Summary

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (born February 4, 1902 in Detroit, died August 26, 1974 in Kipahulu, Hawaii) - American aviation pioneer, famous for the first airplane solo flight between the North American mainland and Europe without stopovers in 1927, brigadier general of the US Army, honorary doctorate from the University of Illinois and other universities. Time magazine's first "Man of the Year."

Origin and childhood

The Lindbergh family was of Swedish descent, Finnic to be precise, which is not synonymous with Swedish, since Skåne belonged to Denmark for 600 years before King Charles X Gustav conquered it, and the local dialect in the countryside is still more similar to Danish than to Swedish. Lindbergh's grandfather August Lindbergh, owned by Ola Månsson (pronounced u:la mo:nson, 1808-1892), came from an indigent peasant family, from the village of Smedstorp (where several family members still live today, some of whom also took the surname Lindberg, without the "h") near Simrishamn in the province of Kristianstad (now the Municipality of Tomelilla). The famous aviator's great-grandfather, Månsson's father, was named Måns Jönsson (Swedish peasants in those days had only patronymic names) and was a farmer and county tailor. Ola Månsson held liberal views and fought for the rights of the peasant state, rights for women and equal rights for Jews. In 1847, he was elected to the Swedish State Diet, Ståndsriksdagen, as a representative of the peasant state. Already earlier, in 1833, he had married the daughter of his neighbors from Smedstorp, Ingar Jönsdotter (1816-1864), with whom he had eight children (five girls and three boys). In 1857 he began an affair with Stockholm waitress Lovisa Callén (d. 1921), who gave birth to his son Charles August a year later. Meanwhile, Månsson was accused of taking bribes and misappropriating funds as chairman of a committee allocating loans to farmers from parliamentary subsidies through the Swedish State Bank (Riksbanken; Månsson was its director in Malmö), and had to fold his parliamentary seat pending trial. After losing in two instances, Månsson, without waiting for the Supreme Court's (Supreme Court (Sweden)(sw.)) verdict, transcribed his farm to his eldest son Jöns Olsson, arranged for himself and Lovisa to file papers under the new name Lindbergh, and emigrated with her and their joint son to the US. From then on, his name was August Lindbergh, and his son, the pilot's father, was Charles August Lindbergh. In Sweden, Månsson was sentenced in absentia to loss of civil rights. In the U.S., the former Månsson returned to the farming profession, obtained a land allocation for a farm in the state of Minnesota near Melrose, and was now building a new existence as a pioneer in this dangerous land, subject to invasions by Indians from the Sioux tribe and natural disasters such as the destruction of a year's crop by a locust attack. With Lovisa, called Louise in the US, he had six children, three of whom survived (so he had 15 children in both marriages?). Toward the end of his life, he legalized his relationship with Louisa, marrying her in 1885.

The eldest son from this union, Charles August Lindbergh, a lawyer and politician, married after the death of his first wife Miss Evangeline Lodge Land, daughter of a well-known Detroit dentist named Charles Henry Land, an inventor known as the "father of porcelain lace." He purchased a farm on the right bank of the Mississippi with 120 morgans of land and a forest, where he settled with his wife and two daughters from his first marriage. In 1901 Evangeline became pregnant. The big city girl never got used to provincial Little Falls; when the birth was imminent, she moved to the family home in Detroit, where on February 4, 1902 at 1:30 in the morning she gave birth to a son (4 kg in weight, 55 cm in height), who was named after his father, with the addition of us to August.

In 1906 Charles Augustus was elected to the U.S. Congress, and from then on the family's wandering between Little Falls, Detroit and Washington, D.C. began, with the result that Charles Augustus never attended more than three months at the same school, which reflected negatively on the grades on his certificates. In addition, his father was involved in a number of election campaigns in various locales and needed a chauffeur for his Ford T, so eleven-year-old Charles got behind the wheel (a driver's license was not required at the time) and drove his father around various meetings (he drove about 4,000 miles at the time). His father's political career ended the year the U.S. entered the war (1917), as he was a staunch isolationist. The family returned to Little Falls and Charles Augustus took up farming.

Youth

After withdrawing from politics, Charles' father began to invest in his farm, bought cows and sheep, and Charles served as the main farmhand, while attending the top of his class at High School, a high school in Little Falls, with rather mediocre results. He did receive a diploma from the school in 1918, which entitled him to higher education, but only because he didn't have to take the final exam - as a young man employed in agriculture, he was exempt from it, as there was a shortage of laborers in the countryside due to the mass conscription. After earning his diploma, Charles wanted to enter the U.S. Air Force officer school, but the war had just ended and the number of places in the school had been reduced, so this career path was impossible at the time. Some time he carried around the idea of studying medicine, but unfortunately he lacked a degree in Latin on his certificate, a language he had a deep aversion to, so nothing came of it. He eventually enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to study engineering, but even these did not go well: in February 1922 he failed his exams in chemistry, mathematics and physics and was struck from the student list. The most important experience of these years was his participation in the military study at the university, where he earned the qualification of cadet - a reserve non-commissioned officer.

Just a month after his fiasco at the university, Charles enrolled in a paid ($500) airplane mechanic course in Lincoln and after two weeks took - as a passenger - his first airplane flight, and after a month and seven hours of flying lessons alongside a teacher, he sat at the helm of an airplane for the first time himself. For the next year, he worked as a stuntman and airplane mechanic in a traveling "airplane circus" run by Bahl, one of his Lincoln teachers. By the spring of 1923, he had put aside enough money to buy his own airplane: at an auction of US Army demobilized aircraft, he purchased for $500 a Curtiss JN-4D, commonly known as a Jenny, with an eight-cylinder engine, a classic US Air Force training aeroplane. He spent the next year as a stunt pilot at various airplane shows in the US.

Following the encouragement of fellow airshow pilots, Lindbergh entered the Aviation Cadet School at Brooks Field near San Antonio in 1924. The course enrolled 104 cadets, of whom Charles, with his 300 flight hours and 700 appearances as a high-performance pilot, was the most experienced of all. Of these 104, 18 cadets graduated from the course in March 1925, of whom Lindbergh achieved the best results. He now attained the rank of U.S. Air Force reserve lieutenant, but did not think about a career as a professional officer for the time being, but returned to competitive aviation, and then - in 1926 - after an unsuccessful attempt to get hired as one of three pilots for Commander Byrd, who planned to fly over the North Pole, he took a job with the Robertson brothers' organized airmail line from Saint Louis, Missouri, to Chicago. He flew in an Airco DH.4 aircraft, which he named St.Louis. These mail flights were, due to generally bad weather conditions and the lack of emergency airfields along the route, among the most dangerous jobs in US aviation: 40 pilots were employed, 31 of whom lost their lives in the first few months after the line was launched. Also, two Lindbergh planes crashed one after the other, but Charles was rescued from both accidents using a parachute. From then on, the US press called him Lucky Lindy.

New York hotel magnate Raymond Orteig, a great aviation enthusiast, funded a prize of $25,000 for a nonstop flight between New York and Paris or vice versa. The thought of taking a flight never left Lindbergh from that moment on, but he had to raise at least $15,000 to buy and rebuild an airplane. To get sponsors, the hitherto shunned recluse Lindbergh joined the Keystone Lodge Masonic Lodge No. 243 in Saint Louis, which included wealthy industrialists, bankers and intellectuals. The necessary funds were soon raised.

Transatlantic Flight (1927)

The first daredevils to win the Orteig Prize were French World War I veterans Captain Charles Nungesser and his navigator Raymond Coli. They took off from Le Bourget Airport on May 8, 1927 with a Levasseur PL 8 aircraft named L'Oiseau Blanc (White Bird). The last recorded contact with them was when they flew over the Irish coast. However, the plane did not reach New York, and neither the location nor the cause of the crash has been determined. Attempts were also made by Rene Fonck, Clarence Chamberlin (who later made a solo flight over the Atlantic as the second man in the world, two weeks after Lindbergh) and Admiral Richard E. Byrd, among others.

Lindbergh learned that a new Bellanca-Wright airplane had been constructed in New York, with which he had high hopes, but Giuseppe Bellanca's company, Columbia Aircraft, demanded too high a price for its machine, and then withdrew from negotiations with Lindbergh altogether, declaring that it would choose its own crew to fly over the Atlantic. Lindbergh then turned to a small aircraft factory in San Diego, the Ryan Aeronautical Company, which offered him an airplane of its brand for $6,000, topped by the price of a Wright 9-cylinder engine, $4,580. Lindbergh decided immediately to sign the contract and detailed his de-siderations: the plane was to be light, single-seat, with a large additional gasoline tank, holding 1,705 liters of fuel, built directly in front of the cockpit, obstructing the pilot's forward view, so that a movable periscope had to be added so that the pilot could have a forward view. Finally completed, the wood-framed aircraft weighed 2230 kg with full tanks, the plane reached a speed of about 200 km

Lindbergh took a test flight from San Diego to St. Louis, covering the distance of 2,000 kilometers in 14 hours and 25 minutes. In St. Louis, his Masonic lodge handed him some mysterious papers, which he taped to the fuselage of the plane, and he proceeded to New York, where he arrived after less than eight hours. The weather was favorable, so he decided to start his flight over the Atlantic the very next day at 7:40 am, after a sleepless 24 hours. He took off from Roosevelt Field Airport in Garden City, Long Island, New York, on May 20, 1927, and in the evening of that day, after a 12-hour flight, he was over Newfoundland; after 25 hours he reached Ireland, over which he lowered his flight, seeing groups of people everywhere cheering in his honor. At 9 p.m. he reached the shore of Normandy. Notified by telegraph of his arrival, the French government ordered torches to illuminate the entire route from Deauville to Paris to help him navigate in the dark. At 10:24 p.m. on May 21, the Spirit of St. Louis landed in Paris after a 33.5-hour flight. The historic flight was a success, and Lindbergh gained worldwide fame (his grandson Erik Lindbergh repeated the same flight 75 years later in 2002, covering the distance in 17 hours and 17 minutes).

For his feat, Charles Lindbergh received the Order of the Legion of Honor from the French President. On his way back, he visited London and was received at Buckingham Palace by King George V, who (as Lindbergh later described in his memoirs) escorted him to the side and asked: May I ask how you actually managed to urinate for so many hours? - Lindbergh lied, saying that he used paper cups, the contents of which he poured into the Atlantic. In fact," he wrote later, "I felt sorry for those Frenchmen who carried me on their shoulders from Le Bourget airport - I had completely soaked my pants, I peed in them....

From England, the U.S. Navy escorted him to the U.S. (the plane, taken apart and expertly packed, traveled with him), where President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross and appointed him colonel of the U.S. Air Force on June 11, 1927. He was welcomed in Washington by 250,000 people. As early as July 20, Lindbergh set off in his Spirit of St. Louis for a circumnavigation of the entire United States. He was sponsored by a friend from a Jewish banker family, Harry Guggenheim, who created the "U.S. Air Force Support Fund" with a capital of $500,000 - a $50,000 honorarium was earmarked for Lindbergh. In three months Lindbergh flew 45,000 kilometers, visited 82 cities and met with 35 million people - a third of the US population at the time.

Lindbergh won and was awarded the Orteig Prize, but what mattered more to him than money was fame and making world aviation history. The "confetti" parade in his honor, by now the largest in U.S. history (4 million participants), was held in New York on June 13, 1927. On March 21, 1929 he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

It is worth noting that although Lindbergh was the first man to make a solo transatlantic flight without landings, from continent to continent, there had been earlier successful attempts with stopovers. The crew of the NC-4 flying boat made a 19-day stage flight across the Atlantic Ocean in May 1919.

The first non-stop flight across the ocean took place almost eight years before Lindbergh. This was accomplished by two British men - John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown on a modified Vickers Vimy IV bomber between June 14 and 15, 1919. However, their flight from Lester's Field (Newfoundland) to Clifden (Ireland) was overshadowed by Lindbergh's feat. It's worth noting that the British feat refers to flying between islands in the ocean, while Lindbergh flew between continents. It is believed that 81 people flew in various forms across the Atlantic before the American.

Archaeologist and inventor

After his flight, Lindbergh wrote a letter to the president of Longines, describing in detail the design of a watch that would make it easier for pilots to navigate. The design was adopted and a watch of this type is still produced today.

Charles Linbergh was also one of the pioneers of aerial archaeology. In 1929, while flying over the jungle on the Yucatan Peninsula, he spotted the ruins of a Mayan city. The discovery sparked his interest in the possibilities of searching for ancient archaeological sites from an airplane. In August of that year, Lindbergh flew over Arizona and New Mexico territory, discovering a number of Pueblo culture sites, and in October of that year he made a pair of repeat flights over Yucatan in search of the ruins.

Marriage

In 1927, the US government sent Lindbergh on a "goodwill mission" to Mexico. The flight was a new record - the pilot covered the distance of 3,500 kilometers in 24 hours with 1,425 liters of gasoline in the tank. Atmospheric conditions were very difficult, the weather was rainy and foggy, so that Lindbergh flew at low altitude, orienting himself according to the course of the railroad tracks. In doing so, he was puzzled as to why one after another of the train stations was called Caballeros, only after some time did he realize that Caballeros means men's restrooms.

In Mexico City, he was welcomed by 150,000 people and invited to live at the U.S. Embassy. The ambassador at the time was Dwight Morrow, from a wealthy family, the father of three daughters and one son. The second daughter Anna was studying the history of literature in New York and came to visit her parents for Christmas. An affection at first sight arose between both of these shy young people. Lindbergh remained in Central America for two more months, visiting 16 Latin American countries on his "goodwill mission," and Anna returned to the US. After completing his mission, Lindbergh flew back to Washington, D.C., and parted there forever with his Spirit of St.Louis, donating it to the museum, where it still resides.

In September 1928 Anna and Charles met in New York. Rumors of a "romance of the year" began to circulate in the press, which embarrassed both of these shy people. Ambassador Morrow, who was beginning to be annoyed by the various insinuations of journalists, called a press conference on February 12, 1929, at which he announced "the engagement of my daughter Anna Spencer Morrow to Colonel Charles Lindbergh." The couple married on May 27, 1929, taking a modest church wedding at the Morrows' summer residence in New Jersey. Charles was 27, and Anna was 23. As Lindbergh later made discreetly clear in his memoirs, the two had hitherto known no intimate life (in their generation and Protestant, middle-class society, they were no exception).

Within a few months, Charles taught Anna the art of navigation. In the spring of 1930 he purchased a new airplane for $20,000, a Lockheed- Sirius, with a 450 horsepower engine, and with two seats in the cockpit: in April of that year he won the speed record for flying from the west coast of the US to the east coast, from Los Angeles to New York, making the flight in 14.5 hours. (Being advanced in her pregnancy, she took the flight at 4,500 meters very badly, but in the end they arrived happily. On June 22, 1930, the Lindberghs' first-born son, Charles Augustus Jr. was born. In the fall of that year, the couple decided to move to the state of New Jersey, where Charles purchased a 200-acre forest parcel near the town of Hopewell.

13 months after their son was born, the Lindberghs placed him in the care of Anna's parents, who also lived in New Jersey, and set off on a new adventure - a flight over the Pacific to China, where no American pilot had ever before flown. Lindbergh converted his lockheed into a hydroplane and fitted it with a new 575 horsepower engine. The route led to Ottawa, from there over Alaska to the Japanese island of Hokkaido, on to Tokyo, where the pair were greeted by 100,000 enthusiasts and finally to Nanjing, where they were expected by Chinese President Chang Kai-shek, who awarded Lindbergh the Republic of China's high decoration, the Military Order of the Blue Sky and White Sun. Further travel led the pair to Shanghai, but there the plane was damaged while being towed to the water. At the same time, a telegram arrived about the sudden death of Anna's father, so that the Lindberghs ordered the plane to be dismantled and packed and headed to the US by sea.

Kidnapping and death of son

The Lindberghs moved into their spacious new, lonely house on the edge of the woods in January 1932. On the evening of March 1, they heard a strange noise from the second floor, where the baby was sleeping, but a windstorm was raging outside, so they assumed it was the source of the noise. At 10 p.m., little Charles' nanny went upstairs to check for diaper changes and found an empty crib and a half-open window, as well as a letter lying on the little one's bedding. Lindbergh immediately reported the matter to the police, who blocked all roads and bridges in the state of New Jersey, but without results. The letter, written in broken English with German insertions, demanded a ransom of $50,000 in various denominations. The kidnapping of Lindbergh's child became a national sensation: newspapers and radio programs reported it. After Edgar Hoover's office joined the search, 100,000 agents in uniform and in civilian clothes searched for the kidnapped, still without success. Only the ladder (with a broken rung) that the kidnapper used to get into the child's room was found. Shortly thereafter, a new letter from the kidnapper arrived demanding $70,000 to be donated to one of New York's cemeteries. Having handed over the money (bills already withdrawn from circulation exchangeable for gold dollars, so-called gold certificates, which Lindbergh's bank had numbered), Lindbergh's intermediary received a letter with a clue that the child was hidden on Nelly's stateroom near the Massachusetts coast. The water police inspected all the ships, but no Nelly was among them. The Lindberghs were deceived.

On May 12, 1932, the deformed and partially eaten by wild animals corpse of a child was found by chance in the woods about 7.2 kilometers from the Lindberghs' property. Called to the morgue, the father immediately recognized little Charles by the distinctive dimple on his chin. After a physical examination, he ordered the corpse to be burned immediately and scattered the ashes by the sea. For the rest of his life he refused to talk about the case. The obduction showed that the boy died from a blow to the head.

Thirty months after the incidents, a $10 gold certificate settled the bill at a gas station in the Bronx. The owner of the station, seeing the rare bill, noted the car's license plate number. The bank, accepting the daily take from him, determined that the bill was from the Lindbergh ransom and alerted the police, who arrested the car's owner. He was Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 34-year-old immigrant from Germany, in whose home further bills from Lindbergh were found. The alleged perpetrator never confessed, and accused Isidor Fish, a German Jew who had died of cancer in 1934, of kidnapping and killing the boy. Put on trial by jury, however, Hauptmann was found guilty of kidnapping and murder and ended his life on April 3, 1936 in the electric chair.

Lindbergh and the Third Reich

In 1936, a US Army military intelligence agent, Major Truman Smith, was appointed military attaché to the American embassy in Berlin, and was concerned about the growing military power of three European dictatorships, Germany, Italy and the Soviets. A personal acquaintance of Lindbergh's, he concluded that the famous aviator could render great service to US intelligence through his contacts, being welcomed and received everywhere, and induced him in July 1936, then already a colonel in the US Army Reserve, to visit Berlin, having obtained a personal invitation from Luftwaffe chief Göring. At Tempelhof Airport, Lindbergh was greeted by Hermann Göring himself with his adjutant, later Field Marshal Milch, at his side. Lindbergh was introduced to all the aces of the German Air Force, with Udet, as famous as the World War I veteran Göring, in the lead. He was immediately allowed to try out Göring's pride, the Junkers Ju 52 aircraft, and was shown the latest bombers, fighters and stukas. Impressed by this display, Lindbergh reported in his secret report to the US government that Germany was close to its position as Europe's greatest air power. He was also invited as a guest of honor to the opening of the Berlin Olympics on August 1, 1936. He later wrote: this fanaticism grinds me down, but the Germans are the most interesting nation in the world. On his second visit to Germany - also on a secret U.S. government mission (1937) - Lindbergh visited Messerschmitt and Dornier production facilities, after which he reported to Washington that Germany was again a world power in aviation, almost equal to England and far superior to France. On his third visit to the Third Reich in 1938, U.S. Ambassador to Berlin Hugh Wilson threw a lavish party for Lindbergh and his wife, during which Göring suddenly appeared and presented the aviator with a high decoration on behalf of the Führer, the Order of the German Eagle for Merit II. cl. and, on behalf of the Luftwaffe, the honorary saber of the German Air Force, which he had designed himself. Lindbergh, not understanding what services he had made to the Third Reich, hesitated for a while, but accepted the honors, which his critics later reproached him for more than once. Ambassador Wilson later told him that refusing to accept it would have led to a serious diplomatic crisis (before Lindbergh, for example, the order had been accepted without qualms by Henry Ford and the French ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet).

From Germany, Lindbergh traveled, still on his intelligence mission, to the USSR, visiting Poland and Czechoslovakia along the way. Received in Moscow with vodka and caviar, he nevertheless managed to keep a clear mind and concluded that the Soviet air fleet was much weaker than the German one and that Stalin's state was characterized by Asian despotism, that at the decisive moment he would prefer Hitler's dictatorship to the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, that Hitler's Germany was nevertheless Europe's bulwark against the Bolshevik invasion. Above all, he feared the outbreak of a world war and the drawing of the US into it. The statements reached the American press and caused a storm - the left-wing press, sympathetic to the Soviets, began to accuse Lindbergh even of anti-Americanism, and the right-wing, not yet devoid of cautious favor for the Third Reich despite the accidents of Kristallnacht, and above all isolationist, saw in him their new leader.

America First Committee

After a two-year stay in England, where she moved after the death of her son, the Lindbergh family returned to the US in the spring of 1939. Lindbergh reported to US Air Force commander Gen. Arnold. In it, he emphasized the Luftwaffe's enormous superiority over the air forces of England and France and his two core beliefs: the need for a rapid and massive expansion of the U.S. Air Force and maintaining U.S. neutrality at all costs in the coming world conflict. In April of that year, he also had a conversation with President Roosevelt, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade him not to agitate against US entry into the war, and after the outbreak of war in September 1939, offered him, through Gen. Arnold, the newly created post of aviation minister on the occasion of his cabinet reorganization, but Lindbergh, who distrusted the president, suspecting him of being influenced by Churchill, did not accept the offer. On September 13, 1939, he gave a 15-minute radio address, calling for a policy of US neutrality toward the war in Europe.

In 1940 a large neutralist organization, the America First Committee, was formed, backed by people with a wide variety of political views: socialists, conservatives, feminists, wealthy Jewish business people like Lindbergh's friend Harry Guggenheim, young students like John F. Kennedy, writers Pearl Buck and Upton Sinclair. The admission of well-known anti-Semites like Henry Ford and Avery Brundage to the organization was ruled out in advance. After a few months, the Committee already had 500,000 members - Lindbergh was the main agitator. The Republicans, who were initially in the isolationist camp, even offered him the party's nomination for the US presidency, but Lindbergh refused.

Roosevelt's government soon found itself on the defensive, although officially it still maintained a course of non-intervention. Secretly, Roosevelt, the Democratic Party (United States), much of Big Business and the army command were planning to enter the war, as it was clear that Britain and the Soviet Union (disliked but needed) would succumb to the superiority of the Third Reich without American help. However, it was necessary to motivate before the American people that the U.S. was at risk - the first step was to discredit the AFC and Lindbergh as a pro-German fifth column in the country: in a speech, Roosevelt called Lindbergh a defeatist, comparing him with traitors from the American Civil War, and Interior Minister Harold L. Ickes accused him outright of collaborating with Germany (citing as evidence that Lindbergh did not send his German order back to Berlin after the start of World War II). Having lost his nerve, Lindbergh sent back his officer's patent to the president and responded by declaring in his speech in Des Moines (September 11, 1941) that the main warmongers were the Roosevelt government, the British Secret Service and big Jewish capital and its media power (while pointing out that he was not an anti-Semite and that he condemned the brutal anti-Semitism of the Third Reich), who were willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of young Americans for their interests. The reaction of the left in the AFC, the liberal press and the Democrats was one of dismay - Lindbergh's political career was over, and most of his old friends turned on him.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war and Lindbergh immediately volunteered for the U.S. Air Force, but was refused admission to the U.S. Air Force on Roosevelt's orders, citing his activities in the then already disbanded AFC as the reason. His new career was made possible by Henry Ford, who realized in advance that participation in weapons production would bring his company large profits and moved to the presidential camp. Ford hired Lindbergh as a pilot for test flights of the B-24 bomber produced by his plant, later as an advisor on the design of the Boeing B-29 supercarrier.

Beginning in the summer of 1944, Lindbergh - as a civilian - took part in US Air Force raids on Japanese positions on the Pacific front. He flew F4U Corsair aircraft in the VMF-222 and P-38 Lightning units. He was a long-range flight advisor. He took part in 50 bombing raids and personally shot down a Mitsubishi Ki-51 reconnaissance plane. For the soul of the Japanese pilot who lost his life in the process, he later prayed for many years.

On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died. Lindbergh's situation changed dramatically.

President Eisenhower's advisor

Just a few days after Germany's unconditional surrender, on May 11, 1945, Lindbergh received his first secret mission from the Truman government: he was sent to Germany to investigate how far the research of Third Reich scientists in the field of rockets and jet aircraft had progressed, with special attention to the production of Prof. Messerschmitt's aircraft. The idea was to recruit as many German specialists as possible (many of whom Lindbergh knew personally from his pre-war years) to cooperate with the US. A few years later, Lindbergh wrote: "The Russians never hesitated to appoint Hitler's rocket specialists as anti-fascists if it suited their interests. We had to prevent it." The last rocket factory complex Lindbergh visited was the underground V2 rocket factory at Nordhausen (Dora-Mittelbau) in the Harz mountains, where 25,000 prisoners from various KZs, sent there to work, gave their lives over a two-year period. Only now did his eyes open to the reality of the Third Reich. In his diary he recorded: "of course I knew that such things took place. But it is another thing to have knowledge, even to look at photographs, and another to see it with one's own eyes and listen to the stories of witnesses."

After 1947, Lindbergh was appointed to Strategic Air Command, where he served on the staff of experts developing missile weapons and organizing the construction of a fleet of atomic bombers, and at the same time tried out all the new American fighters and bombers. In 1948, during the Berlin blockade, he co-organized the air bridge to West Berlin and took part in flights as a pilot, passenger and advisor. Beginning that year, he also acted as chief advisor to Pan American World Airways chief Juan Trippe in the conversion of that airline's fleet from propeller planes to jets. As such, he had free tickets on all PanAM flights and flew officially as a consultant, which was great camouflage for his main activity as a secret US aviation advisor. In April 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him brigadier general of the U.S. Army and his personal consultant - a military and political adviser - on NATO structures in Europe. Lindbergh did not have to fear interference from US intelligence and was given his own office based in Rome, reporting directly to Eisenhower. Among other things, he took part there in preparations for a possible military putsch and NATO intervention in the event of a takeover by the Italian Communists, which was almost imminent at the time. He had his own interpreter and secretary there, a Prussian aristocrat named Valeska, soon to be the mother of his two children, who to this day has not revealed her name.

Lindbergh's four families

In the postwar years, Lindbergh's marriage to Anne Morrow began to fall apart (although the Lindberghs never filed for divorce): Anne began an affair with the aviator-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the end of the war, and Charles, who was away from the US for most of the year on his intelligence mission, established as many as three unofficial families in Germany and Switzerland. In 1957 he became involved with Romanian refugee Brigitte Hesshaimer (d. 2001), whom he placed near Munich with the couple's three children, Dyrk (b. 1958), Astrid (b. 1960) and David (b. 1967). At the same time, he had an affair with Brigitta's sister Marietta, who bore him two sons - Vago (b. 1962) and Christopher (b. 1966). Marietta and her children Charles settled in a villa purchased for them in Switzerland in the canton of Valais. From his third relationship with the Prussian aristocrat Valeska of unknown name, who still lives in Baden-Baden, he had a son (born 1959) and a daughter (born 1961), whose names were not revealed.

All three women knew about each other (Marietta and Briggida were sisters, and both were also friends with Valeska), but seemed to withhold information about Lindbergh's affair with the other women. This one appeared with them infrequently, and to the children he appeared under the pseudonym "Uncle Careu Kent." The children only learned his true identity after their mothers died in 2001.

Supporting two families with five children (Valeska became independent soon after receiving an inheritance from a wealthy aunt) consumed considerable funds, so Lindbergh saved as much as he could: during his travels in Germany and Switzerland, he never stayed overnight in hotels, but slept in parking lots in his Volkswagen Beetle (how the giant Charles fit in it remains his secret).

Anne Morrow Lindenbergh and Brigitte Hesshaimer died in 2001. Brigitte's daughter Astrid, while sorting through her mother's papers, found Lindbergh's letters and photographs. DNA analysis confirmed Charles' paternity. A reunion of half-siblings from the relationships of Anna Morrow and Brigitte Hesshaimer followed in 2005.

Recent years

Back in the 1960s, Lindbergh joined the movement to protect the environment and care for endangered animals, including humpback whales and blue whales. During his time in the Philippines, he became involved in a rescue effort for the local "griffon" monkey-eater. In his last years, he often stressed the need to balance the development of technology, to which he himself contributed, with nature and man's natural surroundings (he spoke out against the introduction of airlines equipped with supersonic aircraft, among other things).

A few years before his death, Lindbergh settled in the village of Kipahulu on the island of Maui, Hawaii, where he died in 1974 of lymphatic vascular cancer. The tombstone, in addition to personal details, includes the inscription If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.... (If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: there also Thy hand shall guide me, and Thy right hand shall uphold me, Psalm 139:9-10). These words come from the Bible, from the Old Testament. Although Lindbergh emphasized many times that he was not a Christian - he professed a kind of pantheism - his funeral had a Christian character.

In honor of Lindbergh and his wife Anna Morrow Lindbergh, the Lindbergh Foundation ("The Lindbergh Foundation") was created in 1978, which gives the "Lindbergh Award" ("The Lindbergh Award") for outstanding achievements for the balance between technological progress and the environment.

In the 2004 novel by author Philip Roth titled Conspiracy Against America, which maintains the convention of alternative history, Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the US in the 1940s.

Sources

1. Charles Lindbergh
2. Charles Lindbergh
3. ^ Lindbergh fathered a total of 13 children throughout his life—six with long-time wife Anne Morrow, the first-born of which, Charles Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in his infancy; and seven other children with three separate European women out of wedlock.[2]
4. ^ Dates of military rank: Cadet, Army Air Corps – March 19, 1924, 2nd Lieutenant, Officer Reserve Corps (ORC) – March 14, 1925, 1st Lieutenant, ORC – December 7, 1925, Captain, ORC – July 13, 1926, Colonel, ORC – July 18, 1927 (As of 1927, Lindbergh was a member of the Missouri National Guard and was assigned to the 110th Observation Squadron in St. Louis.[35]), Brigadier General, USAFR – April 7, 1954.[36]
5. ^ "Always there was some new experience, always something interesting going on to make the time spent at Brooks and Kelly one of the banner years in a pilot's life. The training is difficult and rigid, but there is none better. A cadet must be willing to forget all other interest in life when he enters the Texas flying schools and he must enter with the intention of devoting every effort and all of the energy during the next 12 months towards a single goal. But when he receives the wings at Kelly a year later, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has graduated from one of the world's finest flying schools." "WE" p. 125
6. ^ Cities in which Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis landed during the Guggenheim Tour included: New York, N.Y.; Hartford, Conn.; Providence, R.I.; Boston, Mass.; Concord, N.H.; Orchard Beach & Portland, Me.; Springfield, Vt.; Albany, Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester, & Buffalo, N.Y.; Cleveland, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Wheeling, W.V.; Dayton & Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisville, Ky.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Detroit & Grand Rapids, Mich.; Chicago & Springfield, Ill.; St. Louis & Kansas City, Mo.; Wichita, Kan.; St. Joseph, Mo.; Moline, Ill.; Milwaukee & Madison, Wis.; Minneapolis/St. Paul & Little Falls, Minn.; Fargo, N.D.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Des Moines, Iowa; Omaha, Neb.; Denver, Colo.; Pierre, S.D.; Cheyenne, Wyo.; Salt Lake City, Utah; Boise, Idaho; Butte & Helena, Mont.; Spokane & Seattle, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco, Oakland, & Sacramento, Calif.; Reno, Nev.; Los Angeles & San Diego, Calif.; Tucson, Ariz.; Lordsburg, N.M.; El Paso, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Abilene, Fort Worth & Dallas, Texas; Oklahoma City, Tulsa & Muskogee, Okla.; Little Rock, Ark.; Memphis & Chattanooga, Tenn.; Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Miss.; New Orleans, La.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Spartensburg, S.C.; Greensboro & Winston-Salen, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Md.; Atlantic City, N.J.; Wilmington, Del.; Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.
7. Albert Cushing Read commande l'équipage qui réalise la première traversée de l'Atlantique le 16 mai 1919, en hydravion, en six étapes (la troisième couvrant d'une traite le voyage du Canada aux Açores), tandis que John William Alcock et Arthur Whitten Brown font la première traversée d'une traite le 14 juin 1919 depuis Terre-Neuve jusqu'en Irlande. Charles Lindbergh est donc le premier à l'avoir fait sans escale et en solitaire et en volant de continent à continent.
8. Carte de l'itinéraire suivi, L'Ouest-Eclair, Rennes, 22 mai 1927, quotidien (ISSN 1261-6249) [lire en ligne]
9. Schröck, S. 128.
10. L. Laszlo Schwartz (1957): The Life of Charles Henry Land (1847–1922).
11. a b William R. Denslow, Harry S. Truman: 10,000 Famous Freemasons from K to Z, Part Two. Kessinger Publishing, ISBN 1-4179-7579-2.