The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (36 page)

Still, Rickenbacker needed more income to pay off his creditors, so he took a job at General Motors for $12,000 a year as vice president for sales, promoting and publicizing the company’s LaSalle and Cadillac brands. He put a man in charge of the Speedway operation in Indianapolis, and GM agreed that he could have a leave of absence during the month of May when the Indianapolis 500 was held.

The job with GM necessitated working out of New York City, where Eddie purchased a comfortable, rambling home in Bronxville, an affluent suburb in Westchester County. He needed the space because by now he was the father of two young boys, William Frost, age one, and David Edward, three. Adelaide and Eddie had adopted them, since she could no longer have children of her own.

In May 1927 Charles Lindbergh stunned the world when he flew nonstop between New York and Paris, landing in the dark at Le Bourget airport, which had so impressed Rickenbacker when he’d visited there in 1922. Eddie was just as excited by the feat as everyone else, but he also realized he himself was no longer the most famous airman in America.

As usual, Eddie took his work at GM very seriously, as he had when he commanded the 94th Aero Squadron. Rickenbacker refused to sit behind a desk, instead traveling into the field visiting hundreds of dealerships throughout the country. Once he called on seventy-one different dealers in eighty-one days. After Eddie had made an assessment of an operation, he would call the entire workforce together and harangue them with lengthy motivational speeches offering encouragement, criticism, and advice. In the end he recommended to GM that it discontinue its LaSalle model—not that there was anything wrong with it—because it was competing against its own Cadillac brand. Next season, LaSalle was no more.

Meanwhile, using leverage again to do a deal, Rickenbacker at last purchased Allison Engineering, and soon he sold it to GM, pocketing a tidy sum, most of which went to reduce the notes to his creditors.

In June of 1929 GM bought the Fokker Aircraft Company, which was connected to Trans World Airlines, and Eddie was asked to be vice president in charge of sales. It seemed ironic that he would now be working for the same outfit that built airplanes that had tried so hard to kill him, but he accepted. It was the end of his affiliation with the auto industry and the beginning of an illustrious career in commercial aviation.

By now Fokker was building large passenger planes. It had introduced the famous Fokker trimotor F-10 in the mid-1920s and was now producing a four-engine plane, the F-32, which had “an unfortunate habit of blowing the cylinder heads off.” When this happened, Rickenbacker said, the huge cylinder head, or part of it, would fly back into the rear engine, “which would throw it in any direction.” A friend of Eddie’s told of the time he was enjoying a flight between San Francisco and L.A. when the cylinder crashed through the window by his seat, flew past his nose and out the other window, and smashed into the opposite engine. These were the kinds of things that needed to be dealt with.

During his time at Fokker Eddie acquired the Pioneer Instrument Company, which would be so beneficial to Jimmy Doolittle’s blind-flying experiment with the Guggenheim fund. When news of Doolittle’s perfect blind flight broke into the headlines later that same year, Rickenbacker, perhaps more than anyone else, knew what a godsend it would be for commercial aviation. At last airlines could adhere to firm schedules, without fear of fog and storms.

In the autumn of 1929 the stock market crashed. Especially hard hit were the automotive and aviation industries. Since no one had lived through anything like it before, or ever heard tell about such a thing, no one knew what to do or how long it would last.

Amid the gloom, the War Department announced on July 14, 1930, that Eddie Rickenbacker would be awarded the Medal of Honor, “For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy near Billy, France, September 25, 1918.” The citation referred to his first day as commanding officer of the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron when, flying alone over enemy territory, he took on seven German planes—five Fokkers and two Halberstadt photography aircraft—shooting down two and causing the others to flee.

This honor had been initiated several years earlier by a Michigan congressman, Robert Clancy, and was supported by everyone from Rickenbacker’s squadronmates from the Hat in the Ring gang to Charles Lindbergh, who had also received the award.

It had been opposed, however, by prohibitionists in the Senate, who pointed to newspaper stories revealing Eddie’s penchant for flouting the Volstead Act by having cocktails, and also by high-ranking staff members in the army who remembered Eddie’s spirited defense of Billy Mitchell. These objections were soon overcome when the American Legion became involved; the organization represented too many votes to ignore. On November 6, 1930, at Washington’s Bolling Field, President Herbert Hoover slipped the blue ribbon of the medal over Rickenbacker’s head, with Adelaide and the boys in the forefront of those looking on.

Afterward, there was a substantial air show, including a performance by the 94th Aero, then located in Michigan. Eddie was incensed, however, that Billy Mitchell was left off the invitation list. At one point, Eddie made an attempt to persuade Hoover of the importance of an independent air service but to no avail. “The president was polite and courteous,” Eddie said, “but his interests were not in military aviation.”

In March 1931 a TWA Fokker trimotor airliner en route to Los Angeles was involved in a horrible crash over the wheat fields of Kansas. It was the kind of accident that every aviation company dreads. A wing tore off the plane as it flew out of a low cloud formation. It simply nosed over and dove straight down, burying itself several feet into a cow pasture. A farmer had watched horrified as five passengers fell out and bounced when they hit the ground. Everyone of course was killed. Among the dead was the University of Notre Dame’s legendary football coach Knute Rockne. It was accidents such as this that gave Eddie fits.
¹⁷
In 1932 GM moved the TWA Fokker operation to Baltimore, but without Eddie Rickenbacker, who did not wish to move his family away from New York.

Rickenbacker soon became involved in a series of aviation companies owned by two young Wall Street geniuses, W. Averell Harriman and Robert Lehman. During the next few years he found himself serving as vice president of American Airways, which had east-west routes serving between New York (whose only airport was in Newark, New Jersey) and the Midwest. He had tried to persuade the owners to buy a small outfit then called Eastern Air Transport, which flew passengers on a north-south route from New York to Atlanta and Florida, but he was rebuffed. A year later American was bought by E. L. Cord, manufacturer of the Cord and Auburn automobiles, who moved the home business offices to Chicago, again without Eddie Rickenbacker, who declined to uproot the family and take the boys out of school.

It was around this time that the big airmail brouhaha erupted, which put Rickenbacker in direct conflict with President Roosevelt. He’d voted for Roosevelt in the election of 1932 but was highly critical of what he called Roosevelt’s “socialistic” agenda, which is how Eddie viewed the New Deal. He believed that Roosevelt’s original platform “was sound and conservative and what the country needed.” But it seemed to Rickenbacker that when he got into office the president “made a complete 180-degree turn, and took off in the other direction.”

In December of 1934 an opportunity presented itself that would change Rickenbacker’s life forever. He was approached to become the general manager of Eastern Air Transport, now known as Eastern Air Lines after the government airmail fiasco. It was owned by his old employer GM, and it was losing money to the tune of $1.5 million that very year. Eddie saw it as an opportunity to get back into aviation and accepted the position as a challenge. Florida was gaining a reputation as a vacation destination, and Eddie thought there could be a fine opportunity flying people there, with stops all along the East Coast. New York to Miami by train took two days, whereas an airliner could make it in a matter of hours.

Rickenbacker approached the problem with his usual vigor and persistence, the same way he had with the car companies, popping up everywhere from the Eastern ticket counter selling tickets to the cockpit flying planes; from the mechanics’ shops changing spark plugs to the men’s rooms off the lobby inspecting for cleanliness. He analyzed every aspect of the business, then gave the workers inspirational speeches. He was a stern taskmaster, but employees soon came to understand that he was fair and, more important, they saw that he was working day and night to improve the company. In those days widespread passenger travel was just beginning, as airlines started designing planes with creature comforts in mind—large enclosed cabins, comfortable seats, heating, and meals. Even so it still took at least twenty-five hours to fly from New York to Los Angeles, including several different airlines and changes of planes and more than a dozen stops. With Eddie now running Eastern, the company made $35,000 in 1935. It was a start.

Rickenbacker’s celebrity took off in a different direction with the creation of a comic strip called
Ace Drummond
, which he scripted with the cartoonist Clayton Knight. Loosely based on the Rickenbacker character from World War I, the hero flies his plane all over the world foiling bad men and saving damsels in distress. The comic ran as a Sunday page from 1935 to 1940, and at its peak it was distributed by King Features Syndicate in 135 newspapers. Soon the strip spurred the formation of the Eddie Rickenbacker Junior Pilots Club, which in turn inspired a thirteen-chapter movie serial starring John King as Ace Drummond. The first chapter featured the adventures of Ace Drummond in Mongolia and included dragons, dungeons, and a death ray.

On February 19, 1936, a telegram caught up with Rickenbacker on the road saying that Billy Mitchell had died. Mitchell had been only fifty-six but a bad heart and influenza combined to kill him in a New York City hospital. Eddie went to New York immediately and helped escort the casket from the undertakers to Grand Central Station where it was to be shipped to Mitchell’s childhood home in Milwaukee. It was a poignant, emotional occasion. The casket had been left at the far end of Grand Central, and Eddie and a handful of Mitchell’s close friends carried it through the dark catacombs to the express car on the train. “I felt so bitter, so grief-stricken, so shocked at this ignominious, demeaning end to a brilliant career, that I found the whole episode hard to believe,” Eddie wrote afterward.

Soon enough Mitchell’s crusade would be shockingly vindicated when the Japanese carried out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which put much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet out of commission. In all, sixteen battleships were sunk by airplanes during the Second World War, making clear that airpower was supreme against these large, powerful vessels.

Mitchell was belatedly showered with honors. The B-25 Mitchell bomber was named after him, and would be flown by the crews of Jimmy Doolittle on his famous 1942 raid on Japan. In that year, too, President Roosevelt restored Mitchell to the rank of general and added an additional star, making him a major general. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, posthumously, and inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. Additionally, everything from mountains and high schools to airports, roads, streets, dormitories, and the eating hall at the United States Air Force Academy were named after him. In 1955 a first-rate movie was released,
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell
, starring Gary Cooper and directed by Otto Preminger. In 1999 his portrait was put on a U.S. postage stamp.

All this was to recognize that in fact Mitchell was right and those in power were wrong. Eddie Rickenbacker went even further, giving it as his opinion that if the military had listened to Mitchell right after World War I ended, the United States would have built up such a powerful air force that Hitler and Göring never would have dared to start World War II—a noteworthy ideal.

W
ITH
M
ITCHELL BURIED
, Eddie decided he needed “a change of scenery,” and he took Adelaide and the boys to Europe, ostensibly to examine the state of aviation there. In London they had breakfast with Eddie’s friend the Canadian newspaper baron Max Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook, publisher of the
London Evening Standard
and the
Daily Express
. After learning Rickenbacker’s itinerary, Beaverbrook asked if Eddie would have dinner at his home when he returned. It was a portentous request.

They toured England, France, and Italy by air, the better to see the commercial aviation progress that the Europeans had been making. Germany was high on Rickenbacker’s list, however, because he had heard unsettling rumors since Hermann Göring, now a field marshal, had announced the existence of the Luftwaffe a few months earlier. This was done in flagrant disregard of the Treaty of Versailles, which, under Hitler, the Germans continued to ignore—just as Göring had predicted to Eddie back in 1922.

Arriving in Berlin, Eddie and Adelaide were met once again by Ernst Udet and Erhard Milch, now high-ranking officers in Hitler’s Third Reich, dressed in full Nazi regalia. Milch and Udet escorted the Rickenbackers to the new Air Service building at Tempelhof Airport, which Eddie described as “one big bomb shelter … the size of a city block,” where a grand banquet had been prepared in their honor, hosted by none other than Göring, wearing a grin and a brilliant white uniform so that he resembled a drum major in a marching band.

“Herr Eddie,” Göring greeted him effusively, “do you remember when I told you about the future of our air force when you visited us in 1922?”

Eddie assured him he remembered it clearly.

“
Gut!
” the German beamed, rubbing his hands together in a characteristic gesture. “Now we will show you.” With Udet as guide, they spent three days touring German aviation installations, beginning with Göring and Udet’s old squadron the Richthofen Flying Circus, which was hidden in a pine forest and so well camouflaged that Eddie didn’t realize it was there until he was “right in the middle of it.” In addition to the fighter planes, there were numerous two-seat trainers. When Eddie inquired about these, Udet surprised him by revealing that every man in the squadron was trained to fly—not just the officers but sergeants, privates, mechanics, cooks, clerks, and so on. No manpower was wasted.