The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh Read Free Page A

expansion and development of capabilities in the second part, is a powerful, important story whose impact can hardly be overstated. From the flimsy crate the Wright brothers flew in 1903, to the B-29 that erased Hiroshima with an atomic bomb in 1945, to the sleek jet aircraft of today, men of the air have braved the dangerous skies the way early seafaring explorers braved uncharted oceans. They flew, saw planes crash and men die, and flew on. No one has left in his wake a greater example of devotion to the concept of flight, critical aviation knowledge, and sheer raw courage than Rickenbacker, Doolittle, and Lindbergh.
    * Rodgers’s successor for the bottling company’s sponsorship was a woman flier, handsome thirty-seven-year-old Harriet Quimby, who had been the first woman to fly across the English Channel. In 1912 she was killed after being ejected from her open-cockpit Blériot monoplane, lately christened the new Vin Fiz , over Boston Harbor. She was not wearing a seat belt as there were arguments at the time against wearing one. Her death settled the argument.

C HAPTER 2

    THE KING OF DIRT
    S HORTLY AFTER SUNRISE ON S EPTEMBER 25, 1918, Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker of the U.S. Army Air Service, 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron, was flying solo along the Meuse River above the grisly boneyard that was Verdun, France.
    It was Rickenbacker’s first day as commander of the 94th, the notorious “Hat in the Ring” gang of American Expeditionary Force pilots, and he had gone up alone that morning, to sort things out, get a grip on himself, to see how things had changed, “for the better or the worse.”
    The squadron had been organized six months earlier as American troops began to pour into France. Now there were just three of the original twenty-four pilots left. Rickenbacker’s experience led him to conclude that air squadron leaders could not command from behind a desk; it was imperative that the commander lead personally, by example, in the air. 1
    September 25 was a critical day on the Western Front. Below, in the valley of the Meuse, nearly 250,000 American soldiers of the U.S. First Army were steadily moving into the frontline trenches between the Meuse and the Argonne Forest for the first great American offensive of the war. Suspecting that an attack was imminent, the Germans had been launching large observation balloons and sending up photographic air reconnaissance patrols in an effort to comprehend the Allied buildup.
    Rickenbacker’s job was to see that the German missions failed. Ten days earlier, by default, so to speak, he had been named America’s “Ace of Aces” in aerial combat, an honorary title that he considered dubious, at best.
    Not that the title of top American ace wasn’t flattering. After all, Rickenbacker had shot down seven enemy planes in as many months. It was just that all of the former recipients of the honor had all been killed, and he could not help but ruminate over what he called “the unavoidable doom that had overtaken its previous holders.”
    Rickenbacker was tooling along at about 3,000 feet in his French-built Spad XIII, a new compact, rugged single-seat fighter with a 220-horsepower engine and armed with two Vickers .303-caliber machine guns. Beneath him he could see both the German and Allied trench lines snaking into the distance with the desolated, evil-looking muck of no-man’s-land in between. Seven hundred thousand men had been killed there two years earlier, during the Battle of Verdun in 1916.
    The day was clear and cool, with no clouds to hide in, when out of the blue two enemy planes appeared, at first far off, as specks. They soon proved to be a pair of German LVGs of the photographic reconnaissance variety, two-seater biplanes with 7.92mm Spandau machine guns in front and rear, and so they would be fairly dangerous to attack, coming out of Germany from the direction of Metz for a picture-taking expedition over Allied lines.
    With the big push scheduled for early