The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (64 page)

Like Lindbergh, Ford had his own sharp distaste for the Roosevelt administration and had been a backer of America First. He also maintained a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company that continued to operate in Germany until the United States entered the war. His relationship with Charles had begun in 1927, the year of Lindbergh’s historic flight, when Lindbergh had given Ford his first—and last—airplane ride in the
Spirit of St. Louis
.

Deeply anti-Semitic, the seventy-eight-year-old Ford was also known for his eccentricities, but Lindbergh felt that his sheer scientific and business genius overrode the other shortcomings and had come to see him almost as a father figure.

Ford needed Lindbergh as a troubleshooter, which in the argot of the manufacturing world translated to “technical consultant,” but in fact meant “test pilot.” Charles told him he’d better check with the War Department and White House first, but Henry Ford, being Henry Ford, did not appreciate the notion of having to “check” with
anyone
—up to and including the White House—when he wanted to hire somebody.

Lindbergh insisted that he wanted no part of bringing difficulties upon the Ford Motor Company, but as it turned out even Roosevelt didn’t want to tangle with Ford. By virtue of silence from the White House Lindbergh was allowed to take up his manifest duties as “technical consultant” for Ford’s aircraft production operations.

W
ORKING IN
D
ETROIT
contained an added bonus for Lindbergh—he could be close to his mother, Evangeline, who, at the age of sixty-six, was showing the first signs of Parkinson’s disease but continued to teach chemistry at a local high school. He argued that she should retire; he had plenty of money to support her. But Evangeline was adamant that she wished to go on teaching and riding the crosstown bus to school each morning.

Because of the tremendous wartime migration to the Detroit area, finding a house became difficult, but Charles located a two-story mock Tudor in the tony section of Bloomfield Hills. With the baby due in several months’ time Anne dreaded the idea of having to leave their idyllic place on the Vineyard—especially for Detroit—but accepted that her place was with her husband. Her arrival was marred when, just as they were moving in, their small terrier Kelpie was run over and killed. Anne hoped it was not an omen.
⁴

Lindbergh had just arrived at Willow Run when—only eleven days after he had returned to the United States from his celebrated raid on Tokyo—Jimmy Doolittle landed at the airfield in a Martin B-26 twin-engine bomber he was flying to compare with the B-25s his men had flown on the raid. He and Lindbergh had lunch, along with some army officers and Ford officials. Charles gave few details of their meeting other than to say that Doolittle “looked somewhat tired.”

During his early days at Willow Run Lindbergh immersed himself in the aerodynamic characteristics of the B-24 by flying it for days on end, and soon he set to solving the many problems associated with the plane. After meeting with Hap Arnold in Washington he reported that among the combat air crews the B-17 was by far the preferred heavy bomber since, as Arnold confided, “when we send the B-17s out on a mission most of them return. When we send the B-24s out, a good many of them don’t.” Even if this somewhat overstated the case, it was a serious indictment, and Lindbergh pledged to find solutions.

By interviewing pilots who had flown in combat, he quickly assessed a number of areas that could be improved upon: the B-24 radios didn’t work properly; the armament was in the wrong place or more was needed; there were mechanical problems with the cylinders, the bottom turret, and the nose gun turret; controls were stiff; takeoff run was too long; and so forth. One overarching difficulty was that the workmen on the B-24 had previously worked on automobiles, and the difference between a car and a huge, complicated four-engine bomber with miles of electrical wire, precision parts, weaponry, unfamiliar widgets, and gadgets was overwhelming. The sheer grandiosity of the thing was simply baffling to men who had been accustomed to bolting cylinder heads on 90-horsepower Ford Coupe engine blocks with socket wrenches or slapping a car chassis on a Ford frame.

But beyond all that was the most unsettling trouble of all: Lindbergh detected widespread laziness among the workers. “They appeared to be doing something when I approached,” he said, but when he looked back they seemed to be loafing. He did not mention labor unions in this particular appraisal but later expressed his dissatisfaction with organized labor and its seeming lack of interest in creating an atmosphere of the careful and meticulous work ethic necessary to construct aircraft.

On August 12, 1942, Anne gave birth to Scott Lindbergh, although, in typical Lindbergh fashion, it would be four more months before the parents filled out a birth certificate.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER 1942
, Lindbergh volunteered to be a human guinea pig in a dangerous series of tests on the effects of high-altitude flying. Oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, begins at about 8,000 to 10,000 feet. By around 20,000 feet humans cannot live but a brief time without bottled oxygen. Above 20,000 feet is considered “extreme altitude,” which was where many military fighter planes were now operating. (Mount Everest, for instance, is 29,000 feet.) At the time, many believed that being deprived of oxygen above 40,000 feet would cause the blood to boil, as the water in the blood changed to vapor, resulting in permanent, or fatal, damage to the brain and other organs.

Lindbergh had heard of some experiments in high-altitude flight being conducted at the notable Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where an operation known as the Aeromedical Research Unit was located. Chaired by Dr. Walter Boothby, the unit operated a simulated altitude chamber, a scary-looking apparatus similar in appearance to a gas chamber, which could replicate atmospheres of 40,000 feet and above. Lindbergh got in the thing and, ascending with a rate of climb faster than an airplane, began testing different oxygen masks to determine which was best for pilots.

Here his two great interests, aviation and medicine, intersected, and the scientist in him began to overtake his reflective persona. Next morning he was back in the chamber to an altitude of 44,200 feet for nearly half an hour. He took a ride in a “G” machine that the unit operated, a kind of human centrifuge that simulates the acceleration a pilot experiences coming out of a dive, pulling 5.8 G’s, which is near the outside of what a person can tolerate without special pressurized gear.

In the coming months he returned to the altitude chamber time and again, testing the army’s emergency oxygen equipment, often pushing himself so far that he lapsed into unconsciousness. This produced severe headaches later. Dr. Boothby and others worried that Charles was overdoing his trials, but—like Jimmy Doolittle and his outside loop—Lindbergh persevered with the well-known Lindbergh disdain for caution.

He also performed simulated parachute jumps in the chamber to determine if the oxygen bottle attached to the chute was adequate to get the pilot down to safety. In the end he concluded that army pilots flying at altitude were equipped with insufficient protection.

After two weeks at the Mayo Clinic he was home again in Bloomfield Hills, having dinner with Anne in the parlor where she read him her latest poem (“Christopher”). The boys were growing up now; Land was entering first grade, and Charles one day discovered ten-year-old Jon at his mother’s Detroit home “in the basement, bending glass tubing over one of Grandfather’s old Bunsen burners.”

At the end of October Lindbergh extended his experiments to actual flight and began high-altitude experiments at Willow Run with the P-47 Thunderbolt, the largest, most powerful, and most expensive single-engine fighter plane thus far in history. A modern low-wing aircraft, the Thunderbolt boasted a 2,000-horsepower Ford-built Pratt & Whitney radial engine that could climb above 40,000 feet and fly at a speed of about 430 miles per hour—a far cry from the 90-horsepower Curtiss Jenny he’d learned to fly in twenty years earlier.
^‡
There had been a rumor that ten P-47s had crashed in Florida on takeoff, killing their pilots, but Lindbergh tracked it down and proved it false.

He was able to fine-tune the fuel mixture to coax even more altitude from the plane, and in months of testing he made such a number of changes in emergency equipment—especially in the event of a high-altitude failure—that he is credited with saving countless pilots’ lives. On several of these experiments he nearly lost his own life.

Once at 36,000 feet Lindbergh’s cockpit suddenly began to fill with smoke, but he managed to land on the Willow Run runway with barely enough fuel to fly. Another time the strip holding the emergency-hatch exit blew off. And on another occasion still, at 36,000 feet his oxygen suddenly cut off, though the gauge showed it was flowing correctly. In moments he was overcome by “that vagueness of mind and emptiness of breath which warn a pilot of serious lack of oxygen.” He wondered if his mask was leaking and shoved it against his face. At this altitude a pilot without oxygen has no more than fifteen seconds before losing consciousness. Reflexively, Lindbergh shoved the stick forward into a dive; the altimeter began spinning; he began to lose consciousness; he was going so fast the plane started to shriek; the noise woke him up. At 15,000 feet, consciousness returned and he pulled up on the stick and zoomed. His mental clarity was restored.

“Returning from the border of death always makes one more aware of life,” Charles wrote later. The mechanic told him the oxygen gauge read fifty pounds too high. “That had caused all my troubles,” he said, “a quarter-inch error of a needle.”
⁵

Lindbergh’s testing often took him away from Willow Run. At one point he found himself in the Florida panhandle at Eglin Field, where Jimmy Doolittle had trained his raiders and where Charles flew a British Mosquito, a two-seat bomber with twin Rolls-Royce engines—made out of wood. Many of these planes he flew were experimental or obsolete and the work was hazardous. All the planes were unfamiliar and many had mechanical or aeronautical deficiencies.

On one occasion he visited the Hartford, Connecticut, plant of United Aircraft Corporation, which manufactured the Vought F4U Corsair, the workhorse fighter plane of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in the Pacific.
^§
Eugene Wilson, the company’s president, who had told Lindbergh back in the summer of ’42 when he inquired about a job that he was “dynamite,” now informed him that “considerable water has gone under the bridge since we last talked with you” and asked if Charles was in a position to help United as a technical consultant to the Corsair.
⁶

Lindbergh was thrilled. His work with the P-47 Thunderbolts was nearly finished, as they were now going into production at Willow Run, and likewise his contribution to the B-24 was almost complete. He jumped at a chance to work with the Corsair, a low-curved, folding-wing, 2,000-horsepower, eighteen-cylinder single-seat fighter that reached diving speeds in excess of 500 miles per hour. Lindbergh began spending a lot of time in Hartford, at first teaching navy and marine pilots the fine points of flying the Corsair, and later engaged in simulated combat maneuvers. Deak Lyman, the reporter to whom Lindbergh had given the exclusive story that he was taking his family to England, had left the
New York Times
and was now an executive with United Aircraft. He distinctly remembered the time Charles took on two of the top-rated marine pilots in a high-altitude gunnery contest, in which the forty-one-year-old Lindbergh “outguessed, outflew and outshot” both of the twenty-something-year-old would-be aces.
⁷

Charles had also grown somewhat disenchanted working for Ford, in particular because of the shoddy work on the B-24s that he could not seem to get resolved. Once he complained to a high company official about the poor quality of workmanship. “He says again that I am a perfectionist!” Lindbergh wrote in exasperation, as if an aircraft in trouble could simply be pulled off the road like a car.

A
S 1943
CAME TO A CLOSE
, Lindbergh felt that he had done all he could at both Ford and United Aircraft in the United States. But what he had not been able to do was observe how the aircraft they were manufacturing fared in actual combat. Twenty years earlier the army had trained Lindbergh to be a fighter pilot and, ever since, he had been itching to go into combat. Now, at the age of forty-one, he saw his chance. What he had in mind was a trip to the South Pacific theater to compare—under extreme flying conditions—the army’s twin-boom P-38 with the navy’s Corsair and see what could be done to improve their performance.

By that stage of the war, following the island-hopping scheme, MacArthur’s army was still having a rough time of it on New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific, while the marines were moving on to the central Pacific where they continued to fight big island battles—Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok. Meanwhile, the Americans had left behind relatively undisturbed a string of large Japanese bases, coiled on other islands like wounded, angry beasts, which—though they were not believed to pose a major threat to the American rear—were still highly dangerous and prone to lash out with their airpower. For their part, the Americans left behind did not intend to let these pockets of Japanese resistance remain undisturbed and unmolested, and so a nasty little air war was being conducted on a daily basis, high above the placid tropical islands. It was there that Lindbergh hoped to conduct his tests of American combat aircraft.

He broached the subject quietly, through back channels, using old friends as contacts, among them his first cousin (now) Admiral Jerry Land (who had at last forgiven him for his strident isolationism). On January 5, 1944, in Washington, Lindbergh approached U.S. Marine General Louis E. Woods about going to the South Pacific to survey Corsair bases. Woods was receptive and said he would raise the matter with higher naval officers. That day in his journal Lindbergh wondered, doubtless with bated breath, “But will they feel they have to bring the matter to Roosevelt’s attention?”