The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (71 page)

Nevertheless, the raids conducted by the Eighth Air Force were spectacularly successful and helped bring the war to an early end. Hermann Göring himself said he knew the war was lost for Germany when he saw the American bombers and their P-51 escorts over the capital city of Berlin. This time Eisenhower personally barred Doolittle from going on big raids, because he knew about not only Ultra,
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the secret code-breaking project, but also the invasion plans.

By D-day on the beaches of Normandy there were scarcely any Luftwaffe planes left to intercept the Allied invasion force. Someone on Eisenhower’s staff gave Doolittle the mission of low-level saturation bombing by B-17s to clear the way just ahead of the invasion troops as they moved inland from Normandy. It was a bad idea; the B-17 crews were not trained for low-altitude bombing, and about sixty of the twenty-five hundred planes dropped their loads short, killing a hundred U.S. soldiers as well as an army lieutenant general, and wounding five hundred more. Eisenhower’s chief of staff blamed Doolittle, who responded that close air support was “not a feasible mission” for the Eighth Air Force. But Eisenhower disagreed, and so the low-level bombing continued, with predictable results. Even with these horrid “friendly fire” casualties, Ike and General Omar Bradley, chief U.S. commander on the ground in France, nevertheless praised Doolittle and the Eighth, saying that the close air-support bombing was what allowed the Allies to break out of Saint-Lô and other points of German resistance.

After Eisenhower moved his headquarters to France Doolittle, who had been promoted to lieutenant general, became the highest-ranking American officer in England. On Christmas Eve, 1944, when the Germans had a considerable part of the U.S. Army—including the 101st Airborne Division—surrounded in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, it was fighters and bombers of the Eighth Air Force that allowed them to break out and retake the offensive. But because of his exalted rank, Doolittle now found himself increasingly in the company of such luminaries as Winston Churchill and the king and queen of England.

When the Germans finally surrendered in May 1945 Doolittle toted up the butcher’s bill. The Eighth Air Force had dropped nearly a million tons of bombs, mostly on Nazi Germany, and shot down or destroyed 18,512 enemy aircraft. This, however, came with the price of 43,742 bomber and fighter pilots and crewmen killed, and 4,456 bombers lost. Just when Doolittle thought he’d be headed back to the States, orders came to pack up the Eighth Air Force headquarters and head for the Pacific where, from Okinawa, Doolittle would command the new B-29 bombers in the ongoing attack on Japan. They barely got started when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

At Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, he lived in a tent and rode in a jeep, a substantial comedown from the fashionable London town house and chauffeur-driven Cadillac he’d enjoyed in England. On July 16, 1945, the Eighth Air Force, Pacific, was established. That same day at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the world’s first nuclear bomb was exploded. The B-29s had just begun to arrive for the Eighth Air Force when, on August 6, the
Enola Gay
dropped a nuclear device over Hiroshima, and three days later another bomb destroyed Nagasaki. Six days after that Japan surrendered. Doolittle was among those attending the surrender ceremonies on September 2 aboard the battleship
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay.

He returned home to his beloved Joe. They planned to build a home on Monterey Bay, but the army was not yet finished with Doolittle. His presence was desired on all sorts of commissions, boards, and committees, the most important of which, to him, was a panel that outlined the creation of an air force separate from the army, which at last became reality with the National Security Act of 1947. After that, Doolittle resigned from the service and accepted a senior vice presidency and board membership with Shell Oil, which meant living in New York, but Joe was used to the migrant life.

Doolittle watched with dismay the Soviet military buildup of the 1940s and ’50s and the takeover of eastern Europe, the Berlin blockade, and the Korean War, which he abhorred on the grounds that the U.S. government had settled for a draw instead of outright victory. He continued to make news by his contributions to the improvement of flight. In April 1958, while attending a meeting of air force officers in Puerto Rico, he was shattered by the news that his son and namesake James Jr.—Jim—had taken his life. Jim had been a major in the air force and was a veteran combat pilot in the Pacific during World War II and in Korea. There was no note, and no definite insight as to why he had committed suicide, only the suggestion that he was despondent “about his situation in life.” It was a blow from which Jimmy would never fully recover.

Doolittle retired from Shell in 1967, at the age of seventy, but instead of remaining idle, which he could have comfortably done, he accepted membership on the boards of several other aviation corporations on the theory that early retirement leads to the grave. He and Joe bought the first home they had ever owned, close to the ocean in Santa Monica. He had long since quit flying but found time now to indulge in his favorite sports—hunting and fishing—which he had enjoyed since his childhood in Alaska. He shot birds and fly-fished for trout all over the country and hunted big game in Africa and Alaska.

In 1978 he and Joe moved into a fashionable retirement community in Carmel and Jimmy began to resign from his commissions. During these years many awards of the “lifetime achievement” type came his way; he was especially pleased at one of these events attended by President Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Charlton Heston, and other luminaries. Hope’s wife, Dolores, said of Joe: “As we know … [Jimmy] spent forty-five years in the air. Joe Doolittle spent forty-five years waiting for him to land. At military bases, at civilian airports—and sometimes at the end of a runway that didn’t exist until he landed.”

In November of 1988 Joe had a stroke and on Christmas Eve she passed away. Before she died Joe donated her priceless damask tablecloth with its five hundred–plus embroidered signatures of famous people they had met to the Smithsonian Institution, where it may be seen in the Air and Space Museum. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C. Jimmy joined her there five years later, in the autumn of 1993, at the age of ninety-six. After the services and formal honors a lone fifty-year-old Mitchell B-25 bomber flew over the grave site, while Jimmy’s great-grandson played taps, flawlessly by all accounts.

N
O SOONER HAD
E
DDIE
R
ICKENBACKER
recuperated from his Pacific ordeal than the secretary of war called upon him again for a secret mission. An internecine battle had developed within the Roosevelt administration between the War Department, on the one hand, and the State Department and Roosevelt on the other. At issue was whether the Soviets were making proper use of all the Lend-Lease materials being sent them, in particular heavy shipments of combat aircraft, which might otherwise have gone to American units.
^†
Admiral William Standley, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, had publicly condemned the Soviet government for being secretive about its use of American Lend-Lease aid, which caused a serious diplomatic brouhaha that caught the attention of Rickenbacker’s old friend Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Roosevelt had made it plain he didn’t want any pressuring of the Soviets about Lend-Lease for fear that Stalin might become angry and make a separate peace with Hitler. Roosevelt and the State Department rejected all of Stimson’s overtures concerning the issue.

That is how matters stood in early April 1943, when Stimson summoned Rickenbacker to Washington and gave him another carte blanche letter ordering any American official anywhere, military or otherwise, to provide Rickenbacker with whatever assistance he needed for any purpose whatever, by order of the United States secretary of war. In fact what Stimson wished was for Rickenbacker to go to Moscow and find out just what in hell the Soviets were doing with all of the stuff coming out of American factories that was being convoyed to them across the Atlantic by the millions of tons and billions of dollars.

Stimson was sure that neither the White House nor the State Department would approve Rickenbacker’s mission—not the least because Eddie had been entirely outspoken regarding the Roosevelt administration, and not always positively, in particular of its handling of the war in the Pacific and Roosevelt’s involvement with organized labor. Stimson therefore decided to disguise the mission as a goodwill and fact-finding tour, starting in Casablanca and Algiers, where the Americans were battling the Germans for North Africa. From there, under secret cover, he would travel to and report on the situation at Cairo, at Tehran in British-held Iran, India, China, and, last, Moscow, with a clandestinely stamped passport validating a Rickenbacker visit to the Soviet Union that was secretly arranged at the State Department by Eddie’s old friend Edward R. Stettinius, now head of the Lend-Lease program, whom Eddie had known through his association with the Rockefellers.

On April 26 Rickenbacker left Washington for Miami in an army C-54 transport and the first leg of his trip, which would carry him to South America, then across the Atlantic. He was armed with an array of gifts that Adelaide had assembled for important people, paramount among them nylon stockings, cosmetics, cigarettes, and liquor. Cruising for fifteen hundred miles above the vast and empty Sahara desert from Senegal to Morocco, Eddie ventured that if given the choice of spending twenty-four days on the Pacific or twenty-four days on the desert, he would choose the ocean any day.

At each base he visited he would perform his old routine, pepping up the troops, making them feel important, asking what was wrong. He was flying to as many as six groups a day, delivering a forty-five-minute talk to each. At Algiers he met with Eisenhower. Later that evening, while Eddie was having dinner with Jimmy Doolittle, the Germans staged an air raid. The two of them stepped onto the balcony of Doolittle’s hotel room to watch the fireworks from U.S. antiaircraft guns. Eddie was fascinated by the terrific artillery show but Doolittle, ever conscious of the calculated risk, soon observed that “all of this stuff they’re shooting up there has got to come down” and went back inside. Sure enough next morning Eddie found a twisted hunk of shrapnel on the balcony right near where he’d been standing.

At the behest of Eisenhower, Rickenbacker took on the highly disagreeable task of telling pilots of the Twelfth Air Force, who had been promised they could go home after flying twenty-five combat missions, that such assurances were no longer “operable,” due to the demands of the war. It was a terrible position to put Rickenbacker in because the news was both shocking and dreadful, but he was chosen for it, and accepted the challenge, because he was one of the world’s most respected airmen. Almost anyone else probably would have been driven from the microphone.

The 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron, Eddie’s old outfit from World War I, was stationed in North Africa. Before he left the states, Eddie had a New York jeweler make up gold and enameled “Hat in the Ring” pins, and he handed them out when he visited the squadron’s base.

After finally landing in Moscow Rickenbacker soon noticed two men he took to be members of the “secret police” that were shadowing him. Everything in the Soviet Union, he found, was difficult. There were mountains of bureaucratic red tape; secretive, sometimes nonsensical delays; and a sinister, unpleasant air to just about everything. Eddie was prepared to loathe the Soviet Union and everything it stood for, and at first it did not disappoint. Upon meeting Admiral Standley, the ambassador, Rickenbacker said that he wished to see the Russian front, as many Soviet air bases as possible, and Stalin, in that order. Standley thought he was joking, and said so in his diary.
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In the meantime word of the famous flier’s presence in Moscow got around to the Soviet military and everyone began to clamor for Eddie’s attention. This provided Rickenbacker the opportunity to demonstrate his fabled capacity to hold his liquor—in this case vodka—which, as a bourbon drinker, he detested and called “liquid fire.” Eddie’s capacity to drink Russians into insensibility soon gave him a mythical prestige among the Soviets. One of his admirers was Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had engineered the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad.
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To everyone’s astonishment, Zhukov gave Eddie permission to visit any Soviet fighting front or military base he wanted.

First Rickenbacker was taken to the headquarters of the Moscow air defenses deep underground and was startled when the Soviet commander rushed up in a bear hug, crying “Ah, Eddie!” Turned out this officer was the pilot of a plane that had flown from Moscow to California in 1937, and Rickenbacker had entertained him in royal style when he came through New York. When Eddie asked why the Germans were bombing targets five hundred miles inside Russia but not Moscow, the young colonel handed him a stopwatch and picked up the telephone. “I will show you. When I telephone, you push,” he said. Eddie pushed the stopwatch and they rushed up to an observation post where the sky was empty. “Suddenly they began to appear,” Rickenbacker said, “American P-39s.” In thirty-nine seconds, Eddie counted more than a hundred fighter planes. He had his answer.

True to his word, Zhukov’s blessing soon had Eddie flying over fields of Russian and Lend-Lease aircraft at the fighting front so well camouflaged they could be discovered only by flying at treetop level. Upon landing he found that all of these aircraft were maintained in fine fighting condition and had accumulated a first-rate battle record against the Germans. So far as he could tell, the Lend-Lease was working in that regard. Rickenbacker also ascertained from Russian aviators that the quality of the German pilots was deteriorating. Either they were sending their best fliers back to Berlin as a result of the round-the-clock bombing by the Eighth Air Force or they were simply running out of good pilot material. In any case, it was a valuable piece of information for Stimson, George Marshall, and Hap Arnold. It certainly wasn’t the sort of military intelligence that was coming from the Soviets through regular channels.