Posted on 12/19/2022 8:55:08 AM PST by fugazi
Eddie Rickenbacker has made it back to Washington and is pictured with family on the front page. Both of his sons will enter military service: oldest David joins the Marines in 1943 and Bill enters the Air Force after college and flies transports during the Korean War…
With Rickenbacker is his business partner, Danish-born writer and B-17 pilot Capt. Hans Christian Adamson. He publishes a biography of Reickenbacker after the war. Christmas now just one week away here is the Utility Squadron 7’s Christmas card which is seen on page three… The next page features a story of the Office of War Information’s “request” that Hollywood movie scripts be checked by the government. That seems eerie: something that you’d be more likely to see happen in an Orwellian 2022 than a patriotic 1942…
Lt. Col. John S. Chennault, one of Brig. Gen. Claire Chennault’s five sons to serve in during the war, is pictured on page three… Speaking of pilots, 12 Eagle Squadron pilots are pictured on page four as they have transferred from the Royal Air Force to the U.S. Army Air Force.
Pictured above are several former Eagle Squadron pilots, assembled in a finished wing of the Pentagon, which is still under construction. Some of these pilots wear the RAF’s Distinguished Flying Cross, and although none had received flight training in the United States, they were able to retain their prized British wings. 71, 121, and 133 Eagle Squadrons stayed intact and are renamed the 334th, 335th and 336th. They also keep flying Mk. V Spitfires — now in American colors — until switching to P-47s in April.
The squadrons form the 4th Fighter Group, currently commanded by Col. Edward W. Anderson. Donald M.J. Blakeslee is picked as
(Excerpt) Read more at untothebreach.net ...
A few years back, I read Rickenbacker’s 1963 autobiography. What a great American.
4th FG ended up with over 1000 confirmed kills by war’s end.
Not posting Amaz** link :) but this is IMO the best history of the Group: The Debden Warbirds: The 4th Fighter Group in World War II (Schiffer Military History)
He had quite the life story: his Hat in the Ring fighter pilot days, his car racing influence, his lost at sea challenge, his leadership of Eastern Airlines, and more. He was an American hero up one side and down the other.
Not to mention his early car mechanic/racing days.
In the epilogue he gave a taste of his vision of the future.
In one paragraph he described what is now Amazon, Fed-Ex and Al Gote’s amazing internet.
I highly recommend “The Aviators” which is a book about the lives of Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and Jimmy Doolittle! One of the best books on the subject I have ever read, and I have read quite a few of them.
I found out a few things on each of them I didn’t know.
Remarkable men. And of them all, my impression of Eddie Rickenbacker as a stud, just stood out more than all of them! That guy...holy crap. Relentless, driven, smart, dedicated. The story of his crash in a DC-3, with the horrific injuries that should have killed him, and a year later, he crashes in the Pacific in a B-17 that got lost and ran out of fuel, spending more than three weeks adrift. The other people in the rafts absolutely detested him, because he simply would not allow them to die.
And Jimmy Doolittle-he was a crazy man! The account of how he severely broke both of his ankles doing a handstand while drunk on a second story ledge that crumbled on him, yet went up in casted feet, breaking both casts into pieces to demonstrate an aircraft he was selling. After that, the doctors refused to replace the casts, so he went to a prosthetic craftsman who set him up, and he flew the demo again the next day!
Lindbergh-he got a rap as an anti-semite and Nazi lover, and was nothing of the sort. Being an enemy of the Roosevelt Administration which was chock full of communists, made him a target, and the media at the time joined right in. Later in life, Lindbergh did become a bit of a weirdo and Leftist, and all that goes along with that, but the accounts in the book of his trips overseas where he flew combat missions with the USMC (F-4Us) and the Army Air Corps (P-38s) make wildly entertaining reading, especially given that he so dramatically increased the range of American fighters through spreading his techniques to conserve fuel, that they were able to attack and destroy a Japanese airfield that thought they were so far out of reach that they couldn’t be reached. Lindbergh flew wignman for Maj. Thomas Maguire (38 kills) showed the young pilots how to dive bomb effectively, shot down one Japanese fighter and nearly got shot down as well himself. But he was slandered by the Roosevelt Administration and their allies, and that was that.
Probably one of my top three aviation-related books!
“A few years back, I read Rickenbacker’s 1963 autobiography. What a great American.”
He and Lindbergh were a couple of my father’s heroes. I think he actually met one of them.
You talked me into it. I found it on Amazon in paperback for $15.95
I love the book-I have the audiobook, and have listened to it three times! (It has a very good reader)
I think you will like it.
There is also a story about Doolittle that says volumes about him, though nothing that hadn’t been said before.
His first assignment after joining Hap Arnold’s staff in the last week of December 1942 was to examine problems with the B-26 Martin bomber which had been experiencing several engine failures and deadly crashes. Doolittle flew the airplane and thought it was fine, but the pilots were nearly in a mutiny at being forced to fly an aircraft they uniformly deemed as a man-killer.
Doolittle gathered the pilots on the tarmac, and told them that they could indeed land the plane with a dead engine.
During takeoff, he cut the left engine and then turned into the dead engine to circle back and safely land, something every pilot insisted was impossible. He repeated the maneuver in the opposite direction with the right engine out. He noted: “I did this without a copilot, which made a further impression. This convinced the doubters that all of these ‘impossible’ maneuvers were not only possible but easy if you paid close attention to what you were doing. I had no trouble getting volunteers after each demonstration.”
Later in the war, over in Europe (as a General) he encountered the same sitution with reluctant and angry pilots. Again, he had all the pilots line up on the tarmac, chose one pilot to fly with him, and randomly chose one plane from the squadron to perform a demonstration in (so he couldn’t be accused of cherry-picking the best plane)
He took it up and took that plane all over the sky, cutting the engines, landing it with one...and that was the end of the pilot revolt in that air group.
I’ll have to add THE AVIATORS to my reading list, thanks!
Rickenbacker, Lindbergh, and Doolittle were incredible men.
A family member of a work buddy has Manfred Avon Richtoffen’s personal shotgun, with the provenance to prove it.
Distant relative.
He was an avid hunter and a deadly shot.
I used to work for a guy who was a fighter pilot in wwii. He told me that they did a lot of skeet shooting in training to learn how to lead and hit moving targets.
In the book I mentioned above, they recount how all three of them, Lindbergh, Doolittle, and Rickenbacker were all chummy with Ernst Udet, who was a high ranking Luftwaffe general living in a swanky apartment building. (One of the “Flying Circus” in WWI)
Whenever one of those three visited Germany in the interwar period, Udet, being a high-living individual and playboy, would have them for dinner and drinks, get stinking drunk and fire his handguns at the portraits of female movie actors he had in his apartment.
One time one of them were doing this (might have been Doolittle) and Udet missed his backdrop and blew a giant hole in the wall, and Doolittle said he could see the frightened occupants next door anxiously peering through the hole!
On his return to the US before the war, Doolittle spoke with Rickenbacker about their “common friend” Udet, thought he was becoming mentally unstable, and opined it might be best not to meet with if he went back over. (I might have the three mixed up, can’t remember which was which)
Most people don't know that Lindbergh (working with Dr. Carrel) used his engineering expertise to help develop the Carrel-Lindberg Perfusion Pump, the first "bypass" machine for surgery.
He did it because his sister-in-law needed heart surgery, but wouldn't be able to survive long enough to remove the tumor.
He also did pioneering high altitude research in barometric chambers, performing the tests himself to research the effects.
Regarding Lindbergh - I wouldn’t paint him with too red a brush. His autobiography is a wonderful read, as well. The man was brilliant, and saw more of this world than most. He was slandered, and those slanders still seem to have sticking power.
Nazi lover indeed - he was a US Army colonel, and literally spied on most of the European military organizations in the late 1930s. He found it easy, as they would fawn over him and took him everywhere and showed him everything - as they only saw him as the famous conquerer of the Atlantic.
I didn’t paint him at all with a red brush-he was unfairly slandered and tarred by the Roosevelt Administration for his support of the America First movement.
Much like what the Left does today...actually the Roosevelt Administration was the birthplace of this tactic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.