Aviator Charles Lindbergh was obsessed with macabre experiments to find the secret of eternal life
Dressed head to toe in robes of black, their faces covered by heavy hoods, the satanic-looking figures assembled around a table on which lay the motionless body of a cat, bled to death in readiness for the gruesome procedure ahead.
The walls, ceilings and floors around them were all black, too, the participants in this secret gathering believing that too much light impeded their concentration.
But one man stood out among the silhouettes in the gloom. Taller than most, and with strikingly blue eyes visible through the slits in his hood, Charles Lindbergh had become one of the most famous men in the world after his solo non-stop flight from New York to Paris in his aeroplane, the Spirit of St Louis.
Intrepid flyer: Charles Lindbergh had become one of the most famous men in the world after his solo non-stop flight from New York to Paris
Now he had embarked on a quest which promised to overshadow even that momentous achievement.
If all went well on that April morning in 1935, he and his colleague Dr Alexis Carrel would have taken a historic step towards achieving what man had strived for since time immemorial: to conquer death and enable human beings to live forever.
The story of Lindbergh's search for immortality is revealed in a fascinating new book which tells how he killed his children's pets in the name of his research, contemplated experiments on psychiatric patients and emulated Adolf Hitler in his determination to restrict the promise of eternal life to an elite of white Westerners.
But perhaps the most incredible revelation of all is that Lindbergh and Carrel were no delusional Frankensteins.
Based on sound scientific principles, their work laid the foundation for medical breakthroughs which today make the promise of perpetual life tantalisingly closer to reality.
For Lindbergh, the path leading to that groundbreaking experiment in 1935 could be traced back to his childhood when, as a shy and virtually friendless young boy growing up on a farm in Minnesota, he dreamed of becoming a doctor.
A failure at school, he didn't get the required qualifications so he became a pilot instead, but he always saw himself primarily as a scientist.
His famous transatlantic crossing in May 1927 was primarily an experiment to test the endurance of air-cooled engines so the 25-year-old aviator was astonished when a crowd of 100,000 people surged forward to meet him in Paris.
Wearing glasses and a fedora to disguise himself from the autograph hunters who subsequently besieged him wherever he went, he was not amused when reporters asked if he carried a lucky rabbit's foot with him on his flights, and whether he liked blondes or brunettes.
He preferred to occupy himself with far more serious matters.
During his 33-and-a-half hour flight he claimed to have seen 'inhabitants of a universe closed to mortal men' moving around his aircraft, some of whom he believed had spoken to him.
From then on, he decided that his mission in life was to become one of these immortals - not as a ghostly apparition but as a flesh-and-blood human.
'If man could learn to fly,' he asked himself, 'Why could he not learn how to live for ever?'
This might have remained an unexplored dream had not his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Morrow, suffered a bout of rheumatic fever, leaving one of her heart valves so badly damaged and her health so precarious that she and her husband had to get permission from her doctor every time they wanted to make love.
Lindbergh could not understand how a simple valve could cause so much suffering.
He regarded the human heart as just a pump that could be fixed or replaced like any other mechanical part and, on a visit to the Rockefeller Institute in New York, he met a man who shared his ideas.
Founded by John D. Rockefeller, the world's richest man, this haven where scientists could pursue their dreams free from the demands of clinical practice was home to the laboratories of the French surgeon Dr Alexis Carrel.
In 1912 he had won the Nobel Prize For Medicine for his pioneering work on sewing severed blood vessels back together, but he had other - rather less scientific - interests.
A believer in spiritualism, and the ability of psychics to contact the dead, Carrel was convinced of the immortality of our souls and saw no reason why our bodies should not similarly last forever.
Search for eternal life: Charles Lindbergh allied himself to the sinister medical experiments of Dr Alexis Carell
His early attempts to play God had included a failed attempt to bring a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy back to life, but his work had a far more serious side.
The first scientist to succeed in growing human tissue in the laboratory, he was convinced that his techniques might one day be extended to create replacement body parts, anticipating the promise of stem cell research by more than half a century.
He was also researching how diseased organs might one day be removed from the body to be repaired and then re-inserted.
To keep them alive while they were outside the body, Carrel was perfecting a technique called perfusion which involved placing the organ concerned in a glass chamber and artificially pumping it with blood.
So far his experiments on the thyroids of cats, dogs and chickens had failed because of bacterial contamination and he needed a mechanical genius to design a perfusion pump which was infection-free.
Who better than Lindbergh? He had, after all, helped fashion the Spirit of St Louis out of wood, canvas and piano wire and flown it for more than 33 hours without a co-pilot, a radio, or even a front windscreen (Lindbergh used a periscope when he needed to see directly ahead).
For an academic failure like Lindbergh, being asked to help a Nobel Prize winner was immensely flattering, especially when he realised that they were of one mind in regarding the body as little more than a living machine, made up of parts which might one day be endlessly renewed.
Two weeks later, he came back with some designs which so impressed Carrel that he invited Lindbergh to work alongside him at the Institute and so began the partnership which would lead to the groundbreaking experiment on that hapless cat in 1935.
It got off to a faltering start, Lindbergh's pumps lacking the pressure needed to perfuse a whole organ.
He laboured unsuccessfully to perfect them until the beginning of 1932 when his work was given a terrible new impetus by the tragedy surrounding his 20-month old son, Charles Jnr.
On the night of Tuesday, March 1, Lindbergh returned to the family home in New Jersey after working in Carrel's laboratory.
He was reading some scientific papers in his study when his baby's nursemaid ran in to tell him that his child was missing from his crib.
There was a ransom note on the windowsill. Lindbergh was still a huge celebrity, receiving some 3,000 fans letters a month, but when the child's body was subsequently discovered in a wooded area some five miles away, some newspapers implicated him in his son's death.
They alleged that Charles Jnr had been born physically or mentally defective, a situation his 'perfect' father found so abhorrent that he murdered him.
Charles and his devoted wife of three years, Anne (who also flew and co-authored books with him), were utterly traumatised.
Seeking refuge from the maelstrom swirling about him, Lindbergh returned to work at the Rockefeller Institute barely three months after his son's disappearance.
Sometimes he spent long hours in the library there, reading grisly accounts of how early pioneers of perfusion tried to bring guillotined corpses back to life by injecting their cold cadavers with warm blood.
At other times, he worked through the night in Carrel's laboratory, hidden away on the top floor of the Institute.
But wherever he was in the building, he knew he could escape the pointing fingers that dogged his every step outside.
One of his rare spells of absence came in February 1935 when a carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann was accused of the abduction and murder of Charles Jr.
Lindbergh attended every day of the trial but he returned to the sanctuary of Carrel's laboratory almost as soon as Hauptmann was found guilty.
There, he continued working feverishly until, finally, fewer than two months later, he was ready to test his latest prototype.
And so, on that memorable April morning in 1935, that unfortunate cat was strapped to a table, drained of its blood and offered up to Carrel and Lindbergh in their flowing black robes (Carrel thought that an all-black environment was more hygienic).
Removing the animal's thyroid, Carrel placed the gland in the perfusion chamber designed by Lindbergh.
They then faced an anxious wait to see whether it would survive outside the body which had housed it.
To their delight, the thyroid was still alive and functioning even after 18 days.
Soon the two men had successfully perfused many other animal organs - including hearts, livers, pancreases and in one ghoulish case the entire limb of a miscarried human foetus.
These were remarkable breakthroughs but it was clear that there was a sinister side to them.
Both men believed in eugenics - the idea that the genetic stock of the human race should be improved by allowing the weak to be eliminated and encouraging the strong to reproduce.
In Carrel's suite of laboratories was a foul-smelling room called the 'mousery' where thousands of rodents were allowed to roam free and fight, often to the death.
The winners were given females to impregnate, the losers were given autopsies. The aim was to see whether this contributed to the creation of 'heroic' mice which were resistant to disease and lived longer.
'If I could do the same tests on humans, I might produce a man who could jump 20ft in the air and live to be 200,' said Carrel.
Clearly both men believed that, if immortality was achieved, it should only be for the select few.
Since they shared a horror of Western civilisation being overtaken by racial 'inferiors', they were in no doubt this elite should be white.
In securing life everlasting for the lucky minority, they also appear to have been prepared to sacrifice lesser mortals to their research.
Their correspondence with various state mental hospitals provides a clue as to who their intended human subjects might have been.
In a letter to Carrel, the administrator at one such institution asks: 'When are you coming to look over some of our feeble-minded prospects?'
Since neither Lindbergh nor Carrel had any psychiatric training, one can only conclude their visits had one purpose: to choose humans unable to give proper consent on which perfusion experiments could be conducted.
Whatever plans they might have had were interrupted when Hauptmann unsuccessfully appealed against his death sentence in the autumn of 1935.
Lindbergh received many death threats from Hauptmann's supporters, some directed at his three-year-old son Jon who was born in August 1932, just a few months after his older brother's murder.
Lindbergh decided to move his family to the safety of Britain, where he rented a large house in Kent and continued his work - this time investigating the claims of Himalayan yogis to have extended their lives by many decades by means of breath control.
His experimental subjects were dozens of guinea pigs and white mice.
Lindbergh had originally given these to his son Jon as pets - the large numbers a precaution against the little boy noticing those who disappeared after his father placed them in a bell-jar and subjected them to varying levels of carbon dioxide.
Soon, Lindbergh's attention was diverted elsewhere. An enthusiastic supporter of Hitler, who he described as a 'great man', he returned home in 1939 to dissuade the U.S. government from joining the war against Germany but was reviled for his views.
Alarmed that his protégé was getting distracted, Carrel begged him to concentrate on his scientific work but Lindbergh refused and, shortly after Carrel's death in Paris in 1944, a traumatic visit to Germany would finally bring his obsession with immortality to an end.
At the end of the war - during which he flew some 50 combat missions in the Pacific - he was part of a deputation sent to Munich to recruit German scientists to share their expertise with the U.S.
During that trip, he visited a concentration camp called Dora, 160 miles south-west of Berlin, where 25,000 people had been worked or beaten to death.
His journal refers repeatedly to the sickening rodent-like stench at Dora which he realised he had smelled before, not in a place of punishment, but a place of science where, in the name of eugenics, the strong were allowed and even encouraged to dominate the weak.
That place was Dr Carrel's mousery at the Rockefeller Institute and the sights and smells of Camp Dora led Lindbergh to re-examine the beliefs and aspirations which had shaped his life and work for so many years.
He began to realise that his commitment to science and pursuit of immortality had made him complicit in a brutally efficient culture of death.
Another epiphany came soon afterwards when his countrymen dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, leaving 100,000 dead.
'This put man in the position of having challenged God,' he wrote.
Now he wondered if he and Carrel hadn't committed the same act of arrogance.
In the coming years, he became a passionate campaigner for peace and the protection of the environment.
But while he may have turned his back on science, science did not turn its back on the work of Lindbergh and Carrel.
In 2006, doctors at the Wake Forest Institute For Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina successfully grew seven replacement human bladders from their patients' cells and similar research is now looking at whether kidneys, livers, tendons, ligaments and even the human heart can be manufactured in the laboratory.
These developments mark a great leap forward in the concept of the body as a living machine made of replaceable parts - an idea conceived by Carrel and Lindbergh at the Rockefeller Institute back in the 1930s.
Might this technology one day provide the secret to the eternal life so eagerly sought by Lindbergh and Carrel?
And, if so, would Lindbergh himself have taken advantage of it had he been given the opportunity?
We will never know because in August 1974 he was admitted to hospital in New York, dying of lymphoma. He spent only a few days there before insisting on returning to his home in the Hawaiian island of Maui.
His doctors advised that the journey would almost certainly kill him and accused him of 'abandoning science' in leaving behind the hospital and the hightech machinery which might prolong his life.
But Lindbergh was adamant. Somehow he survived the flight home and there, at the age of 72, the man who tried so hard to fight death finally succumbed to the fate which awaits us all.
Thoughts on race and racism
Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs about the white race in an article he published in Reader's Digest in 1939:
We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.[99]
Because of his trips to Nazi Germany, combined with a belief in eugenics,[100] Lindbergh was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer.
Lindbergh's reaction to Kristallnacht was entrusted to his diary: "I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans," he wrote. "It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult 'Jewish problem,' but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?"[101] Lindbergh had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938-39, just after Kristallnacht, a time when many Americans reacted with revulsion at the barbarism. He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews,[102] it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted. On the advice of his close friend the eugenicist Alexis Carrel, he cancelled the trip.[102]
In his diaries, he wrote: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence...Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.”
Lindbergh's anti-communism resonated deeply with many Americans, while eugenics and Nordicism enjoyed social acceptance.[87]
Although Lindbergh considered Hitler a fanatic and avowed a belief in American democracy,[103] he clearly stated elsewhere that he believed the survival of the white race was more important than the survival of democracy in Europe: "Our bond with Europe is one of race and not of political ideology," he declared.[104] He had, however, a relatively positive attitude toward blacks (something that was scheduled to be fully revealed in an undelivered speech interrupted by the events that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor[105]). Critics have noticed an apparent influence of German philosopher Oswald Spengler on Lindbergh.[106] Spengler was a conservative authoritarian and during the interwar era, was widely read throughout Western World, though by this point he had fallen out of favor with the Nazis because he had not wholly subscribed to their theories of racial purity.[106]
Lindbergh with Edsel Ford (left) and Henry Ford in the Ford hangar. Photo: August 1927.
Lindbergh developed a long-term friendship with the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who was well known for his anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent. In a famous comment about Lindbergh to Detroit's former FBI field office special agent in charge in July 1940, Ford said: "When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews."[107][108]
Lindbergh considered Russia to be a "semi-Asiatic" country compared to Germany, and he found Communism to be an ideology that would destroy the West's "racial strength" and replace everyone of European descent with "a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown." He openly stated that if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia. He preferred Nordics, but he believed, after Soviet Communism was defeated, Russia would be a valuable ally against potential aggression from East Asia.[106][109]
Lindbergh said certain races have "demonstrated superior ability in the design, manufacture, and operation of machines."[110] He further said, "The growth of our western civilization has been closely related to this superiority."[111] Lindbergh admired "the German genius for science and organization, the English genius for government and commerce, the French genius for living and the understanding of life." He believed that "in America they can be blended to form the greatest genius of all."[citation needed] His message was popular throughout many Northern communities and especially well received in the Midwest, while the American South was Anglophilic and supported a pro-British foreign policy.[112]
Holocaust researcher and investigative journalist Max Wallace in his book, The American Axis, agreed with Franklin Roosevelt's assessment that Lindbergh was "pro-Nazi." However, Wallace finds the Roosevelt Administration's accusations of dual loyalty or treason as unsubstantiated. Wallace considers Lindbergh a well-intentioned, but bigoted and misguided, Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people.[113]
Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, A. Scott Berg, contends Lindbergh was not so much a supporter of the Nazi regime as someone so stubborn in his convictions and relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering that he easily allowed rivals to portray him as one. Lindbergh's receipt of the German medal was approved without objection by the American embassy; the war had not yet begun in Europe. Indeed, the award did not cause controversy until the war began and Lindbergh returned to the United States in 1939 to spread his message of non-intervention. Berg contends Lindbergh's views were commonplace in the United States in the pre–World War II era. Lindbergh's support for the America First Committee was representative of the sentiments of a number of American people.[114]
Yet Berg also notes that "As late as April 1939 – after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia – Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Hitler. 'Much as I disapprove of many things Hitler had done,' he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, 'I believe she [Germany] has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations... in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history.'" Berg also explains that leading up to the war, in Lindbergh's mind, the great battle would be between the Soviet Union and Germany, not fascism and democracy. In this war, he believed that a German victory was preferable because he despised Joseph Stalin's regime, which, at the time, he believed was far worse than Hitler's.[citation needed]
Berg writes that Lindbergh believed in a voluntary rather than compulsory eugenics program.[citation needed] Wallace noted that it was difficult to find social scientists among Lindbergh's contemporaries in the 1930s who found validity in racial explanations for human behavior. Wallace went on to observe that "throughout his life, eugenics would remain one of Lindbergh's enduring passions."[115] In Pat Buchanan's book A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, he portrays Lindbergh and other pre-war isolationists as American patriots who were smeared by interventionists during the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Buchanan suggests the backlash against Lindbergh highlights "the explosiveness of mixing ethnic politics with foreign policy."[116]
Lindbergh always preached military strength and alertness.[117][118] He believed that a strong defensive war machine would make America an impenetrable fortress and defend the Western Hemisphere from an attack by foreign powers, and that this was the U.S. military's sole purpose.[119]
Berg reveals that while the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a shock to Lindbergh, he did predict that America's "wavering policy in the Philippines" would invite a bloody war there, and, in one speech, he warned that "we should either fortify these islands adequately, or get out of them entirely."[114]
[edit] World War II
VMF-222 "Flying Deuces"
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh sought to be recommissioned in the USAAF. The Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, declined the request on instructions from the White House.[120]
Unable to take on an active military role, Lindbergh approached a number of aviation companies, offering his services as a consultant. As a technical adviser with Ford in 1942, he was heavily involved in troubleshooting early problems encountered at the Willow Run Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber production line. As B-24 production smoothed out, he joined United Aircraft in 1943 as an engineering consultant, devoting most of his time to its Chance-Vought Division. The following year, he persuaded United Aircraft to designate him a technical representative in the Pacific Theater of Operations to study aircraft performances under combat conditions. He showed Marine Vought F4U Corsair pilots how to take off with twice the bomb load that the fighter-bomber was rated for and on May 21, 1944, he flew his first combat mission: a strafing run with VMF-222 near the Japanese garrison of Rabaul, in the Australian Territory of New Guinea.[121] He was also flying with VMF-216 (first squadron there) during this period from the Marine Air Base at Torokina, Bougainville Australian Solomon Islands. Several Marine squadrons were flying bomber escorts to destroy the Japanese stronghold of Rabaul. His first flight was escorted by Lt. Robert E. (Lefty) McDonough. It was understood that Lefty refused to fly with him again, as he did not want to be known as "the guy who killed Lindbergh."[121]
433rd Fighter Squadron "Satan's Angels"
In his six months in the Pacific in 1944, Lindbergh took part in fighter bomber raids on Japanese positions, flying about 50 combat missions (again as a civilian). His innovations in the use of Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters impressed a supportive Gen. Douglas MacArthur.[122] Lindbergh introduced engine-leaning techniques to P-38 pilots, greatly improving fuel consumption at cruise speeds, enabling the long-range fighter aircraft to fly longer range missions. The U.S. Marine and Army Air Force pilots who served with Lindbergh praised his courage and defended his patriotism.[121]
On July 28, 1944, during a P-38 bomber escort mission with the 433rd Fighter Squadron, 475th Fighter Group, Fifth Air Force, in the Ceram area, Lindbergh shot down a Sonia observation plane piloted by Captain Saburo Shimada, Commanding Officer of the 73rd Independent Chutai.[121][123]
After the war, while touring the Nazi concentration camps, Lindbergh wrote in his autobiography that he was disgusted and angered. [N 4]
[edit] Later life
After World War II, he lived in Darien, Connecticut and served as a consultant to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force and to Pan American World Airways. With most of Eastern Europe having fallen under Communist control, Lindbergh believed most of his pre-war assessments were correct all along. But Berg reports after witnessing the defeat of Germany and the Holocaust firsthand shortly after his service in the Pacific, "he knew the American public no longer gave a hoot about his opinions." His 1953 book The Spirit of St. Louis, recounting his nonstop, transatlantic flight, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954, and his literary agent, George T. Bye, sold the film rights to Hollywood for more than a million dollars. Dwight D. Eisenhower restored Lindbergh's assignment with the U.S. Army Air Corps and made him a Brigadier General in 1954. In that year, he served on the Congressional advisory panel set up to establish the site of the United States Air Force Academy. In December 1968, he visited the crew of Apollo 8 (the first manned spaceflight to travel to the Moon) the day before their launch. On July 16, 1969, Lindbergh and T. Claude Ryan (previous owner of the Ryan Flying Company that built the Spirit of St. Louis aircraft) were present at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of Apollo 11.[125] Lindbergh later wrote the foreword for Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins's autobiography, Carrying the Fire.
[edit] Children from other relationships
From 1957 until his death in 1974, Lindbergh had an affair with German hat maker Brigitte Hesshaimer (1926–2003) who lived in a small Bavarian town called Geretsried (35 km south of Munich). On November 23, 2003, DNA tests proved that he fathered her three children. The two managed to keep the affair secret; even the children did not know the true identity of their father, whom they saw when he came to visit once or twice per year using the alias "Careu Kent." Brigitte Hesshaimer's daughter Astrid later read a magazine article about Lindbergh and found snapshots and more than a hundred letters written from him to her mother. She disclosed the affair after both Brigitte and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had died. At the same time as Lindbergh was involved with Brigitte Hesshaimer, he also had a relationship with her sister, Marietta (born 1924), who bore him two more sons. Lindbergh had a house of his own design built for Marietta in a vineyard in Grimisuat in the Swiss canton Valais.[126]
A 2005 book by German author Rudolf Schroeck, Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh), claims seven secret children existed in Germany. It says Lindbergh "came and went as he pleased" during the last 17 years of his life, spending between three to five days with his Munich family about four to five times each year. "Ten days before he died in August 1974, Lindbergh wrote three letters from his hospital bed to his three mistresses and requested 'utmost secrecy'", Schroeck writes, whose book includes a copy of that letter to Brigitte Hesshaimer.[citation needed]
Two of the seven children were from his relationship with the East Prussian aristocrat Valeska, who was Lindbergh's private secretary in Europe. They had a son in 1959 and a daughter in 1961. She had been friends with the Hesshaimer sisters and was the one who introduced them to Charles Lindbergh. In the beginning, they lived all together in his apartment in Rome. However, the friendship ended when Brigitte Hesshaimer became pregnant by him as well. Valeska lives in Baden-Baden and wants to keep her privacy, as mentioned in many German and International Reuter's newspaper articles, in Rudolf Schroek's book and a TV documentary by Danuta Harrich-Zandberg and Walter Harrich.[citation needed]
In April 2008, Reeve Lindbergh, his youngest daughter with wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures, a book of essays that includes her discovery in 2003, of the truth about her father's three secret European families and her journeys to meet them and understand an expanded meaning of family.[127]
[edit] Environmental causes
From the 1960s on, Lindbergh campaigned to protect endangered species like humpback and blue whales, was instrumental in establishing protections for the controversial[128] Filipino group, the Tasaday, and African tribes, and supporting the establishment of a national park. While studying the native flora and fauna of the Philippines, he became involved in an effort to protect the Philippine Eagle. In his final years, Lindbergh stressed the need to regain the balance between the world and the natural environment, and spoke against the introduction of supersonic airliners.[citation needed]
Lindbergh's speeches and writings later in life emphasized his love of both technology and nature, and a lifelong belief that "all the achievements of mankind have value only to the extent that they preserve and improve the quality of life." In a 1967 Life magazine article, he said, "The human future depends on our ability to combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness."[citation needed]
In honor of Charles and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh's vision of achieving balance between the technological advancements they helped pioneer, and the preservation of the human and natural environments, the Lindbergh Award was established in 1978. Each year since 1978, the Lindbergh Foundation has given the award to recipients whose work has made a significant contribution toward the concept of "balance."[citation needed]
Lindbergh's final book, Autobiography of Values, based on an unfinished manuscript was published posthumously. While on his death bed, he had contacted his friend, William Jovanovich, head of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, to edit the lengthy memoirs.[129]
Charles Lindbergh's grave
Lindbergh spent his final years on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where he died of lymphoma[130] on August 26, 1974 at age 72. He was buried on the grounds of the Palapala Ho'omau Church in Kipahulu, Maui. His epitaph on a simple stone which quotes Psalms 139:9, reads: "Charles A. Lindbergh Born Michigan 1902 Died Maui 1974". The inscription further reads: "...If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea... C.A.L."[131]
[edit] Honors and tributes
The Spirit of St. Louis on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Terminal 1-Lindbergh at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport was named after him, and a replica of The Spirit of St. Louis hangs there. Another such replica hangs in the great hall at the recently rebuilt Jefferson Memorial at Forest Park in St. Louis. The definitive oil painting of Charles Lindbergh by St. Louisan Richard Krause entitled "The Spirit Soars" has been displayed there.[132] San Diego's Lindbergh Field, which is also known as San Diego International Airport, was named after him and also displays a replica of the San Diego-built Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis. The airport in Winslow, Arizona has also been renamed Winslow-Lindbergh Regional. Lindbergh himself designed the airport in 1929 when it was built as a refueling point for the first coast-to-coast air service. Among the many airports and air facilities that bear his name, the airport in Little Falls, Minnesota, where he grew up, has been named Little Falls/Morrison County-Lindbergh Field.[133]
The original The Spirit of St. Louis currently resides in the National Air and Space Museum as part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
"Longines" watch designed by Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight
Statue in honor of Lindbergh, Nungesser and Coli at Paris – Le Bourget Airport
In 1952, Grandview High School in St. Louis County was renamed Lindbergh High School. The school newspaper is the Pilot, the yearbook is the Spirit, the students are known as the Flyers, and the school's marching band holds the title of the Spirit of St. Louis Marching Band. The school district was also later named after Lindbergh. The stretch of US 67 that runs through most of the St. Louis metro area is called Lindbergh Boulevard. Lindbergh also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[citation needed]
Lindbergh Senior High School is located in the southeastern section Renton, Washington, in Renton School District 403. It was founded in 1972. The class of 1974 was the first to graduate.
In the 1970s, Charles A. Lindbergh Senior High School, in the Hopkins School District 270, located in a southwestern suburb of Minneapolis, was named for the Minnesota native and famed aviator. In 1980, Hopkins closed an older high school and renamed Lindbergh High as Hopkins Senior High School. The Lindbergh Center is located on the Hopkins High School campus.
In Lindbergh's hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, one of the district's elementary schools is named Charles Lindbergh Elementary. The district's sports teams are named the Flyers and Lindbergh Drive is a major road on the west side of town, leading to Charles A. Lindbergh State Park. The Lindberghs donated their farmstead to the state to be used as a park in memory of Lindbergh's father.[134] The original Lindbergh residence is maintained as a museum, the Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site, and is listed as a National Historic Landmark.[135]
Lindbergh is a recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America.[citation needed]
On May 2, 2002, Lindbergh's grandson, Erik Lindbergh, celebrated the 75th anniversary of the pioneering 1927 flight of the Spirit of Ft. Louis by duplicating the journey in a single engine, two seat Lancair Columbia 200. The younger Lindbergh's solo flight from Republic Airport on Long Island, to Le Bourget Airport in Paris was completed in 17 hours and 7 minutes, or just a little more than half the time of his grandfather's 33.5 hour original flight.[136]
After his transatlantic flight, Lindbergh wrote a letter to the director of Longines, describing in detail a watch that would make navigation easier for pilots. The watch was manufactured to his design and is still produced today.[137]
In February 2002, the Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston, within the celebrations for the Lindbergh 100th birthday established the Lindbergh-Carrel Prize,[138] given to major contributors to "development of perfusion and bioreactor technologies for organ preservation and growth". M. E. DeBakey and nine other scientists[139] received the prize, a bronze statuette expressly created for the event by the Italian artist C. Zoli and named "Elisabeth
"Elizabeth", the Lindbergh Carrel Prize
[140] after Elisabeth Morrow, sister of Lindbergh's wife Anne Morrow, died as a result of heart disease. Lindbergh, in fact, was disappointed that contemporary medical technology could not provide an artificial heart pump that would allow for heart surgery on her and that gave the occasion for the first contact between Carrel and Lindbergh.[citation needed]
Lindbergh received many awards, medals and decorations, most of which were later donated to the Missouri Historical Society and are on display at the Jefferson Memorial, now part of the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri.
When the 20-month-old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh disappeared from the family's secluded estate, only to turn up dead two months later, it became one of the most sensational news stories of the 20th century.
Three years after the boy's death, a German illegal immigrant was convicted of his murder, and later executed - though he insisted he was innocent until the end.
Now one investigator claims to have found new evidence which reveals the role of a previously unknown criminal mastermind, intent on destroying Lindbergh's life.
Mystery: Charles Lindbergh Jr (left), son of the famous aviator (right), was kidnapped and murdered in 1932
New suspect: John Knoll (right) bears a striking similarity to 'Cemetery John' (left), the man who received the $50,000 ransom for Charles Jr in a cemetery in the Bronx
It was Bruno Hauptmann, a convicted criminal who illegally entered the U.S. from his native Germany, who was put to death in 1936 for the murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr.
But he was put up to the killing by John Knoll, another German immigrant who worked in a deli in the Bronx area of New York, according to author Robert Zorn.
While the direct evidence linking Knoll to the famous crime is scanty, there is one crucial connection which suggests that he could have been involved with the kidnapping.
The $50,000 ransom paid by the Lindberghs for the return of their son in 1932 was handed over by an intermediary to a man known as 'Cemetery John' in a Bronx cemetery.
Mr Zorn argues that John Knoll bore a striking similarity to 'Cemetery John' - he even had an unusual growth at the bottom of his thumb, just as the man who received the ransom did.
Moreover, a comparison of the handwriting in the ransom letter revealed a 95 per cent match with Knoll's own handwriting.
Hunt: The child's disappearance was one of the most sensational news stories of the 20th century
Family: Charles Jr with (L-R) his mother, great-grandmother and grandmother
According to the author, Knoll was motivated by a dislike of Lindbergh and a desire to prove that he could wield power over the legendary aviator, the first man to fly non-stop over the Atlantic.
'This guy was a real villain,' Mr Zorn says. 'This was a guy who always had to draw attention to himself. His behaviour was bizarre.'
Famed FBI profiler John Douglas echoes this analysis, adding that Knoll is 'the best suspect there has ever been in this case'.
Claims: Robert Zorn's new book Cemetery John is an attempt to solve the 80-year-old case
The identification of the German immigrant as 'Cemetery John' has also been supported by high-profile political and legal figures such as former Vice President Dan Quayle.
If Knoll was indeed involved in the murder, which saw Charles Jr's body dumped near his parents' home in Hopewell, New Jersey two months after the boy went missing, then he covered his tracks well.
But not well enough to escape Mr Zorn's father, Eugene Zorn, who lived near Knoll in the Bronx when he was a teenager and became close to the older man.
The elder Mr Zorn was reading a magazine article about the case in 1963 when he had a flash of inspiration and became convinced that he knew the man who was responsible.
He spent the rest of his life building up evidence against Knoll, and passed on his legacy to his son after his death in 2006.
In the younger Mr Zorn's book, Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind of the Lindbergh Kidnapping, he describes one particularly suspicious interaction between the suspect and his father.
In 1931, the German took 15-year-old Eugene on a trip to a New Jersey amusement park - and when they were there, the boy overheard Knoll planning the kidnapping with his brother Walter and Bruno Hauptmann.
The author told CBS This Morning that he believed this was deliberate, as Knoll wanted someone to record his horrific deeds - and Mr Zorn even compared it to the recent Jerry Sandusky child abuse case.
'Just like this Sandusky character groomed these boys for his evil purposes,' he said, 'John Knoll... groomed my father to be the archivist of his horrible crime, and embedded clues in my father'.
Eugene Zorn was haunted by this realisation, and spent the rest of his life trying to set the record straight.
Now his son believes that he has done so himself - and managed to solve one of the most notorious crimes in history in the process.
|
French launch bid to rewrite history books with claim that Lindbergh was NOT first to fly across the Atlantic
New claims French pair died after landing plane in U.S.
- Remains of white aircraft found off New York coast
Pioneers: New evidence suggest Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli may have died after successfully completing a transatlantic flight in 1927
Charles Lindbergh is renowned as the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but according to new research, he was beaten to the achievement ten days earlier.
According to French aviation enthusiast Bernard Decré, Lindbergh was only the first to complete the crossing and survive, with two French pilots believed to have reached the coast of Canada ten days before Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis touched down in Paris in May 1927.
New documentary evidence found in the U.S. national archives may prove that Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli completed a transatlantic crossing and were the first men to do so, though they were likely killed in the process.
The fate of Nungesser and Coli has been called the 'Everest of aviation mysteries' with their disappearance sparking a raft of conspiracy theories, including speculation that their sea plane, L'Oiseau Blanc, was shot down by Maine bootleggers who feared police surveillance.
But the discovery of a U.S. Coast Guard telegram which tells of the wreckage of a white aircraft seen floating some 200 miles off the New York coast on August 18 1927 could have solved the riddle - and changed Lindbergh's role in the history books.
The American aviator successfully flew the Spirit of St Louis from New York to Le Bourget in France on May 20-12 1927, winning a $25,000 prize offered by hotelier Raymond Orteig as well as claiming the U.S. Medal of Honour and the French Legion d'Honneur.
Yet according to Mr Decré, 70, Lindbergh's triumph - and the improved U.S.-Franco relations that followed - was only made possible by a cover-up of the fateful flight of L'Oiseau Blanc.
Wrecked: Documentary evidence tells of the remains of a white plane, possibly Nungesser and Coli's L'Oiseau Blanc (pictured), being found 200 miles off the New York coast
He believes Nungesser and Coli crashed just off the coast of the French islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon in Newfoundland on May 11, with their plane breaking up on landing and killing both men before ocean currents curried the broken aircraft south.
The Newfoundland archives suggest an aircraft was heard on that date but Mr Decré claims the crash of L'Oiseau Blanc was covered up by U.S. and French authorities.
Hero: Charles Lindbergh became an icon of aviation after flying the Spirit of St Louis from New York to Paris in 1927
'My intention is not to disparage the magnificent achievement of Lindbergh,' Mr Decré told The Independent.
'Enormous credit is also due to the British pilots [John] Alcock and [Arthur] Brown who were the first to complete a 'short' crossing of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919.
'But I believe that, just as any aircraft needs to be checked minutely before each flight, we must be as precise as we can about the early history of aviation.
'I believe that Nungesser and Coli, although they did not live to tell their story, should now be restored to an important place in history.'
Though Nungesser and Coli may not have lived to tell the tale, nor met Orteig's 'challenge' of a New York-Paris flight, their ill-fated voyage from east to west would represent the first full or 'long' crossing of the Atlantic by plane.
As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo non-stop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from Roosevelt Field[N 1] located in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine purpose built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh used his fame to promote the development of both commercial aviation and Air Mail services in the United States and the Americas. In March 1932, however, his infant son, Charles, Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what was soon dubbed the "Crime of the Century". This eventually led to the Lindbergh family being "driven into voluntary exile" in Europe to which they sailed in secrecy from New York under assumed names in late December 1935 to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria" in America. The Lindberghs did not return to the United States until April, 1939.
Before the United States formally entered World War II, Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the U.S. out of the world conflict, as had his father, Congressman Charles August Lindbergh, during World War I. Although Lindbergh was a leader in the anti-war America First movement, he nevertheless strongly supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew many combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission that he had resigned in April 1941.
In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist.
Charles A. Lindbergh: son and father c. 1910
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902, but spent most of his childhood in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C.. He was the only child of Swedish immigrant Charles August Lindbergh (birth name Carl Månsson) (1859–1924), and Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh (1876–1954), of Detroit.[2] The Lindberghs separated in 1909. Lindbergh, Sr. was a U.S. Congressman (R-Minnesota (6th)) from 1907 to 1917 who gained notoriety when he opposed the entry of the U.S. into World War I.[3] Mrs. Lindbergh was a chemistry teacher at Cass Technical High School in Detroit and later at Little Falls High School, from which Charles graduated in 1918. Lindbergh also attended over a dozen other schools from Washington, D.C., to California during his childhood and teenage years (none for more than a full year) including the Force School and Sidwell Friends School while living in Washington, D.C., with his father,[4] and Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California.[5] Lindbergh enrolled in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Fall of 1920, but dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year and headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, in March 1922 to begin flight training.[6]
[edit] Early aviation career
Lincoln Standard J biplane
From an early age Charles Lindbergh had exhibited an interest in the mechanics of motorized transportation including his family's Saxon Six automobile, and later his Excelsior motorbike. By the time he started college as a mechanical engineering student, he had also become fascinated with flying even though he "had never been close enough to a plane to touch it."[7] After quitting college in February 1922, Lindbergh enrolled as a student at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's flying school two months later and flew for the first time in his life on April 9, 1922, when he took to the air as a passenger in a two-seat Lincoln Standard "Tourabout" biplane trainer piloted by Otto Timm.[8]
Lindbergh flight gear at Cradle of Aviation Museum in New York State.
A few days later Lindbergh took his first formal flying lesson in that same machine with instructor-pilot Ira O. Biffle although the then 20-year-old student pilot would not be permitted to "solo" during his time at the school because he could not afford to post a bond which the company President Ray Page,[9] insisted upon in the event the novice flyer were to damage the school's only trainer in the process.[10] In order to both gain some needed flight experience and earn money for additional instruction, Lindbergh left Lincoln in June to spend the summer and early fall barnstorming across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana as a wing walker and parachutist with E.G. Bahl and later H.L. Lynch. During this time he also briefly held a job as an airplane mechanic in Billings, Montana, working at the Billings Municipal Airport (later renamed Billings Logan International Airport).[11][12] When winter came, however, Lindbergh returned to his father's home in Minnesota and did not fly again for over six months.[13]
"Daredevil Lindbergh" in his Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" in 1923.
Lindbergh's first solo flight did not come until May 1923 at Souther Field in Americus, Georgia, a former Army flight training field where he had come to buy a World War I surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane. Even though Lindbergh had not flown in more than six months, he had already secretly decided that he was ready to take to the air by himself. After just half an hour of dual time with a pilot who was visiting the field to pick up another surplus JN-4, Lindbergh flew solo for the first time in the Jenny that he had just purchased for $500.[14][15] After spending another week or so at the field to "practice" (thereby acquiring five hours of "pilot in command" time), Lindbergh took off from Americus for Montgomery, Alabama, on his first solo cross country flight, and went on to spend much of the rest of 1923 engaged in virtually nonstop barnstorming under the name of "Daredevil Lindbergh". Unlike the previous year, however, this time Lindbergh did so in his "own ship"—and as a pilot.[16][17] A few weeks after leaving Americus, the young airman achieved another key aviation milestone when he made his first nighttime flight near Lake Village, Arkansas.[18]
Lindbergh damaged his "Jenny" on several occasions over the summer, often breaking the prop on landing (which happened on May 18, 1923 outside Maben, Mississippi). His most serious accident came when he ran into a ditch in a farm field in Glencoe, Minnesota, on June 3, 1923, while flying his father (who was then running for the U.S. Senate) to a campaign stop. The accident grounded him for a week until he could repair his plane. In October, Lindbergh flew his Jenny to Iowa where he sold it to a flying student. (Found stored in a barn in Iowa almost half a century later, Lindbergh's dismantled Jenny was carefully restored in the early 1970s and is now on display at the Cradle of Aviation Museum located in Garden City, New York, adjacent to the site once occupied by Roosevelt Field from which Lindbergh took off on his flight to Paris in 1927).[19] After selling the Jenny, Lindbergh returned to Lincoln by train where he joined up with Leon Klink and continued to barnstorm through the South for the next few months in Klink's Curtiss JN-4C "Canuck" (the Canadian version of the Jenny). Lindbergh also "cracked up" this aircraft once when his engine failed shortly after take off in Pensacola, Florida, but again he managed to repair the damage himself.[20]
2nd Lt. Charles A. Lindbergh, USASRC March 1925
Following a few months of barnstorming through the South, the two pilots parted company in San Antonio, Texas, where Lindbergh had been ordered to report to Brooks Field on March 19, 1924, to begin a year of military flight training with the United States Army Air Service both there and later at nearby Kelly Field.[21] Late in his training Lindbergh experienced his most serious flying accident on March 5, 1925, eight days before graduation. He was involved in a midair collision with another Army S.E.5 while practicing aerial combat maneuvers and was forced to bail out.[22] Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training remained when Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925 thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.[23]
Lindbergh later noted in "WE", his best selling book published in July 1927, just two months after making his historic flight to Paris, that he considered this year of Army flight training to be the critically important one in his development as both a focused, goal oriented individual, as well as a skillful and resourceful aviator.
"Always there was some new experience, always something interesting going on to make the time spent at Brooks and Kelly one of the banner years in a pilot's life. The training is difficult and rigid but there is none better. A cadet must be willing to forget all other interest in life when he enters the Texas flying schools and he must enter with the intention of devoting every effort and all of the energy during the next 12 months towards a single goal. But when he receives the wings at Kelly a year later he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has graduated from one of the world's finest flying schools." [24] "WE" (p. 125)
With the Army not then in need of additional active duty pilots, however, following graduation Lindbergh immediately returned to civilian aviation as a barnstormer and flight instructor, although as a reserve officer he also continued to do some part-time military flying by joining the 110th Observation Squadron, 35th Division, Missouri National Guard, in St. Louis in November 1925. He was soon promoted to 1st Lieutenant.[25]
[edit] Air Mail pilot and pioneer
[edit] Robertson Aircraft Corporation and CAM-2
Large commercial corner cover flown by Lindbergh from Chicago to St. Louis on the opening day of CAM-2 (April 15, 1926)
Lindbergh's copy of a CAM-2 "Weekly Postage Report" for the week of February 6–12, 1927
In October 1925, Lindbergh was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation (RAC) in St. Louis (where he had been working as a flight instructor) to first lay out, and then serve as chief pilot for the newly designated 278-mile (447 km) Contract Air Mail Route #2 (CAM-2) to provide service between St. Louis and Chicago (Maywood Field) with two intermediate stops in Springfield and Peoria, Illinois.[26] Operating from Robertson's home base at the Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field in Anglum, Missouri, Lindbergh and three other RAC pilots, Philip R. Love, Thomas P. Nelson, and Harlan A. "Bud" Gurney, flew the mail over CAM-2 in a fleet of four modified war surplus de Havilland DH-4 biplanes. Two days before he opened service on the route on April 15, 1926, with its first early morning southbound flight from Chicago to St. Louis, Lindbergh officially became authorized to be entrusted with the "care, custody, and conveyance" of U.S. Mails by formally subscribing and swearing to the Post Office Department's 1874 Oath of Mail Messengers.[27] It would not take long for him to be presented with the circumstances to prove how seriously he took this obligation.
Wreck of Lindbergh's DH4 which crashed near Covell, IL, on November 3, 1926
Twice during the 10 months that he flew CAM-2, Lindbergh temporarily lost "custody and control" of mails that he was transporting when he was forced to bail out of his mail plane owing to bad weather, equipment problems, and/or fuel exhaustion. In the two incidents, which both occurred while he was approaching Chicago at night, Lindbergh landed by parachute near small farming communities in northeastern Illinois. On September 16, 1926, he came down about 60 miles (97 km) southwest of Chicago near the town of Wedron,[28] while six weeks later, on November 3, 1926, Lindbergh bailed out again about 70 miles (110 km) further south hitting the ground in another farm field located just west of the city of Bloomington near the town of Covell.[29] After landing without serious injury on both occasions, Lindbergh's first concern was to immediately locate the wreckage of his crashed mail planes, make sure that the bags of mail were promptly secured and salvaged, and then to see that they were entrained or trucked on to Chicago with as little delay as possible. Lindbergh continued on as chief pilot of CAM-2 until mid-February 1927, when he left for San Diego, California, to oversee the design and construction of the Spirit of St. Louis.[30]
[edit] Air Mail advocate
B.L. Rowe corner cover flown by Charles Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince (February 6, 1928) and Havana (February 8, 1928)
Although Lindbergh never returned to service as a regular U.S. Air Mail pilot, he used the immense fame that his exploits had brought him to help promote the use of the U.S. Air Mail Service. He did this by giving many speeches on its behalf, and by carrying souvenir mail on both special promotional domestic flights as well as on a number of international flights over routes in Latin America and the Caribbean which he had laid out as a consultant to Pan American Airways to be then flown under contract to the Post Office Department as Foreign Air Mail (FAM) routes. At the request of Capt. Basil L. Rowe, the owner and chief pilot of West Indian Aerial Express (later Pan Am's chief pilot as well) and a fellow Air Mail pioneer and advocate, in February 1928, Lindbergh also carried a small amount of special souvenir mail between Santo Domingo, R.D., Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Havana, Cuba in the Spirit of St. Louis.[31]
Autographed USPOD penalty cover with C-10 flown northbound by Charles Lindbergh over CAM-2 on February 21, 1928, and southbound on February 22
Those cities were the last three stops that he and the Spirit made during their 7,800-mile (12,600 km) "Good Will Tour" of Latin America and the Caribbean between December 13, 1927 and February 8, 1928, during which he flew to Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba, spending 125 hours in the air.[32] The final two legs of the 48-day tour were also the only flights on which officially sanctioned, postally franked mail was ever carried in the Spirit of St. Louis. Exactly two weeks later, Lindbergh also "returned" to flying CAM-2 for two days so that he could pilot a series of special flights (northbound on February 20; southbound on February 21) on which tens of thousands of self-addressed souvenir covers sent in from all over the nation and the world were cacheted, flown, backstamped, and then returned to their senders as a further means to promote awareness and the use of the Air Mail Service. Souvenir covers and other artifacts associated with or carried on flights piloted by Lindbergh are still actively collected under the general designation of "Lindberghiana."[33]
[edit] Pursuing the Orteig Prize
Charles Lindbergh (left) accepted his prize from Raymond Orteig (right) in New York on June 14, 1927
Designated to be awarded to the pilot of the first successful nonstop flight made in either direction between New York City and Paris within five years after its establishment, the $25,000 Orteig Prize was first offered by the French-born New York hotelier (Lafayette Hotel) Raymond Orteig on May 19, 1919. Although that initial time limit lapsed without a serious challenger, the state of aviation technology had advanced sufficiently by 1924 to prompt Orteig to extend his offer for another five years, and this time it began to attract an impressive grouping of well known, highly experienced, and well financed contenders. Ironically, the one exception among these competitors was the still boyish Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year-old relative latecomer to the race, who, in relation to the others, was virtually anonymous to the public as an aviation figure, who had considerably less overall flying experience, and was being primarily financed by just a $15,000 bank loan and his own modest savings.[34]
The first of the well-known challengers to actually attempt a flight was famed World War I French flying ace René Fonck who on September 21, 1926, planned to fly eastbound from Roosevelt Airfield in New York in a three-engine Sikorsky S-35. Fonck never got off the ground, however, as his grossly overloaded (by 10,000 lbs) transport biplane crashed and burned on takeoff when its landing gear collapsed. (While Fonck escaped the flames, his two crew members, Charles N. Clavier and Jacob Islaroff, died in the fire.) U.S. Naval aviators LCDR Noel Davis and LT Stanton H. Wooster were also killed in a takeoff accident at Langley Field, Virginia, on April 26, 1927, while testing the three-engine Keystone Pathfinder biplane, American Legion, that they intended to use for the flight. Less than two weeks later, the first contenders to actually get airborne were French war heroes Captain Charles Nungesser and his navigator, François Coli, who departed from Paris – Le Bourget Airport on May 8, 1927, on a westbound flight in the Levasseur PL 8, The White Bird (L'Oiseau Blanc). Contact was lost with them after crossing the coast of Ireland and they were never seen nor heard from again.[35]
American air racer Clarence D. Chamberlin and Arctic explorer CDR (later RADM) Richard E. Byrd were also in the race. Although he did not win, Chamberlin and his passenger, Charles A. Levine, made the far less well remembered second successful nonstop single-pilot flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean in the single engine Wright-Bellanca WB-2 Miss Columbia (N-X-237), leaving Roosevelt Field on June 4, 1927, two weeks after Lindbergh's flight and landing in Eisleben, Germany 43 hours and 31 minutes later on June 6, 1927. (Ironically, the Chamberlin monoplane was the same one that the Lindbergh group had originally intended to purchase for his attempt but passed on when the manufacturer insisted on selecting the pilot.) Byrd followed suit in the Fokker F.VII tri-motor, America, flying with three others from Roosevelt Field on June 29, 1927. Although they reached Paris on July 1, 1927, Byrd was unable to land due to poor weather and was forced to return to the Normandy coast where he ditched the tri-motor high-wing monoplane near the French village of Ver-sur-Mer.[36]
[edit] Lindbergh's flight to Paris
Part of the funding for the Spirit of St. Louis came from Lindbergh's own earnings as a U.S. Air Mail pilot over the year before his nonstop flight to Paris. (January 15, 1927, RAC paycheck to Lindbergh)
Six well known aviators had thus already lost their lives in pursuit of the Orteig Prize when Lindbergh took off on his successful attempt in the early morning of Friday, May 20, 1927. Dubbed the Spirit of St. Louis, his "partner" was a fabric covered, single-seat, single-engine "Ryan NYP" high-wing monoplane (CAB registration: N-X-211) designed by Donald Hall and custom built by B.F. Mahoney's Ryan Aircraft Company of San Diego, California. The primary source of funding for the purchase of the Spirit and other expenses related to the overall New York to Paris effort came from a $15,000 State National Bank of St. Louis loan made on February 18, 1927, to St. Louis businessmen Harry H. Knight and Harold M. Bixby, the project's two principal trustees,[N 2] and another $1,000 donated by Frank Robertson of RAC on the same day. Lindbergh himself also personally contributed $2,000 of his own money from both his savings and his earnings from the 10 months that he flew the U.S. Air Mail for RAC.[37]
Sample of the fine linen fabric that covered the Spirit of St. Louis
Burdened by its heavy load of 450 U.S. gallons (1,704 liters) of gasoline weighing approximately 2,710 lbs (1,230 kg), and hampered by a muddy, rain soaked runway, Lindbergh's Wright Whirlwind powered monoplane gained speed very slowly as it made its 7:52 AM takeoff run from Roosevelt Field, but its J-5C radial engine still proved powerful enough to allow the Spirit to clear the telephone lines at the far end of the field "by about twenty feet with a fair reserve of flying speed."[38] Over the next 33.5 hours he and the "Spirit"—which Lindbergh always jointly referred to simply as "WE"—faced many challenges including skimming over both storm clouds at 10,000 feet (3,000 m) and wave tops at as low at 10 ft (3.0 m), fighting icing, flying blind through fog for several hours, and navigating only by the stars (whenever visible) and "dead reckoning" before landing at Le Bourget Airport at 10:22 PM on Saturday, May 21.[39] A crowd estimated at 150,000 spectators stormed the field, dragged Lindbergh out of the cockpit, and literally carried him around above their heads for "nearly half an hour." While some damage was done to the Spirit (especially to the fabric covering on the fuselage) by souvenir hunters, both Lindbergh and the Spirit were eventually "rescued" from the mob by a group of French military fliers, soldiers, and police who took them both to safety in a nearby hangar.[40] From that moment on, however, life would never again be the same for the previously little known former U.S. Air Mail pilot who, by his successful flight, had just achieved virtually instantaneous—and lifelong—world fame.
Charles Lindbergh with the Spirit of St. Louis – 1927
Although Lindbergh was the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, he was not the first aviator to complete a transatlantic flight in a heavier-than-air aircraft. That had been done first in stages between May 8 and May 31, 1919, by the crew of the Navy-Curtiss NC-4 flying boat which took 24 days to complete its journey from Jamaica Bay at Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, to Plymouth, England, via Halifax, Nova Scotia, Trepassey Bay (Newfoundland), Horta (Azores) and Lisbon, Portugal. The lighter-than-air (LTA) U.S. Navy airship USS Los Angeles (ZR-3) made a non-stop crossing from the Zeppelin Company works in Friedrichshafen, Germany to the U.S. Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey from October 12 to 15, 1924.[41]
The world's first non-stop transatlantic flight (albeit over a route far shorter than Lindbergh's, 1,890 miles (3,040 km) vs. 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km)) was achieved nearly eight years earlier on June 14–15, 1919. Two British aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, flew a modified Vickers Vimy IV bomber from Lester's Field near St. John's, Newfoundland on June 14 and arrived at Clifden, Ireland, the following day.[42] Both men were knighted at Buckingham Palace by King George V, in recognition of their pioneering achievement.[43]
[edit] Aftermath of the flight
The Spirit's flight from Paris to Belgium
The French Foreign Office flew the American flag, the first time it had saluted someone not a head of state.[44] Lindbergh made a series of flights in Europe using the Spirit before returning to the United States. Gaston Doumergue, the President of France, bestowed the French Légion d'honneur on the young Capt. Lindbergh, and on his arrival back in the United States aboard the United States Navy cruiser USS Memphis (CL-13) on June 11, 1927, a fleet of warships and multiple flights of military aircraft including pursuit planes, bombers and the rigid airship USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), escorted him up the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. where President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross.[45][46]
"Lindbergh Air Mail" Stamp (C-10) issued June 11, 1927
On that same day that Lindbergh and the Spirit arrived in Washington, the U.S. Post Office Department issued a 10-Cent Air Mail stamp (Scott C-10) depicting the Spirit of St. Louis and a map of the flight. On June 13, 1927, a ticker-tape parade was held for him down 5th Avenue in New York City.[47] The following night the City of New York further honored Capt. Lindbergh with a grand banquet at the Hotel Commodore attended by some 3,700 people.[48]
Program cover for the "WE" Banquet given by the Mayor's Committee on Receptions of the City of New York on June 14, 1927
After the flight, Lindbergh became an important voice on behalf of aviation activities, including the central committee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), an appointment made by President Herbert Hoover.[49] He embarked on a three-month cross country tour on behalf of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. The 1927 "Lindbergh Tour" culminated with visits to 48 states and 92 cities, where he delivered 147 speeches, and rode 1,290 miles (2,080 km) in parades.[25] At the conclusion of the tour, Lindbergh spent a month at Falaise, Guggenheim's Sands Point mansion, where he wrote the acclaimed "We", a book about his transatlantic flight published by George P. Putnam.
The massive publicity surrounding him and his flight boosted the aviation industry and made a skeptical public take air travel seriously. Within a year of his flight, a quarter of Americans (an estimated thirty million) personally saw Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. Over the remainder of 1927 applications for pilot's licenses in the U.S. tripled, the number of licensed aircraft quadrupled, and U.S. Airline passengers grew between 1926 and 1929 by 3,000% from 5,782 to 173,405.[50] Lindbergh later charted both polar and South American air routes, developed techniques for high altitude flying, and during World War II demonstrated how to increase flying range by developing techniques of refining flight attitudes and leaning fuel mixture to decrease the rate of gasoline consumption and improving efficiency.
The winner of the 1930 Best Woman Aviator of the Year Award, Elinor Smith Sullivan, said that before Lindbergh's flight, "people seemed to think we [aviators] were from outer space or something. But after Charles Lindbergh's flight, we could do no wrong. It's hard to describe the impact Lindbergh had on people. Even the first walk on the moon doesn't come close. The twenties was such an innocent time, and people were still so religious—I think they felt like this man was sent by God to do this. And it changed aviation forever because all of a sudden the Wall Streeters were banging on doors looking for airplanes to invest in. We'd been standing on our heads trying to get them to notice us but after Lindbergh, suddenly everyone wanted to fly, and there weren't enough planes to carry them."[51]
[edit] Marriage and children
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) was the daughter of diplomat Dwight Morrow whom he met in Mexico City in December 1927, where her father was serving as the U.S. Ambassador. According to a Biography Channel profile on Lindbergh, she was the only woman that he had ever asked out on a date. In Lindbergh's autobiography, he derides womanizing pilots he met as "barnstormers", and Army cadets for their "facile" approach to relationships. For Lindbergh, the ideal romance was stable and long term, with a woman with keen intellect, good health, and strong genes.[52] Lindbergh said his "experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me the importance of good heredity."[53]
The couple were married on May 27, 1929, and eventually had six children: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. (1930–1932); Jon Morrow Lindbergh (b. August 16, 1932); Land Morrow Lindbergh (b. 1937), who studied anthropology at Stanford University and married Susan Miller in San Diego; Anne Lindbergh (1940–1993); Scott Lindbergh (b. 1942); and Reeve Lindbergh (b. 1945), a writer. Lindbergh also taught his wife how to fly and did much of his exploring and charting of air routes with her.
[edit] "The Crime of the Century"
Main article: Lindbergh kidnapping
The "wanted" poster
In what came to be referred to sensationally by the press of the time as "The Crime of the Century", on the evening of March 1, 1932, 20-month old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was abducted by an intruder from his crib in the second story nursery of his family's rural home in East Amwell, New Jersey near the town of Hopewell.[N 3] While a 10-week nationwide search for the child was being undertaken, ransom negotiations were also conducted simultaneously with a self-identified kidnapper by a volunteer intermediary, Dr. John F. Condon (aka "Jafsie").[55] These resulted in the payment on April 2 of $50,000 in cash, part of which was made in soon-to-be withdrawn (and thus more easily traceable) Gold certificates, in exchange for information about the child's whereabouts which proved to be false. The child's remains were eventually found by chance by a passing truckdriver six weeks later on May 12 in roadside woodlands near Mount Rose, NJ.
In response to the highly publicized crime, the Congress passed the so-called "Lindbergh Law" on June 13 which made kidnapping a federal offense under certain circumstances. Known formally as the "Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932" (18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)), the new statute provided for federal jurisdiction over all future kidnappings in which any victim(s) were taken across state lines and/or (as had occurred in the Lindbergh case) the kidnapper(s) used "the mail or any means, facility, or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce in committing or in furtherance of the commission of the offense" including as a means to demand a ransom.[56]
Lindbergh testifies at the Hauptmann trial in 1935
The assiduous tracing of many $10 and $20 Gold certificates passed in the New York City area over the next year-and-a-half eventually led police to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 34-year-old German immigrant carpenter, who was arrested near his home in The Bronx, New York, on September 19, 1934. A stash containing $13,760 of the ransom money was subsequently found hidden in his garage. Charged with kidnapping, extortion, and first degree murder, Hauptmann went on trial in a circus-like atmosphere in Flemington, New Jersey on January 2, 1935. Six weeks later he was convicted on all counts when, following 11 hours of deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict late on the night of February 13 after which trial judge Thomas Trenchard immediately sentenced Hauptmann to death.[57] Although he continued to adamantly maintain his innocence, all of Hauptmann's appeals and petitions for clemency were rejected by early December 1935.[58] Despite a last minute attempt by New Jersey Governor Harold G. Hoffman (who believed Hauptmann was guilty but also had always expressed doubts that he could have acted alone) to convince him to confess to the crimes in exchange for getting his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, the by then 36-year-old Hauptmann refused and was electrocuted at Trenton State Prison on April 3, 1936.[59]
[edit] Self exile in Europe (1936-1939)
Lindbergh and his family arrive in England, Dec 31, 1935 (Universal Newsreel)
An intensely private man when it came to his family life,[60] Lindbergh became exasperated by the unrelenting press and public attention focused on them in the wake of the kidnapping and Hauptmann trial.[61][62] Particularly concerned for the physical safety of their then three-year-old second son, Jon, by late 1935 the Lindberghs secretly came to the decision to voluntarily exile themselves in Europe,[63] and thus in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, December 22, 1935 they "sailed furtively"[61] from Pier 60 (West 20th St, Manhattan) for Liverpool, England,[64] as the only three passengers on board the United States Lines freighter SS American Importer. To help maintain the strict secrecy Lindbergh insisted upon for their departure,[62] the family traveled under assumed names and using diplomatic passports which had been issued just a week earlier through the personal intervention of Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills.[65]
News of the Lindberghs' "flight to Europe"[61] did not break until a full day later in an exclusive front-page story by New York Times aviation writer Lauren "Deac" Lyman, a longtime family friend and supporter, published in the paper's final Monday morning edition although Lyman intentionally withheld the identity of the ship as well as its time and port of departure from that initial account.[66] While Lyman included the information in his followup story published the next day,[62] radiograms sent to Lindbergh on the American Importer were nevertheless all returned with the notation "Addressee not aboard."[61]
Although Lindbergh had "offered no public explanation" for the family's unannounced departure,[61] shortly before they sailed he had told Lyman in a private interview: "We Americans are a primitive people. We do not have discipline. Our moral standards are low. It shows up in the private lives of people we know — their drinking and 'behavior with women.' It shows in the newspapers, the morbid curiosity over crimes and murder trials. Americans seem to have little respect for law, or the rights of others."[67][68] For those reasons, Lindbergh told Lyman, he had decided to take his family to England to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria" that surrounded him in America.[66] The Lindberghs arrived in Liverpool on December 31, 1935 where they secluded themselves before later departing for South Wales to stay with relatives.[69][70]
"Long Barn", the Lindbergh's rented home in England
The family eventually rented "Long Barn" in the village of Sevenoaks Weald, Kent, England. One newspaper wrote that Lindbergh "won immediate popularity by announcing he intended to purchase his supplies 'right in the village, from local tradesmen.' The reserve of the villagers, most of whom had decided in advance he would be a blustering, boastful young American, is melting."[71] At the time of Hauptmann's execution, local police almost sealed off the area surrounding Long Barn with "orders to regard as suspects anyone except residents who approached within a mile of the home." Lindbergh later described his three years in the Kent village as "among the happiest days of my life."[71] In 1938, the family moved to Île Illiec, a small four-acre island Lindbergh purchased off the Breton coast of France.[72]
Although Charles and Anne Lindbergh had made a brief unannounced holiday visit to the US in December, 1937,[73] the family (including a second son, Land, born in London in May, 1937) would continue to live and travel extensively in Europe for more than three years before finally returning to reside again in the United States in April, 1939, settling in a rented seaside estate at Lloyd Neck, Long Island, NY.[67][74] The timing of family's return came primarily as the result of a personal request by General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army Air Force in which Lindbergh was a Colonel in the Reserves, to him to accept a temporary call up to active duty in order to help evaluate that service's readiness for a potential war.[75][76] Lindbergh's brief four-month tour was also his first period of active military service since he had graduated from the Army's Flight School 14 years earlier in 1925
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A posthumous photograph of Captain Baron Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron). The special value of the photograph is said to be that it shows the wounds in the head could not have been caused by fire from the air.
