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I cannot recommend the book “The Aviators” highly enough. They discuss this in detail.

That was exactly one of his main driving motives and forces that turned him into a looney, all that came from the kidnapping and murder. That, and the Leftist politicians and media doing all they could to turn him into a Nazi out of revenge for standing up to them.

That, and the Leftist media and the New Dealers (and other Leftists including Roosevelt) who never forgot Lindbergh’s opposition and standing against their endeavors.

He gets no credit for his pioneering work in high altitude flight in which he worked in hypobaric chambers to test the limits of his endurance, and actual high altitude flights he carried out when little was known, both extremely hazardous undertakings at the time which could have killed or disabled him.

Likewise for his work in biomechanics, in which he developed the precursor to medical devices like the modern heart-lung machine, and its function helped to develop a feasible means for stopping the heart during surgical procedures, because before its development, there were many cardiac surgeries that could not be performed without killing the patient. He became involved because his sister-in-law had just such an ailment, and when he was told why she couldn’t be saved with surgery (because the heart would have to be stopped for too long and would fatally damage it) he turned his intellect towards a solution.

In WWII, the detailed account of his work in the Pacific theater during WWII is worth the reading of the book alone even if Doolittle and Rickenbacker had not been covered in equal depth.

He was sent out to fly both the F-4U Corsair (USMC) and the P-38 (Army Air Corps) to compare capability and tactics. He went out and flew (against regulations) combat missions in both with men half his age, and commanded the profound respect of the men he flew with.

There were fewer Japanese fighters at the time to deal with, so many of the Corsair and P-38 pilots were relegated to ground attack, something most of them despised, and they were terrible at it. He watched them from above as they missed hitting targets in pass after pass, then swooped in and with comparatively little to no experience, let loose his bombs to score a direct hit. He was a natural.

His greatest achievement was extending the combat radius of the P-38 nearly 50% from 400 miles to 600 miles, an astonishing improvement.

When he arrived at the P-38 squadron bases, some of the young pilots were skeptical and thought he shouldn’t be allowed to fly with them because he was so old. However, one pilot in particular, a young 24 year old pilot quietly said something like “Oh, I don’t know. I think he should fly. I would like to see what he can do. He can fly with me.” That was 24 year old Major Thomas McGuire who became the second leading ace in the Pacific War right behind Richard Bong.

When they went out, flying the long over-water missions resulted in many planes landing with fumes, and many not making it back at all. But over time, they found that Lindbergh had significant amounts of fuel remaining, and it became a thing that after he landed and left the plane with the ground crews, crowds of men would clamber around the plane while someone climbed up on the wing and would announce how much fuel he had left. People didn’t believe it.

But when he was asked to explain, when he described how he leaned out the fuel mixture and adjusted other flight settings such as RPM and manifold pressure, the other pilots and ground crews scoffed at him and protested that running the engines like that would destroy the engines. He calmly insisted it wouldn’t. He went on to say “These are military grade engines. They are made to take punishment. Punish them. However, you as the pilots are the captains of your own ships. You must do what you think is right for you.”

But when, as an exercise, the crews removed the engines from his plane after some weeks of this treatment and broke them down, they found no damage at all. Soon, ALL the pilots were using his instructions, and it spread from squadron to squadron. They extended the combat radius of the planes by nearly 500 miles, an absolutely astonishing thing, with not a penny spent to do it. They completely destroyed one Japanese airbase that didn’t even bother to run air combat patrols because they thought they were completely out of range of the American land fighters, and the completely surprised Japanese at this heretofore fully safe base were caught completely with their pants down and were destroyed.

However, the upper ranks found out he was flying combat missions, and he was summoned by the horrified REMFs to Australia to meet personally with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. When he told MacArthur how he had helped them increase their combat radius, MacArthur was so amazed, he not only let him continue flying combat, but gave him his very own P-38 to fly back in and keep for himself while he was in the Pacific.

He was a brilliant man. But flawed.

He had seven children with three different German women (I believe) after the war, and he turned into a rabid environmentalist Leftist and was the Director of the World Wildlife Fund back before many people even knew what an environmentalist was) and we know what kind of Leftists THOSE people are.

He got weirder and weirder, and later in life, could be seen covering himself with mud then swimming naked in Long Island Sound. He grew very strange at the end.