The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (39 page)

So many of Eddie’s bones had been broken that at last the doctors decided to place his entire body from head to toe in a cast—except for his right arm—to let the knitting process begin. His bed was rigged with trusses and other contraptions to keep his limbs elevated and immobile. The next day he took a turn for the worse, and death seemed to surround him in his hospital bed.

Reporters hanging around the hospital quickly picked up word that Rickenbacker was dying. That evening Walter Winchell, the popular gossip columnist, announced on his national radio show that Eddie would be dead within the hour. With his good right hand Rickenbacker seized a bedside water pitcher and flung it at the radio.

For the next ten days Eddie remained in the delicate state between life and death. There were times when he would sink; his pulse would either quicken or become dangerously slow. But inevitably he would rally. Dr. McRae told him he’d never seen a patient with so much determination to live. All during this time Adelaide was a tower of strength, encouragement, and bravery. She sat by his bed night and day, holding his hand, attentive to his every need.

They kept him sedated with morphine but Eddie was suffering from hallucinations and begged to be taken off it. The doctor told him he wouldn’t be able to stand the pain, but at last he took Eddie off the drug for twenty-four hours. The pain was awful but Rickenbacker felt himself rally and “began to get better immediately.”

After six weeks doctors removed the full body cast, introducing an entirely new period of torture. In order to repair the smashed hip socket a hole was drilled through his thigh bone so that a technician could slowly work the ball of the socket back in place. They put his arm back in a cast but the pain was so excruciating that Rickenbacker gnawed the cast off with his teeth. After that, the doctors left it uncasted.

During the four months that Rickenbacker stayed in the hospital some eighteen thousand letters, cards, telegrams, and gifts arrived for him. Get well wishes came from such diverse individuals as Fiorello La Guardia, J. Edgar Hoover, and Ernst Udet. Enough flower arrangements and potted plants arrived during his stay to decorate every ward and room in the hospital. In time Rickenbacker graduated from a wheelchair to a self-propelled pushcart and then to crutches and walking canes, and finally on June 25, 1941, he was released from the hospital. He looked god-awful—thin, ashen, disheveled—when he boarded a special plane that Eastern Air Lines had sent for him.

When the flight arrived at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, Rickenbacker was greeted with cheers by several hundred Eastern employees as he stepped down the stairway with the aid of a cane. Reporters asked Eddie if he thought America should enter the war and he replied, “We are in it, and have been in it for a year. A lot of people don’t realize that. The sooner everyone knows we are in, the better it will be.” Another reporter asked whether it was vital to the United States that Hitler be defeated. Rickenbacker replied, “The sooner we crush Hitler, the better.” He had by then come full circle.
²¹

The family took a cottage on Connecticut’s Candlewood Lake where they spent the summer during Eddie’s slow recovery. An orderly from Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital came along as massage therapist and exercise coach. Eddie found that rowing a boat every day was beneficial; he also found that for the first time he was able to spend his days uninterrupted with the boys.

Eventually Rickenbacker began to spend several days a week in New York tending to business. He was in his office on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when news came over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor—just as Billy Mitchell had predicted. The news left him not only angered but also frustrated that a big war was now on and he was so infirm. His body wasn’t straight anymore, and he had a permanent limp in his left leg because of a severed nerve. In fact, he had to give up driving because he couldn’t use that leg to disengage the clutch of his automobile.

There were a few things he could do, though, and first was to announce that the Indianapolis Speedway was closed for the duration. The nation could not afford to waste the fuel, metal, and tire rubber the race used up, Rickenbacker said, and the engineers, mechanics, and drivers would be needed in the military. Second, he began making arrangements for Eastern Air Lines to cooperate with the military in all ways possible.

As winter came, Eddie and Adelaide retired to a houseboat in Florida, where he continued his rowing and exercising, hoping to get back into the best possible shape. Meantime, the war had become a perfect cascade of disasters. Germany had declared war on the United States right after Pearl Harbor and launched a relentless campaign of submarine warfare that threatened to destroy the U.S. Merchant Marine. The Japanese continued their rampage across the Pacific, occupying lands from Alaska to Southeast Asia and south through Indonesia to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Wake Island had fallen, the Philippines was near collapse, and Australia and India were threatened.

For all of the horror and pain that it caused, the plane crash did have some positive effect on Eddie. Once more he felt that he was being tested, that he’d been allowed to live “for some good purpose … for some opportunity to serve.” In March 1942 he was still wondering what that might be when he received a phone call from Hap Arnold, who was now the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Arnold asked if Rickenbacker could come to Washington for a private talk, something he could not say over the phone. The following Monday, in Arnold’s office, he disclosed to Eddie that his staff was receiving reports that the morale of air force groups being trained for combat was abysmal. “They’re indifferent. They haven’t got the punch to do the job they’re being prepared for,” Arnold said. He asked Eddie if he could go on a tour, immediately, and “put some fire in them, and while you’re there, look around and see what our problems are.”

Rickenbacker said he’d be honored, but that he needed ten days to clear his desk, that his boys were coming home for Easter and he’d be ready afterward. Arnold told him the problem was too large to wait. Some of these troops would be on their way overseas by then and they needed a Rickenbacker talking-to
now
. “It is that serious,” Arnold said.

“I’ll go right away, General,” Eddie told him.

To give him some gravitas, Arnold offered to make him a two-star general, but Rickenbacker turned it down. He wanted to remain “Captain Eddie,” a civilian, unencumbered by military orders, and with the right to speak his mind. He left on March 10, 1942, for Tampa’s MacDill Field on a mission that once more would put him deep in the shadow of death.

*
Rickenbacker didn’t like the ring of “major” and was always “Captain Eddie” throughout his long career.

†
Four-wheel braking was not incorporated in the final design because engineers agreed it was a little “too innovative.”

‡
About $63 million today.

§
Milch walked a tightrope during the Hitler regime, since his father’s parents were Jewish, but he was a favorite of Göring, who had Milch’s mother produce a certificate saying that his father was not actually the sire of the child. “It is I,” Göring famously said, “who decides who is a Jew.”

‖
Crosby and his wife, the former Polly Peabody, scandalized Boston from the time of their marriage in 1922 until his death seven years later in a murder-suicide pact with another man’s wife in New York City.

a
Illegal even then, whispering campaigns, complete with paid rumormongers, were often used in the early twentieth century to help put competitors out of business.

b
Udet was an international-class seducer of women, whose conquests included Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany.

c
These Nazi “laws” stripped non-Germans—in particular Jews, blacks, and Gypsies, or Roma—of their civil rights and severely restricted their ability to live productive lives. It was the first step on the way to the Holocaust.

d
The U.S. government actually built more than 300,000 planes during the war.

e
This was the same vibrator beam, or a modified version of it, that had been developed by the Guggenheim Full Flight Laboratory in 1929, the year of Jimmy Doolittle’s historic flight.

f
Had he not done this, it is likely that everyone aboard would have been immolated in a fiery crash.

C
HAPTER
9

AN INSPIRATION IN A
GRUBBY WORLD

L
INDBERGH HAD PLANNED TO CHECK
into a cheap hotel or
pensione
for the night when he landed in Paris, and then spend a week or so fooling around the aerodromes and flying fields, perhaps meeting some French pilots and engineers. Instead he became the object of the greatest celebration in France since the end of World War I, and which became possibly the greatest public outburst in the history of the world.

The members of the press went berserk over the story. In anticipation of Lindbergh’s arrival, it was said that United Press International had arranged for exclusive use of all the public phones at Le Bourget, which nearly resulted in a mini-riot. The phone booth occupied by the chief UPI correspondent was overturned by his competitors with its door down, trapping him inside with all the phone wires ripped out. The night editor of the international edition of the
Chicago Tribune
had not believed that Lindbergh would make it and hence had left no news hole for the story. Thus, next day, a brilliant one-on-one interview with Lindbergh rated only a two-column head, when every other newspaper in the civilized world splashed his success in banner headlines—not to mention that the “interview” itself was a fake,
^*
written by the paper’s Paris correspondent ahead of time to beat the crowd.
¹

Lindbergh was just as astonished as anyone else at the animating effect his successful landing had on the rest of the world. “To me,” he said, “it was like a match lighting a bonfire.” When the Paris telegraph flashed out the news of Lindbergh’s achievement it reached New York radio stations at about five p.m., and the city spontaneously erupted into delirious celebration: all the boats in the harbor, including the ocean liners, began blowing their horns. This in turn set off the fire trucks from Harlem to the Battery, which responded with their own horns and sirens; police cars from Brooklyn to Staten Island chimed in; people in the streets yelled and shook their fists in the air, while those in the high-rise buildings began shredding papers and phone books and throwing the stuff out the window like confetti. On Broadway, performances were interrupted with the news, and theater orchestras arose in their pits and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise.” Scenes such as these were repeated in cities and towns all over America as the radio, telegraph, and telephone broadcast the news.
²

People scrambled to name babies, streets, schools, parks, landmarks, and so forth, after the new hero. The
New York Times
headline
LINDBERGH DOES IT
! covered the entire top of the fold. In the South and Midwest, farmers rang their dinner gongs and churches set their steeple bells clanging. There was a similar outpouring worldwide. From Stockholm to Singapore, from Tokyo to Tegucigalpa, people were seized with the notion that an entirely new horizon had been discovered—as if all men were now bound much closer to one another in a more harmonious, immutable way. Only from the surly bonds of the Soviet Union was there no uproarious celebration or hearty applause; instead, from the Kremlin came a wary silence.

When he arose from sleep at the American embassy in Paris a little after noon, Lindbergh was treated to a warm bath drawn by a butler who left him fresh towels and a robe. Outside, no fewer than twenty-five movie cameras and fifty photographers had set up since early morning, waiting to capture the valiant young flier on film, while several hundred newspaper reporters were loitering in the embassy’s public rooms downstairs. Because Lindbergh had neglected to pack even so much as a business suit, the matter of clothing became urgent. Ambassador Herrick’s valet came to the rescue with a dark suit borrowed from a tall, slender acquaintance, which would have to do while a bevy of Paris tailors arrived to measure Lindbergh for everything from slacks to a top hat and tails. Herrick recognized a good thing when he saw it, for the arrival of Charles Lindbergh was the best thing that had happened to his ambassadorship and he intended to capitalize on it for all it was worth. He cabled Washington: “If we had deliberately sought a type to represent the youth, the intrepid adventure of America … we could not have fared as well as in this boy of divine genius and simple courage.” As one writer observed somewhat snidely, Herrick was delighted that he “had on his hands not a gauche hick from the Middle West backwoods, but a young man who seemed to be normal and comfortable in every situation.”
³

Indeed he was. Lindbergh had his idiosyncrasies, as we shall see, but on the face of it he was highly intelligent, especially about aviation, had a sunny disposition, a naturally smiling countenance, and a lyrical demeanor, and being a captain in the army had taught him always to defer to his elders and betters as “sir.”

In the borrowed suit he spoke from the balcony of the embassy to the assembled mob of journalists, movie and camera crews, and Parisians who were chanting “
Vive Lindbergh!
” in the courtyard below. In reply Lindbergh used the only French phrase he knew, which was “
Vive la France!
,” and waved a French flag, thus entering the great corpus of historical photography while the flash pans hissed and sparkled and the movie cameramen cranked on. At the suggestion of Ambassador Herrick, he mentioned that Benjamin Franklin, when he had been the American envoy to France, had shown great interest in French aerial balloons. Like Rickenbacker before him, Lindbergh was beginning to realize that what he had done was bigger than him, or anything he had ever conceived it might be, and wrote later that he found himself “surrounded by unforeseen opportunities, responsibilities and problems.”