pattern: one corner of the field appeared to be washed with floodlights; and there seemed to be another string of lights stretching all the way to Paris. He flew another few miles in search of the airport; but after five minutes into rural darkness, he returned to the long strand of lights and spiraled lower. With each glance out the window of his banking plane, more of the airfield revealed itself. Those tens of thousands of surrounding lights, he realized, were the headlamps of automobiles stuck in traffic.
Several times he circled the field, surrendering altitude, surveying the approaching ground. He fastened his safety belt, checked his instrument panel, got a look at the wind sock, and figured where to bring his plane down. He came in close enough to see the texture of the sod, then climbed to a thousand feet for his final approach.
He circled around into the wind, began pulling back on the stick, closing the throttle, cutting his speed, approaching the field until the wheels touched ground, bounced gently and returned to earth, at which time the tail skid touched down. The plane kept rolling into an easy turn, coming to a momentary stop in a dark section right in the middle of Le Bourget. It was 10:24 P.M. Paris time—thirty-three and one-half hours since takeoff. Lindbergh taxied toward the floodlights. Then looking out his window, he was thunderstruck.
The 150,000 people at the airfield stood everywhere—on tops of cars, on tops of the airport buildings, and mostly on the ground behind a fence guarded by the Le Bourget field police, special units of Paris agents, and two companies of soldiers with fixed bayonets. American Ambassador to France Myron T. Herrick was escorted to the overcrowded pavilion at one end of the field for a formal reception of the aviator.
When Lindbergh brought the Spirit of St. Louis into the glow of lights on the field, he saw a human tidal wave. “The movement of humanity swept over soldiers and by policemen and there was the wild sight of thousands of men and women rushing madly across half a mile of the not too even ground,” reported The New York Times’s ace foreign correspondent Edwin L. James. “Soldiers and police tried for one small moment to stem the tide, then they joined it, rushing as madly as anyone else toward the aviator and his plane.”
Seventy-three-year-old Ambassador Herrick, who had been around public events most of his life, swore he had never seen anything like it—“not the pandemonium the newspapers always tell about at political conventions, but the real thing…. Soldiers and police were swept away, the stout fence was demolished, and the crowd surged toward the airplane.” The first to reach Lindbergh were Le Bourget workmen, who cried, “Cette fois, ça va!” (“This time, it’s done!”)
Numerous quotations have been attributed to Lindbergh upon seeing faces pushing their heads inside the Spirit of St. Louis—such statements as “I’m Charles Lindbergh” and “Well, I made it”—which he forever denied making. In truth, all he said was, “Are there any mechanics here?”
In the hysterical din, his words meant nothing. Even if somebody had replied in English, Lindbergh probably would not have been able to hear, for the noise of his engine still whirred in his ears, drowning out all sound except the ominous cracking of wood and ripping of fabric. Before he had got the door of his plane open, the first great wave of humanity had crashed over him, keeping him from even putting a foot on the ground. Arms grabbed him, rendering him helpless as he floated over the sea of heads.
After several minutes, he was able to stand on the earth for the first time, and he got caught in the riptide of the masses. A few quick-thinking Frenchmen ran to his rescue. One pulled off Lindbergh’s helmet and put it on an American reporter who happened to be standing next to him. In that same instant, a French civil flier named George Delage threw his coat over Lindbergh’s shoulders and ran off to get his car while his friend, military pilot Michel Détroyat, pushed Lindbergh to the periphery of the crowd. In the confusion, the mob descended upon the man wearing the helmet, while Détroyat and Lindbergh were able to duck into Delage’s Renault.
They drove him to a hangar on the side of the field, where, in its small waiting room, they offered him food and medical attention. They kept most of the lights out, to avoid attracting attention. France was his, they said. Lindbergh’s only concern was for his plane, to which he wished to return. Delage and Détroyat made him understand the inadvisability of such a move. He asked about immigration and customs, which got a laugh; and he asked about Nungesser and Coli, which elicited sad expressions.
Détroyat left and returned minutes later with Major Pierre Weiss of the Bombardment Group of the Thirty-fourth A. F. Regiment. Weiss could not believe Delage and Détroyat had been harboring the hero because, he explained, “Lindbergh has just been carried triumphantly to the official reception committee.” The four men piled into Delage’s Renault and drove across the field, where they waited in Weiss’s office; Weiss left to bring Myron Herrick to the actual owner of the hero’s helmet.
It was after midnight when Herrick, with his son and daughter-in-law, reached Weiss’s darkened office. Lindbergh offered his letters of introduction, which were unnecessary. Herrick said, “Young man, I am going to take you home with me and look after you.” Lindbergh drew closer and explained that he still could not hear very well. Herrick repeated his offer, which Lindbergh accepted, though he said he hoped to visit his plane before leaving the field. Again, the obvious arguments against such an attempt were aired. But Lindbergh had been worrying about the cracking and ripping noises he had heard as the crowd had seized him, and he said there were a few items he wished to retrieve.
They drove to the hangar where the Spirit of St. Louis had been parked. Lindbergh was shocked to see the crowd had ripped off pieces of the actual plane as souvenirs; a lubrication fitting and the clipboard with his log of the flight were gone. Further inspection revealed, however, that no serious harm had been done. The plane would spend the night under military guard.
Herrick intended to drive Lindbergh into Paris, but through a misunderstanding, Lindbergh, Weiss, Détroyat, and Delage all found themselves packed again into the Renault, detouring several miles over backroads to the west before heading south into the city. They drove through the Saint Ouen gate toward the Place de l’Opéra—where crowds had been dancing in the streets for hours—then straight up the Boulevard Haussmann.
Lindbergh’s guides had selected the tomb of the Unknown Soldier as his first stop in Paris. They all got out and stood in silence in the middle of the Étoile, under the Arc de Triomphe. Lindbergh swayed slightly, his legs buckling. They returned to the car and drove to the chancery in the Rue de Chail-lot, which they thought was the Ambassador’s residence. The police redirected them to No. 2, avenue d’Iéna—one block up a steep hill from the Seine.
Ambassador Herrick had telephoned ahead to his staff to prepare a room and food for their late-night visitor. The French aviators left Lindbergh in the care of Herrick’s butler, who served a platter of chicken and side dishes, which Lindbergh declined in favor of an egg and some bouillon. He excused himself to bathe.
Traffic kept the Ambassador from reaching his home until three o’clock that morning. He found his visitor sitting on the edge of a bed in a guestroom, wearing a robe and slippers and a pair of Herrick’s pajamas. The street in front of the house had filled with newspapermen, and Herrick suggested that Lindbergh grant them a brief audience. Lindbergh explained that his backers in St. Louis had contracted with The New York Times for him to give them an exclusive interview, and that he could not violate those terms. Herrick’s son, Parmely, went downstairs to the salon, where some reporters were already waiting, to find the Times’s representative, Carlyle MacDonald. As diplomatic as his father, Parmely suggested to MacDonald that “this thing seemed too big an affair to be made the exclusive news of any one paper”; and he asked him to consent to Lindbergh’s meeting all the reporters. MacDonald agreed, and the corps of pressmen cheered before being shown upstairs.
Lindbergh’s room was blue and gold, with a soft light glowing. He stood to greet his callers, and they insisted he be seated. He grinned and said, “It’s almost as easy to stand up as it is to sit down.” The journalists peppered him with questions, all of which he answered in few words. After seven or eight minutes, Herrick suggested that any further questions would be an undue strain on Lindbergh—who had by then been awake for sixty-three hours. The newspapermen withdrew. Lindbergh shook Ambassador Herrick’s hand and said there was no need to awaken him in the morning, as he was “sure to be up and ready at nine o’clock.”
At 4:15 A.M., Lindbergh got into one of the narrow twin beds in his room, a delicate but sturdy Louis XVI replica, with a carved headboard, frame, and footboard in beige and teal. Two meters in length, it was barely long enough for the weary pilot.
As soon as the journalists left, Ambassador Herrick cabled Evangeline Lindbergh in Detroit. “WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP,” he said. “YOUR INCOMPARABLE SON HAS HONORED ME BY BEING MY GUEST STOP HE IS IN FINE CONDITION AND SLEEPING SWEETLY UNDER UNCLE SAMS ROOF.”