The Eagle, the Wizard and the UFOs

Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s fascination with psychology was counterbalanced by her husband’s antipathy to introspection.

So, when they vacationed in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1959, she was eager to meet their lakeside neighbor, 75-year-old Carl Jung, the psychologist famed for his theories about humanity’s collective unconscious.

Charles Lindbergh was surprised to learn that Jung did not regard the many reports of “flying saucers” as psychological manifestations, but as factual. Jung waved away Lindbergh’s recitation of findings from U.S. Air Force investigations.

Noting that he had discussed the topic with Air Force Chief of Staff Carl Spaatz, Lindbergh said Spaatz told him, “Slim, don’t you suppose that if there was anything true about this flying saucer business, you and I would have heard about it by this time?”

Unimpressed, Jung replied, “There are a great many things going on around this earth that you and Gen. Spaatz don’t know about.”

Anne thought Jung resembled one of his own archetypes, calling him “the old wizard.” Charles sensed “…elements of mysticism and greatness about him — even though they may have been mixed, at times, with elements of charlatanism.”

Lindbergh asked Jung why he chose to live by down by the lake instead of high up in the mountains. Jung explained that having the lake next to his house suggested the different levels of human consciousness and the subconscious.

The Lindberghs’ friend Helen Wolff found the question was as telling as the answer. “The eagle and the fish,” she thought.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

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

The Lone Eagle Dodges Death

P-47 Thunderbolt painting by Keith Woodock

Charles Lindbergh dodged death a dozen times.

Working with the bomber manufacturer Ford during World War II, Lindbergh became interested in the problems plaguing high-altitude aviation. While he was testing a P-47 Thunderbolt — an Air Force fighter that could reach 40,000 feet and 430 mph — Lindbergh’s oxygen ran out with no warning at 36,000 feet.

The gages appeared fine, but Lindbergh had trained extensively with oxygen deprivation, and sensed a characteristic shift in pulse and vision, “that vagueness of mind and emptiness of breath which warn a pilot of serious lack of oxygen.”

Blacking out, he shoved the stick forward into a power dive. Aware only dimly of the shrieking wind outside his cockpit, Lindbergh came to in the increasing air density and found that his plane had dropped 20,000 feet.

After he landed, a mechanic discovered that the pressure gage was 50 pounds too high. “That had caused all my trouble — a quarter-inch error of a needle,” Lindbergh wrote.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Under the Protection of Thor

Painting by Sinclair Stratton

After their baby was kidnapped and then accidentally and secretly killed the same night in 1932, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh acquired a powerful, fiercely protective German shepherd.

Lindbergh named him Thor, evoking “thunder, strength and the protection of mankind.” Within a week, Anne wrote, “The devotion of this dog following me everywhere is quite thrilling, like having a new beau.” Thor awakened Anne every morning with his nose on the bed.

Lindbergh trained Thor to open and close doors on command and take the family terriers for a walk on a leash. Thor would reportedly watch his mistress swim in the sea. When he judged she had swum out far enough, he would jump into the water and paddle out to her, pulling her back to shore by his tail.

They knew their later-born children were safe once they gave Thor the whispered command, “Mind the baby.”

Overcome by old age during World War II, Thor struggled to rise and follow whenever Anne passed. Lindbergh noticed that his eyes followed her every moment she remained in sight.

Thor died quietly under a hickory tree on the Lindberghs’ lawn and was buried in a grave Lindbergh dug.

“He had no pain, and I think he died as the old should die, not lingering so long that all joy is gone from the living,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. “I think Thor found something worthwhile in life to the very day he died, and yet I think he was ready and willing to go. But now, for us, there is a great empty, lonely feeling in the places he used to be.”

Lindbergh’s biographer Scott Berg noted that the passage about Thor was more emotional than anything Lindbergh ever wrote about a person.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

The Lone Eagle and the Swastika

Lindbergh gets a tour from German officers.

By Dan Hagen

The Lindberghs were “perfectly thrilled” by their two visits to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh said.

She pronounced herself “…shocked by the strictly puritanical view at home that dictatorships are of necessity wrong, evil, unstable and no good can come of them — combined with our funny-paper view of Hitler as a clown.”

Yes, people who object to being stripped of all rights and ruled with an iron fist are just so boorish, aren’t they, Anne?

Oh, well, the Lindberghs weren’t the first Americans to be wooed by the charms of totalitarian dictatorship, and they certainly weren’t the last. In 21^st century America, we’ve got plenty of their fellow travelers still pining for it, in fact.

Charles Lindbergh displayed the typical virtues and flaws of an autodidact — flashes of brilliant, outside-the-box insights and mountainous blind spots. His blind spot about the Germans would cost him, and the situation wouldn’t be improved by his musings about “voluntary eugenics.”

In fact, Lindbergh’s visits to Germany provided valuable data about Nazi air power to U.S. intelligence, and that was their underlying purpose. No one but Lindbergh — the most famous man in the world at the time — could have gotten that kind of access, and few had the technical expertise that enabled Lindbergh to make such swift, astute assessments of the Luftwaffe’s progress in aviation technology. What he saw alarmed him about the prospects for peace.

Lindbergh even observed an amusing omen about the coming conflict between England and Germany, even if nobody recognized it as such.

During a luncheon at the Wilhelm Strasse residence of Hitler’s “paladin,” the rotund Hermann Goering sat on a sofa and showed off playing with his pet lion, until it urinated all over his white pant leg.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Pining for Expertise

"Ponderosa Pines," a painting by Marsha Hamby Savage

We live in an era that pretends to disparage expertise, largely as a way to keep the lower classes uneducated and therefore easily gulled. However, those paying attention know that expertise always comes in handy.

For example, was it the legion of police officers on the case who were effective in solving the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby? Was it the millions of interested citizens armed with their “common sense?”

No. It was an expert on wood.

Arthur Koehler, the head of the Forest Service Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, dismantled the homemade ladder used in the kidnapping — the ladder from which the baby fell and died on the night of the crime, a fact that remained unknown to everyone but the kidnappers for months.

Koehler identified the markings of the pine, birch and fir that made up the ladder, spotting a piece of wood that contained four nail holes unrelated to the fabrication of the ladder, a fact that indicated prior usage. Koehler thought the unweathered low-grade sapwood must have been nailed down indoors and used for rough construction, perhaps to finish a garage or attic.

The soft Ponderosa pine rungs of the ladder showed no wear, meaning that the ladder had been specifically built for the kidnapping job. The marks made by planer that dressed the wood showed an unusual combination of cutter heads. Koehler mailed a form letter querying 1,600 lumber mills on the East Coast, and 25 of them reported planer markings that matched.

Koehler requested samples, and identified Dorn Lumber Mill in McCormick, SC, as the source of the wood. A total of 25 lumberyards had received shipments of Dorn’s pine since 1929. Through further scientific investigation, Koehler was able to specify that the kidnappers bought the wood at the National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx, which had received a shipment in December 1931, three months before the kidnapping.

Finally, Koehler was able to prove that the ladder came from wood removed from Bruno Hauptmann’s attic.

There’s really no substitute for critical thinking — for knowing what you’re doing.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Love Is in the Air

By Dan Hagen

Hollywood could not have scripted a better romance for Charles Lindbergh.

Anne Morrow, the daughter of a respected banker who was U.S. ambassador to Mexico, once wrote that her life's ambition was to “marry a hero,” according to a classmate at Chapin School.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Self-effacing, she was somewhat paradoxically accomplished — captain of the field hockey team, as well as student council president and the star of the literary magazine.

Pretty and more than smart, this Lois Lane fell instantly in love with the Lone Eagle, the man who could fly.

Tall and handsome, Lindbergh displayed a catlike self-possession that concealed his marked shyness around girls. At 26, the most famous man in the world was presumably still a virgin. But Anne was quietly tortured by the thought that Lindbergh was only interested in her older sister, the vivacious star of the family, Elisabeth. The press suggested that he and Elisabeth were secretly engaged.

So imagine Anne’s reaction when he called to ask her, and not Elisabeth, to go flying. Anne’s quiet ways put Lindbergh at ease.

Between the couple and happily ever after would fall the shadow. Fame would offer this first superstar and his bride anything they wished to reach for, at the price of the life of their infant son.

Lindbergh’s love is one of those biographical stories that cry out for a 21^st century screen treatment. The three others that always spring to mind are Nellie Bly, Ida B. Wells and Mata Hari, almost preternaturally strong and adventurous women in an era that did not welcome those qualities in their sex.
Incidental intelligence: Over a What’s Cookin’ breakfast today with Matt Mattingly and stage and screen actor Jack Milo, I brought up my idea of a Charles Lindbergh love story biopic. Milo helped us refine it into a high concept fit for Hollywood 2013: “Charles Lindbergh Vs. Mothra.” Those tiny Japanese fairy girls could fly along with the Lone Eagle in the Spirit of St. Louis.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

The first couple of the sky

Citizen Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh once turned down a fortune merely in order to make a quiet stand for journalism ethics.

Young, handsome, brave, self-possessed and remarkably unassuming, Lindbergh in 1927 was the first superstar, more popular than anyone in the world today. Shortly after his return from his spectacular New York to Paris flight, Lindbergh was offered a movie contract by media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

In return for appearing in a film about aviation opposite Heart’s mistress Marion Davies, Lindbergh would be paid $500,000 plus 10 percent of the gross receipts — a percentage that would at least equal his salary and leave Lindbergh financially independent for life.

They met at Hearst’s Riverside Drive apartment in New York, where Hearst handed Lindbergh the contract and Lindbergh politely tried to hand it back.

“I wish I could do it if it would please you, but I cannot, because I said I would not go into pictures,” Lindbergh told Hearst.

In his memoirs years later, Lindbergh revealed the other reason for his flat refusal. With an aviation pioneer’s occupational distaste for inexactitude, Lindbergh didn’t like what Hearst stood for.

Hearst “controlled a chain of newspapers from New York to California that represented values far apart from mine,” Lindbergh said. “They seemed to be overly sensational, inexcusably inaccurate and excessively occupied with the troubles and vices of mankind. I disliked most of the men I had met who represented him, and I did not want to become associated with the organization he had built.”

Hearst argued with Lindbergh, refusing to accept the returned contract and telling Lindbergh he’d have to tear it up. Hearst having insisted, Lindbergh ripped the document in half and threw the pieces in the fireplace while Hearst watched with what Lindbergh described as “amused astonishment.”

It wouldn’t be their last disagreement.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Plane Crash...

By Dan Hagen

These days, we’re abandoning post offices and mail deliveries, but people once risked and lost their lives just to see that the mail got through.

At 5:55 p.m. on Sept. 16, 1926, Charles Lindbergh took off from Lambert Field in St. Louis for his airmail run to Springfield and Peoria. Night fell when he was 25 miles northeast of Peoria, and what had been a light haze became a low fog that completely masked the ground. Too late, the Lone Eagle learned he could not land.

‘Lindbergh maintained his course until 7:15, at which time he saw several patches of light atop the dark, heavy blanket of fog,” wrote A. Scott Berg. They were the glows of towns and searchlights directed by worried ground crews, but couldn’t help Lindbergh.

“At 8:20 his engine quit, and he cut into his reserve tank, which held another 20 minutes of fuel. When that was exhausted, Lindbergh headed toward open country, nosing his plane up. “At 5,000 feet,’ he wrote, ‘the engine sputtered and died. I stepped up on the cowling and out over the right side of the cockpit, pulling the ripcord after about a 100-foot fall.’

Lindbergh left the mail in the plane, figuring it would survive the crash since the fuel tanks were dry. Then, parachuting down toward the fog, he heard the sound of his airplane engine starting.

“Apparently, when the ship nosed down, residual gasoline drained into the carburetor,” Berg wrote. “Lindbergh dropped into the fog — 1,000 feet into nothingness. He crossed his legs to keep from hooking a branch or wire, and he guarded his face with his hands, and waited.”

Lindbergh landed safely in a tall cornfield, becoming the only person in the U.S. known to have had his life saved by skydiving three times running.

Although his plane was smashed into a ball, the mailbags survived, and were taken along to the Ottawa, IL, post office in time to catch the 3:30 a.m. train to Chicago.
Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Lucky Lindy in Free Fall

Charles Lindbergh on his Excelsior motorcycle

By Dan Hagen

Eyes ever wandering to the classroom window, Charles Lindbergh frequently got poor grades.

Two days shy of his 20^th birthday, on Feb. 2, 1922, Lindbergh learned that the University of Wisconsin was booting him, his adviser informing his mother than Lindy was “quite immature.”

A taciturn loner, the peripatetic future pilot had already traveled across America’s primitive roads by himself on his Excelsior motorcycle, sleeping on the ground between his bike and a tree unless foul weather, insects or snakes drove him into a corncrib. He lived on quarts of milk he picked up for a dime.

Lindbergh raised a $125 deposit to learn flying and plane maintenance and construction at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation in Lincoln, and later signed on as an unpaid assistant to a barnstormer just to gain flight experience.

Warming to wing walking, Lindbergh decided he’d try the even more spectacular stunt of leaving the plane in flight.

“Lindbergh wanted to try what was known as a ‘double jump’ — in which one chute opens and is discarded, making way for a second one to deliver the jumper to the ground,” A Scott Berg wrote.

“One June evening, against a clear sky, Lindbergh made his leap from 1,800 feet, and the first chute opened perfectly. After a few seconds, he cut it loose and waited for the second to open. But several seconds passed and he did not feel the tug that should have followed. Because he had never made such a descent before, Lindbergh had no idea that everything was not right until he began to fall headfirst. Another long moment later, the parachute at last blossomed, carrying him safely to earth.

“For the rest of his life, Lindbergh remembered feeling no panic over what might have happened to him, only how soundly he slept that night.

“Easier for him than most, with nobody dependent upon him for anything, Lindbergh decided ‘that if I could fly for 10 years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.’”

And at the moment he decided to make that first jump, he recalled, “…life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness.”

As a former skydiver, I know what Lindbergh meant — everything leading to a moment reduced to sun and blue and rushing air and pure, existential elongation, that “lonely impulse of delight (that) drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

At the Intersection of Main and Integrity

C.A. Lindbergh, lawyer, landowner, lawmaker and Swedish immigrant

At the turn of the century, Charles Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline, may have been the model for the endearing, educated fish-out-of-small-town-water Carol Kennicott in the Sinclair Lewis novel “Main Street.” Much younger than her husband, she had servants who gossiped that she nagged him and sisters who mocked her by calling her “Anvil Chorus.”

Lindbergh’s handsome father, C.A., had a reputation as an honest Minnesota lawyer and landowner who bought at the seller’s price and sold at the buyer’s price.

“Nobody in the district was more concerned about financial abuses of power; and nobody had been more outspoken, regularly firing of letters to the editors of local newspapers,” wrote A. Scott Berg.

Fighting for farmers, C.A. denounced a “favored class” in America that “grabs the profits and leaves industrious workers with only a bare subsistence.”

C.A. served on the boards of two Little Falls banks, and once said, “To make money, in my opinion, is not the sole purpose of a bank.” These days, Goldman Sachs and its bootlicking hired hands in the U.S. Treasury Department would have such an mouthy Occupy radical spied on, arrested and, if at all possible, smeared as a “terrorist.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Life's Values and Lindy

Funny. Charles Lindbergh’s ancestors so often seemed to be stubborn, pioneering, energetic and eccentric loners with a cutting edge/crackpot scientific bent. Are we all that predictable?

Portrait of Lindy by Pam Glew

“Raised in virtual isolation among Lindberghs, Lodges and Lands, it was difficult for Charles Lindbergh ever to recognize that his kin might have differed from other people,” wrote biographer A. Scott Berg.

“He was proud that his family tree abounded with independent thinkers in a broad range of disciplines — most of which he would pursue. But he never perceived that many of his ancestors were prideful to the point of arrogance — rebels so far apart from the rest of society as to be above the law, so evangelical as to appear fanatical, so global in their vision as to be shortsighted.

“For all his fascination with detail, Lindbergh never examined his family history close enough to see that it included financial malfeasance, flight from justice, bigamy, illegitimacy, melancholia, manic-depression, alcoholism, grievous generational conflicts and wanton abandonment of families. But those undercurrents were always there.

“And so this third-generation Lindbergh was born with a deeply private nature and bred according to the principles of self-reliance — nonconformity and the innate understanding that greatness came at the inevitable price of being misunderstood.”

Toward the end of his life, Lindbergh did understand this much about all that: “Life’s values originate in circumstances over which one has no control,” he said.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

The Flight of the Famous

Courageous, boyishly handsome at just 25, Charles Lindbergh must have seemed literally super heroic when alone he flew — actually flew! — across the Atlantic to land in Paris in 33 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.

And because he landed in a 1927 world newly united by tabloid newspapers, radio, telephones and motion pictures with sound, Lindbergh became one of the first people on the planet to discover the double-edged nature of superstardom, a freshly honed edge that would finally cut him deeply.

Lindbergh actually saw the Era of Celebrity arrive in real time as a crowd of 150,000 surged toward his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, when he landed at Aéroport du Bourget late that May night.

“Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human behavior, and he was, after all, only a man,” observed biographer A. Scott Berg.

“The public saw more than that. Indeed, Harry Crosby felt that the stampede at Le Bourget that night represented nothing less than the start of a new religious movement — ‘as if all the hands in the world are … trying to touch the new Christ and that the new cross is the Plane.’ Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth.

“For several years, Lindbergh had lived according to one of the basic laws of aerodynamics — the need to maintain balance. And so, in those figures running toward him, Lindbergh immediately saw inevitable repercussions.

“At first he feared for his physical safety; over the next few months he worried about his soul. He instinctively knew that submitting himself to the idolatry of the public could strip him of his very identity; and that the only preventive he could see was to maintain his privacy. That reluctance to offer himself to the public only increased its desire to possess him — the first of many paradoxes he would encounter in his lifelong effort to restore equilibrium to his world.

“’No man before me had commanded such freedom of movement over earth,’ Lindbergh would write of his historic flight. Ironically, that freedom would be denied him thereafter on land.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Lindbergh by Granger