Books: An American Epic

THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS (561 pp.]—Charles A. Lindbergh—Scribners ($5).

Few men define their age in a lifetime; Charles Augustus Lindbergh did it in 33½ hours. When The Spirit of St. Louis hopped the Atlantic nonstop from New York to Paris on May 20-21, 1927, the Age of Flight finally came of age. Nowadays, when any weekday finds hundreds of passengers casually making the trans atlantic crossing, the drama is gone. Lind bergh’s great and simple epic was that he was the first to fly the Atlantic alone, the first to fly without stop from the U.S. to Europe.*

In The Spirit of St. Louis, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice for September, Airman Lindbergh. 51, gives a full and earnest account of how he planned and piloted his plane to international fame.

Each unassuming page shows why the dizzy decade of Teapot Dome, bathtub gin, flappers, crooners and “It” girls found in him an untarnished symbol of its better self. No Antoine de Saint Exupery, no philosopher of flight, Lindbergh rarely rises to poetic altitudes and sometimes drones on in childhood reveries and me chanical details. But at its exciting best, his book keeps the reader cockpit-close to a rare adventure.

Obscure Mail Pilot. The idea that he could fly the Atlantic came to Lindbergh in his DH4 biplane one moonlit night over Peoria, Ill., while he was flying the mail from St. Louis to Chicago. It is September 1926, and he is not yet 25, but four solid years of barnstorming and army air service have given him an air of quiet confidence that a group of aviation-mind ed St. Louis businessmen cannot resist.

They dig up $15,000 to back his flight; Lindbergh puts in his own life savings of $2,000. There is also a practical incentive: the Orteig Prize of $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, either way.

Finding the right plane is a puzzler; “Rene Fonck, France’s World War I ace, has just crashed on the take-off at Roosevelt Field in a trimotored Sikorsky biplane, and two of his crew members have burned to death. Lindbergh distrusts the heavy, intricate, three-engine craft of the day: too much could go wrong. But his backers are cautious; they urge him to go to the renowned Fokker Co. A three-engine plane for such a flight will cost $90,000, the salesman tells him. When Lindbergh mentions a one-engine job, the salesman’s voice turns chill: “Mr. Fokker wouldn’t consider selling a single-engine plane for a flight over the Atlantic Ocean.” Lindbergh finds a plane and price he likes in a Wright-Bellanca, but the company insists on naming the crew. Obscure mail pilots need not apply.

An Odor of Dead Fish. At wit’s end by Feb. 3, 1927, Lindbergh dashes off a telegram to an almost unknown San Diego outfit called Ryan Airlines, gets an answer back the next day: “Can build plane . . . Delivery about three months.” Lindbergh heads for the coast, finds Ryan Airlines in a dilapidated waterfront building with no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines—only the pervasive odor of dead fish from a nearby cannery. But the competent chief engineer, Donald Hall, impresses Lindbergh. The order is placed. With five other transatlantic flights poised to go, a race against time begins.

Working round the clock, Ryan gets The Spirit of St. Louis built in 60 days. In the meanwhile, Flyers Clarence Chamberlin and Bert Acosta, preparing for a hop of their own, set a new endurance record, staying aloft 51 hrs. 11 min. 25 sec. Lindbergh frets, but death, accidents and delay soon begin to scratch the other entries. Two Navy pilots nose into a swamp on take-off and are killed. Chamberlin damages his Bellanca in a routine test flight. Commander Richard E. Byrd, with his Fokker and four-man crew all set, waits at Roosevelt Field for the word from the weatherman. On May loth, two days after Frenchmen Nungesser and Coli take off from Paris, Lindbergh hops from San Diego to St. Louis in the record time of 14 hrs. 25 min., takes off next morning, and by afternoon is in New York.

Dance of Doubts. The lone dark horse, unknown to the Eastern newspapers until his dramatic flight across the continent, found himself an overnight favorite with the tabloids. “Slim” or Captain Lindbergh to his St. Louis backers, he is dubbed the “Flyin’ Fool.” Photographers crash his hotel room at Garden City, L.I. for pictures of “Lindy” shaving, Lindy in pajamas. When reporters quiz his mother on how she feels about the suicidal risks of the flight, Lindbergh flares into a sharp resentment of the press which he never lost. With his plane grounded by storms on the Atlantic, doubts begin to dance across his mind. Can The Spirit of St. Louis carry the needed 450 gallons of gas weighing 2,700 Ibs.? He has never tested it with more than 300 gallons, for fear a tire would blow out on landing. Can he fly with the big gas tank in front of the cockpit, and no visibility ahead except for a makeshift periscope? Can he navigate a whole ocean with simple compasses? Even Nungesser and Coli have been lost over the Atlantic. Why should he succeed?

On the night of May 19th, he decides to forget about flying and see the Broadway musical, Rio Rita. But, by nightly custom, he checks on weather first. A surprise report: partial clearing over the Atlantic. He orders his plane readied for flight at dawn, and near midnight turns in for two hours’ sleep, but only tosses and turns.

Before daybreak, May 20, Lindbergh arrives at Roosevelt Field to find a light, dismal drizzle falling. The field is mushy. The Spirit of St. Louis is shrouded and dripping. Reporters and a handful of onlookers shake their heads. “It’s more like a funeral procession than the beginning of a flight to Paris.” As the engine warms up, it is 30 r.p.m. low. The stick wobbles sluggishly in the taxiing run; water and mud spew from the tires, drum on the fabric. Lindbergh, at the head of the runway, opens the throttle. Three times he lifts his plane from the runway, three times touches it back down. The fourth time The Spirit of St. Louis is only 1,000 ft. from a web of telephone wires. Slowly it rises—”5,000 lbs. balanced on a blast of air.” The telephone wires are skimmed by 20 ft. The plane is airborne.

“Which Way Is Ireland?” Lindbergh carries five sandwiches in a brown paper bag, a canteen of water, a rubber raft, two small flashlights, a knife, and not much more except an iron will. For the first hours, that will is lightly tested, an occasional nodding daydream, a slight arm or leg cramp. Now & then he takes a swallow of water and keeps alert by checking his instruments and charts. But after nightfall, with The Spirit of St. Louis a dot over the Atlantic, fog closes in. Lindbergh looks for holes, climbs to 10,000 ft., goes down to 10 ft. above the vicious whitecaps. Sleet comes, ice edges the wings. For 1,000 miles he flies on his primitive instruments and battles the storm. After the storm comes another enemy, the urge to sleep.

In the 18th hour, “my back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart … All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out . . .” He pushes his eyes open with his thumbs. Daylight comes, but in the 24th hour, Lindbergh has to strike his face and arms viciously and stamp his feet to keep awake. Over and over again he does his navigation chores: “. . . And 12 make 23. Twenty-three—what do I want with 23?” But even in a semi-stupor, he does his chores right. In the 27th hour, he joyously sights some fishing smacks. Diving to 50 ft., he throttles his motor and yells: “Which way is Ireland?” He gets no answer, but within an hour he is over the Irish coast. Then come the Cornish cliffs of England, the Channel, the coast of France. Hungry, he munches a sandwich, first food in 33 hours, slakes his dry throat from the still half-filled canteen. It’s nearly 10 p.m.; the lights of Paris come into view, and five miles away, the floodlights of Le Bourget Field. Lindbergh toys with the idea of flying on to Rome. He has nearly 1,000 miles worth of gas left. But he circles Le Bourget, lands and rolls to a stop in the center of the field.

“I start to taxi back toward the floodlights and hangars—but the entire field ahead is covered with running figures!” Lindbergh was completely unprepared for the crowd of 25,000 that had broken down Le Bourget’s fences to greet him. He had rather expected to have to introduce himself.

* The first nonstop transatlantic airplane flight was made by two Britons, Alcock and Whitten-Brown, from Newfoundland to Ireland on June 14-15, 1919-