The Secret War of the Lone Eagle

P-38 painting by Jack Connelly

The fact that his political enemy FDR had flatly forbidden his participation in Allied military operations did not prove to be an insurmountable obstacle for Charles Lindbergh.

Wearing a naval uniform without insignia to preserve his anonymity, Lindbergh was able to wrangle assignments in the Pacific theater as a technical adviser on aviation. Once there, he quietly maneuvered himself into a number of dangerous solo combat missions, his pioneering experience in the air permitting him to outfly men half his age.

However, Lindbergh’s greatest contribution to the war effort was as a technical adviser. The crew chief of “Satan’s Angels,” the 475^th Fighter Group of the Fifth Air Force, noticed that Lindbergh’s P-38 was returning from missions with a good deal more fuel than the other planes.

In a thatch-roofed rec hut on Humboldt Bay in New Guinea, Lindbergh explained to skeptical combat pilots that by raising manifold pressure and lowering RPMs, they could burn less fuel in their engines.

Over the next weeks, the technique enabled Satan’s Angels to stretch their 6-to-8-hour missions to 10 hours, surprising the Japanese by striking deeper into their territory.

When Gen. Douglas MacArthur summoned him to Australia, Lindbergh explained that only instruction and training were required to greatly improve fighters’ fuel economy. MacArthur told him that would be a gift from heaven, asked Lindbergh to train his squadrons and ordered that Lindbergh could do any kind of flying in any plane he liked.

But Lindbergh didn’t like some of the sights he saw — Japanese skulls crushed to fragments so that GIs could steal their gold teeth, and Japanese bodies dumped into a ditch under a truckload of Allied garbage.

“To kill, I understand; that is an essential part of war,” Lindbergh wrote. “But for our people to kill by torture and to descend to throwing the bodies of our enemies into a bomb crater and dumping garbage on top of them nauseates me.”

Lindbergh also had troubling thoughts about the air war his accomplishments had helped make possible.

After dropping a 500-pound bomb on a reported anti-aircraft gun emplacement in Kavieng, chief port of the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Lindbergh told his journal, “I don’t like this bombing and machine-gunning of unknown targets. You press a button and death flies down. One second the bomb is hanging harmless in your racks, completely under your control. The next it is hurtling down through the air, and nothing in your power can revoke what you have done. The cards are dealt. If there is life where that bomb will hit, you have taken it.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg