Hermann Göring in the uniform of Field Marshall. The photograph was taken at the time of his greatest power as Air Minister of Germany and Prussian Minister of the Interior.
(In The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on...)
In The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, bringing to life the thrill and peril of trans-Atlantic travel in a single-engine plane. Eloquently told and sweeping in its scope, Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning account is an epic adventure tale for all time.
(With remarkable detail, warmth, and accuracy, Charles A. ...)
With remarkable detail, warmth, and accuracy, Charles A. Lindbergh - aviator, author, scientist, and conservationist - recalls the boyhood experiences that led to his later life of international fame and significant achievement.
(Autobiography of Values is a rare work, the spare and bea...)
Autobiography of Values is a rare work, the spare and beautiful telling of an American life that belongs with the great memoirs in our literature: Franklin, Adams, Steffens. The depth of Lindbergh's feeling for life, at times poetical and mystical, is shown by him in settings around the earth: Africa, the Pacific islands, Europe, Mexico, England, France, Germany, Russia, India. In the end, he was still a questing man, an adventurer in space and time and spirit.
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, who made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21, 1927. He got the United States' highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his transatlantic flight.
Background
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit. Lindbergh’s early years were spent chiefly in Little Falls, Minnesota, and in Washington, D.C. His father, Charles August Lindbergh, represented the 6th district of Minnesota in Congress (1907–17), where he was a staunch supporter of neutrality and a vocal antiwar advocate. Charles's mother was Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh, a chemistry teacher. The couple built a home on 110 acres (44.5 hectares) of land near Little Falls, Minnesota, where their only child enjoyed the outdoor life of fishing and hunting.
Education
The younger Lindbergh’s formal education began at Little Falls High School, where his mother worked as a teacher of chemistry. Later he was a pupil of Sidwell Friends School, Washington and Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California. Lindbergh was not a particularly good student in school. Instead, he was interested in mechanical things like cars, farm equipment, and motorcycles. His higher education ended during his second year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, when his growing interest in aviation led to enrollment in a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the purchase of a World War I-era Curtiss JN-4 ("Jenny"), with which he made stunt-flying tours through Southern and Midwestern states. After a year at the army flying schools in Texas (1924–25), he became an airmail pilot (1926), flying the route from St. Louis, Missouri, to Chicago.
Lindbergh in early 1927 had a single-engine monoplane built to his specifications in San Diego. Notably, it was outfitted with extra fuel tanks, including one in front of the cabin, which required him to use a periscope to see forward. On May 10–12 Lindbergh flew what became dubbed the Spirit of St. Louis from San Diego to New York (with a stopover in St. Louis) in preparation for the transatlantic attempt. Only a few days earlier, on May 8, World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser and his navigator François Coli disappeared after beginning their effort to collect the Orteig Prize by flying from Paris to New York. They were last sighted over Ireland several hours after takeoff. The loss of Nungesser, one of France’s most charismatic and decorated pilots, highlighted the peril inherent in such an undertaking, which Lindbergh proposed to attempt alone.
Lindbergh was delayed several days by bad weather, but at 7:52 AM on the morning of May 20 he took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island (just east of New York City) and headed east. Shortly before nightfall, Lindbergh passed over St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the way to the open sea. After flying some 3,600 miles (5,800 km) in 33.5 hours, he landed at Le Bourget field near Paris at 10:24 PM on the night of May 21. There the somewhat bewildered flier was mobbed by a large crowd that had come to greet him. Overnight Lindbergh became a folk hero on both sides of the Atlantic and a well-known figure in most of the world. U.S. Pres. Calvin Coolidge presented him with the Distinguished Flying Cross and made him a colonel in the Air Corps Reserve. There followed a series of goodwill flights in Europe and America.
While he was in Mexico, Lindbergh met Anne Morrow, daughter of Dwight Morrow, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time. They were married in May 1929. She served as a copilot and navigator for him on many flights, and together they flew to countries throughout the world. During that period, Lindbergh acted as a technical adviser to two airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport and Pan American World Airways, personally pioneering many of their routes. When he was not flying, Lindbergh worked with Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Alexis Carrel on the development of the perfusion pump, a device that allowed organs to be kept alive outside the body. While the perfusion pump did not see widespread use, it demonstrated the feasibility of preserving organs through artificial means and acted as a precursor for the heart-lung machine.
In March 1932 the Lindberghs’ two-year-old son, Charles Augustus, Jr., was kidnapped from their home near Hopewell, New Jersey, and a short time later was found murdered. Partly because of Lindbergh’s worldwide popularity, this became the most famous crime of the 1930s, and it was a major subject of newspaper attention. In January 1935 Lindbergh himself testified against Bruno Hauptmann, a German American carpenter who was accused of having carried out the kidnapping and murder. Hauptmann was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the sensation of the trial and credible threats against the life of their son Jon forced the Lindberghs to take refuge in Europe in December 1935. In April 1936, having exhausted his appeals, Hauptmann was executed.
After a six-month stay in Britain, the Lindberghs traveled to Germany, where they were treated as honored guests of the Third Reich. Charles visited centres of military aviation, where he assessed the pace of Germany’s rearmament, while Anne was fêted in Berlin. Lindbergh praised the Luftwaffe’s fighter and bomber designs, and he asserted that "Europe, and the entire world, is fortunate that a Nazi Germany lies, at present, between Communistic Russia and a demoralized France." Lindbergh viewed the Soviet Union as the paramount threat to Western civilization, and his belief in the supremacy of airpower led him to conclude that Britain and France were effectively prostrate before the growing might of the Luftwaffe. Lindbergh viewed the Soviet Union as the paramount threat to Western civilization, and his belief in the supremacy of airpower led him to conclude that Britain and France were effectively prostrate before the growing might of the Luftwaffe.
Throughout the late 1930s, Lindbergh traveled the globe as an ambassador without portfolio. He returned to Germany in October 1938, and Hermann Göring decorated him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle. While this led to considerable criticism, Lindbergh remained enormously popular with the American public. The Lindberghs were preparing to purchase a house in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee when the Nazis carried out the pogroms that came to be known as Kristallnacht on the night of November 9–10, 1938. Lindbergh and his family instead moved to Paris, before relocating to the United States just months before the outbreak of World War II.
Upon his return, Lindbergh became a vocal advocate for American neutrality. Anti-Semitic radio preacher Charles Coughlin embraced Lindbergh’s message, and Lindbergh’s public statements would serve as a prime impetus for the creation of the America First Committee in 1940. The group, which boasted a membership of 800,000, opposed American aid to the Allies and counted Lindbergh as its most prominent spokesperson.
During this time, Lindbergh was also acting as a high-level adviser to the U.S. Army Air Corps, and he carried on a personal correspondence with the commanding general, Henry ("Hap") Arnold. Lindbergh’s argument for increasing U.S. defense capability found a supportive audience among military planners, but his strategic vision was blinkered by his belief that aviation was a uniquely Western innovation, "one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown." At an America First meeting in October 1940, Lindbergh declared that "no nation in Asia has developed their aviation sufficiently to be a serious menace to the United States at this time." A little more than a year later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would demonstrate how fatally flawed that conclusion was.
The public debate over the war became a personal battle between Lindbergh and Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. In April 1941, when Roosevelt compared Lindbergh to Confederate sympathizer Clement Vallandigham, Lindbergh responded by resigning his Air Corps Reserve commission. Throughout 1941 Lindbergh poured himself into the antiwar movement, speaking to crowds of thousands from coast to coast.
When the United States entered the war, many of Lindbergh’s America First peers joined the active duty military. Having publicly resigned his commission during the spat with Roosevelt, however, Lindbergh had effectively closed the door on that possibility. He appealed to General Arnold, but few in the War Department were willing to support someone whose loyalty to the United States appeared to be in question. Officials in the Roosevelt administration saw no military or political benefit in reinstating an officer who had spent almost two years vilifying them. Denied a role in the military, Lindbergh threw himself into the war effort as a civilian, serving as a consultant to the Ford Motor Company and to the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC; later United Technologies Corporation).
Lindbergh was dispatched to the Pacific theatre in April 1944, ostensibly to investigate performance issues with UAC’s F4U Corsair. Although he wore the uniform of a United States Navy officer, he lacked any rank or command authority, and, as a civilian, he was officially barred from firing weapons in combat. That legal distinction was largely ignored once he reached the front lines in New Guinea. As a "technician" and later as an "observer," Lindbergh flew 50 combat missions - most of them in the cockpit of a P-38 Lightning - strafing and bombing enemy ground and naval targets. He was also credited with shooting down a Japanese "Sonia" attack aircraft. Lindbergh’s greatest contribution, however, was his technical expertise; he developed a novel technique that reduced the P-38’s fuel consumption, dramatically increasing its already impressive operational range. After the end of the war in Europe, he accompanied a navy mission that investigated German aviation developments.
Charles and Anne eventually had four more children; following World War II, the family lived quietly in Connecticut and then in Hawaii. He continued as a consultant to Pan American World Airways and to the U.S. Department of Defense. He was a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and served on a number of other aeronautical boards and committees.
Lindbergh wrote several books about his life, including The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), which described the flight to Paris and gained him a Pulitzer Prize. He was also the author, with Alexis Carrel, of The Culture of Organs (1938), concerning the operation of the perfusion pump and related research on which he and Carrel had collaborated.
(In The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on...)
1953
Religion
Lindbergh once said: "When we worship God and live by His spiritual values, the knowledge and infinite complexity of science are channeled by a wisdom beyond human capability ... Then science gives us the material strength to protect our spiritual values."
Politics
Concerned that German air power was unbeatable, Lindbergh became involved with the America First Organization, which advocated that the United States stay neutral in the war in Europe. He viewed the European conflict as a fraternal squabble between an ascendant Germany and those countries which sought to deny it a place of power and prestige; Germany alone, Lindbergh argued, could "dam the Asiatic hordes" and prevent the overrunning of Europe. In an essay for Reader’s Digest in November 1939, Lindbergh cautioned against "a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race," and he further pleaded, "let us not commit racial suicide by internal conflict." Lindbergh was not the only person advocating for American isolationism based on notions of white supremacy, nor was he unique in suggesting that the Jewish were the single group most interested in involving the United States in the war in Europe.
On September 11, 1941, at an America First speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh identified the "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration" as "war agitators" who had used "misinformation" and "propaganda" to mislead and frighten the American public. The response was immediate. Public support for Lindbergh evaporated, and the Des Moines speech was denounced as anti-Semitic and un-American.
Views
Lindbergh was a famous proponent of early air travel, but he also helped sow the seeds of the space program through his work with Robert Goddard, the so-called "father of modern rocketry." Lindbergh first learned about Goddard’s experiments with liquid-fueled rockets in late-1929, and the two soon struck up a lifelong friendship. Convinced that Goddard’s work might one day facilitate a trip to the moon, Lindbergh became the physicist’s greatest champion and even persuaded philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to give him $100,000 in funding. Goddard’s breakthroughs would later prove invaluable in the development of early missiles and space travel. When Apollo 8 became the first manned space mission to orbit the moon in 1968, Lindbergh sent the astronauts a message saying, "You have turned into reality the dream of Robert Goddard."
Lindbergh was a staunch conservationist. He traveled widely after World War II, and later claimed that his wanderings had made him acutely aware of the toll modern civilization was taking on animal and plant life. Arguing that he would rather have "birds than airplanes," in the 1960s, Lindbergh threw his support behind the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. He used his travels to lobby for environmental causes, and fought against the disappearance of dozens of endangered species including blue and humpback whales, tortoises, tamaraws and eagles. Before his death in 1974, he also lived among indigenous tribes in Africa and the Philippines and helped procure land for the formation of Haleakala National Park in Hawaii.
Quotations:
"The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure. It made use of the latest developments of science. Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky. There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God."
"Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter."
"Our ideals, laws, and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."
Personality
According to his daughter, Reeve Lindbergh, her father was no fan of manufactured holidays. Both Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, he said, were commercially driven and insincere, and he refused to acknowledge either one in the Lindbergh household. While his children were forced to cede to his wishes while he was present, his frequent trips allowed them to celebrate Mother’s Day in secret if he was away from home.
Interests
ecology, space
Connections
In 1927, while visiting Mexico City, Lindbergh met Anne Morrow, the daughter of one of his financial advisors. They would marry in 1929 and go on to have six children together. Between 1958 and 1967, Lindbergh fathered seven children with three women living in Europe, all while he was still married to Anne Morrow.
Lindbergh
Bestselling author and National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to be given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives - more than two thousand boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries - and to be allowed freely to interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a brilliant biography that clarifies a life long blurred by myth and half-truth.
1998
The Flight: Charles Lindbergh's Daring and Immortal 1927 Transatlantic Crossing
The author’s deeply researched telling also incorporates a trove of primary sources, including Lindbergh’s own personal diary and writings, as well as family letters and untapped aviation archives that fill out this legendary story as never before.