The Yanks Are Coming! (27 page)

Rickenbacker's mechanical knowledge, careful pre-flight checks of his equipment (which didn't prevent his machine guns from jamming), fast reflexes, and wily combat techniques honed by a continual review of his previous dogfights made him a deadly effective combat ace who relished aerial duels and strafing enemy infantry. It was not bloodlust that drove him, but duty and competition. He was happy to see enemy pilots parachute to safety or scramble out from crashed planes: “I never wanted to kill men, only to destroy machines.”
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Even an ear infection and perforated eardrum that the doctors said would end his flying days could not keep him grounded, at least not for long.
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In September he was promoted captain and made commander of the 94th Aero Squadron.

By the end of the war, Rickenbacker had fought through 134 “aerial encounters,” shooting down at least 26 confirmed enemy aircraft. Those stats made him America's top fighter ace, “ace of aces,” though as he noted, “One can hardly expect to get confirmations for all one's victories since nine-tenths of our combats were necessarily fought on the German side of the lines.”
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His 94th Aero Squadron was also the tops, with more flying hours and confirmed destruction of enemy aircraft than any other. When the Armistice became official, Rickenbacker was flying over the trenches and saw American and German soldiers celebrating in no-man's-land together, no longer enemies, but grateful survivors of the titanic struggle.

After the war, Rickenbacker wanted to stay with his squadron, but such was his celebrity that the War Department ordered him home, against his protests, to help sell Liberty Bonds. He was inundated with requests for commercial endorsements—and offers to make him a movie star—all of which he categorically refused. He had no intention of cashing in on his fame, but he did write a memoir of the war titled
Fighting the Flying Circus
, which gave him the
opportunity to tell the story of the 94th Aero Squadron to a popular audience. His bond tour was successful (Damon Runyon, whom he had befriended when Runyon was a war correspondent, helped him prepare his remarks).
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The tour was arduous and at the end of it he was promoted major—a promotion he felt he didn't earn; he continued to style himself Captain Rickenbacker—and discharged from the Army. He was fine being discharged into civvy street, but he was angry and dismayed that the U.S. government, in stark violation of the freedom for which he and his colleagues had just fought, was about to enforce Prohibition. He considered it a slap in the face of the returning soldiers, and a more obvious slap in the face of anyone with a German (that is, beer-drinking) heritage. He denounced the law and vowed not to abide by it.

COMMERCIAL VENTURES

He also vowed to find a position with a company that would actually put him to work and not merely capitalize on his name. He decided he wanted to build his own car and found financing to support it, establishing the Rickenbacker Motor Company in 1921. “Our car,” Rickenbacker wrote, “would appeal to the white-collar worker, the junior executive, the fairly prosperous farmer and the woman of taste. Finally, it would earn the appreciation of anyone who recognized fine engineering and workmanship”
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—and who might want the 94th Aero Squadron emblem on a car. Rickenbacker would leave economy cars to Henry Ford and luxury cars to the likes of Cadillac and Packard. His cars would simply be the best.

The project, however, would not have his undivided attention. He took another job—as California sales director for General Motors' new car, the Sheridan (a car and a job that only lasted for a year)—and
he got married in 1922 to a divorcée named Adelaide Frost.
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The couple honeymooned in Europe. In Germany, a former German fighter pilot invited the Rickenbackers to dinner. Among the group was Hermann Göring, another World War I flying ace, who was already predicting a new German Reich, this one founded on air power.

In Rickenbacker's own (commercial) empire, he took it as a point of pride that while the Rickenbacker Motor Company was growing rapidly, its profit margins were small, because that meant the buyer got more car for his money. He was also an innovator, producing the first commercial car with four-wheel brakes—which unfortunately proved to be his downfall. His competitors waged an enormous campaign alleging that four-wheel brakes, which had been used in race cars, were dangerous in passenger cars. The charge was ludicrous, but it was also effective; it forced the company into bankruptcy and Rickenbacker into a fortune's worth of debt.

While his company foundered, Rickenbacker testified for the defense at Billy Mitchell's court-martial and said bitterly after Mitchell's conviction, “That was his reward for the great service he had given his country.”
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Rickenbacker, luckily, found himself with a reputation that enabled him to raise money for another commercial venture. He credited his country: “Here in America,” he wrote, “failure is not the end of the world. If you have determination, you can come back from failure and succeed.”
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He bought an engineering company (which he later sold to General Motors) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, saving it from property developers, and added a golf course to its attractions. To keep cash flowing to his family—the couple now had two adopted sons—and to continue paying off his debts, he took another sales job with General Motors.

He also got back into aviation. General Motors used him as an advisor in acquiring the American division of the German Fokker
company (for which he became vice president of sales). He contributed stories for a syndicated newspaper cartoon about an American fighter pilot named Ace Drummond. He began flying again, including attempting—and failing—to break the transcontinental speed record; and he invested in Florida Airways, which was being established by a wartime buddy, and which went bust by pushing too hard to become a passenger airline when there was a dearth of willing passengers. Still, in 1930, President Herbert Hoover came through with a much-delayed medal, awarding Rickenbacker the Medal of Honor to go along with his nine Distinguished Service Crosses.

Rickenbacker remained an American hero, albeit at times a controversial one. He opposed the New Deal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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and told reporters that Roosevelt's scheme—short-lived as it turned out—to use military aircraft to fly mail routes was “legalized murder.”
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The young pilots, who lacked proper training and flew aircraft unsuited to the task, routinely crashed in bad weather. He also warned—but found few listeners—about German military rearmament after a 1935 visit when he was given a tour of Germany's rapidly expanding air force, being built in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

At home, Rickenbacker's goal was to become a leader in commercial aviation. When he became general manager of Eastern Air Lines in 1935, he wanted to do more than deliver the U.S. mail. “Eastern Air Lines,” he said, “is held up by government subsidy. I believe it can become a free-enterprise industry, and I will pledge all my efforts and energies to making it self-sufficient. But if this airline cannot be made to stand on its own feet and must continue to live on the taxpayers' money through government subsidy, then I want to be relieved of that job.”
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He even closed the company's office in Washington, DC. He didn't want lobbyists; he wanted employees
who worked on and with the airplanes. In 1938, he bought Eastern Air Lines from General Motors.

Even before he bought the company, he managed it with a near-manic insistence on knowing everything he could about his planes, his employees, and his business; and he made sure everyone knew what “Captain Eddie” thought and wanted. He increased the number of flights, improved the aircraft, and boosted his employees' benefits while keeping his own pay static. By 1939, he had built Eastern Air Lines into a company that was making more than a million and a half dollars in annual profit.

In February 1941 he survived a plane crash (eight others on the plane didn't) but was hospitalized for four months, barely dodged easeful death (he felt it as a presence and realized he had to fight for life), and was left with a permanent limp. Surviving the crash was a personal triumph, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor later that year struck him as a political failure. Rickenbacker was convinced that had the United States built a giant, world-class air force in the 1930s—something he had ardently, publicly advocated—the United States could have deterred Nazi and Japanese aggression. It would have been expensive, a billion dollars over five years by his estimation, but nothing in comparison to the nearly $300 billion and more than 400,000 lives that World War II cost the United States. As an America Firster, Rickenbacker thought that with proper preparation the United States could have avoided war.

In 1942 General Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, tapped Rickenbacker for a special job, telling him, “I'm concerned about the reports I'm getting from combat groups in training. I'm told that they are indifferent, that they haven't got the punch they need to do the job they're being prepared for. I want you to go out and talk to these boys, inspire them, put some fire in them. And while
you're there, I want you to look around and see what the problems are.”
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ONE LAST ADVENTURE

After tours of bases stateside and in England, Rickenbacker set off for Canton Island in the Pacific in October 1942 with a top secret message from the president for Douglas MacArthur. Unable to find the island, and with fuel running out, the pilot of the plane was forced to make a crash—and as it turned out, expert—landing into the ocean. All eight men aboard survived the impact (though one died during their coming ordeal). Freeing themselves from the plane, they loosed its three rubber rafts and then bobbed amidst twelve-foot waves. What they had failed to secure from the plane was their stowed-away emergency food and water. They lived off rainwater, a handful of oranges someone had stuck in his pocket, a seagull, and a few fish that they managed to catch—for twenty-four days. The rafts, initially roped together, were later separated. Three of the men washed ashore on an island and were rescued by a missionary. The pilot, who was alone in a raft, was picked up by the U.S. Navy and directed Navy rescuers to Rickenbacker and the others. Rickenbacker not only survived (minus more than fifty pounds) but delivered his secret message (and it remains secret) to MacArthur.
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The American press had assumed Rickenbacker was dead; when they were proved wrong, headlines sang the praises of the apparently indestructible hero. He wrote the story of his ordeal for
Life
magazine, but only after Hap Arnold had authorized it and only on Rickenbacker's condition that his payment for the story go to the Air Force Aid Society. Because he had been on a taxpayer-funded mission, Rickenbacker felt he had no right to profit from the adventure.
He continued to go on inspection tours around the world, including a special mission to Soviet Russia to see what use they were making of lend-lease American planes.

After President Roosevelt's death, Rickenbacker welcomed the elevation of fellow Great War veteran Harry Truman to the presidency. He judged Truman a conservative Democrat who would “get us on an even keel again.”
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Rickenbacker changed his opinion of Truman, just as he had earlier changed his opinion of Roosevelt, going from supporter to critic, though not as violently, summing up: “Well, he knew how to swear. He knew how to drink bourbon. He knew how to make up his mind, and unfortunately made it up in the wrong direction. But on the whole, he wasn't too bad.”
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In his own postwar return to normalcy, Rickenbacker sold the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, established a forty-hour work week and a retirement plan for his Eastern Air Line employees (while warning them that the plan in no way relieved them of their personal responsibility for their retirement welfare), and bought a ranch in Texas. Rickenbacker's eldest son, David, had seen wartime service in the Marines. His second son, Bill, after graduating from Harvard, joined the postwar Air Force and trained in Texas. This inspired Rickenbacker to acquire a piece of land that could be passed down in the Rickenbacker family for generations. In the event, however, he eventually donated the land to the Boy Scouts, and the Rickenbacker family settled in and around New York, Bill becoming an investment analyst and senior editor for the conservative magazine
National Review
and David working for the United States Trust Company.

In 1959, with some concerned about his age and autocratic management style, Rickenbacker was promoted from president to chairman of the board of Eastern Air Lines. That made him less involved
in day-to-day operations—and spared him, as he saw it, from having to work around the unwelcome and ever-increasing bureaucratic regulation of commercial aviation. Nevertheless, Eddie Rickenbacker remained one of the most successful, and lowest-paid, airline executives in the country up until his retirement, at the direction of the airline's board of directors, at the end of 1963.

In retirement he traveled, wrote his memoirs, and was an outspoken lecturer against the socialist trends he saw in America. His sacred trinity was God, country, and freedom. He loathed President Kennedy's failure to follow through with the Bay of Pigs invasion and thought American involvement in the Vietnam War was a typical liberal Democrat mistake—though at the same time he loathed the leftist antiwar movement and argued that the best way to end the war was to win it. He died in 1973 of heart failure while on a trip to visit his ancestral Switzerland. Though he died abroad, Rickenbacker—America's World War One “ace of aces”—was a classic American through and through.