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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Scholarly, well written and illuminating, February 29, 2008
Today we're used to the ritual of the media building a 'star' and then sacrificing them on the altar of publicity. Diana. John Lennon. Lindbergh, the son of a WW1 Congressman, was one of the first to go. The celebrity that followed his epic flight forced him to reclusivity. A devastating low blow was dealt by papparazzi breaking into the autopsy room to photograph the dead body of his kidnapped son. The aviator thus turned against the press, and they never forgave him for it.
Written with interviews and full access to Lindbergh's private papers, this book demonstrates why Wayne S Cole is "the" historian of WW2 non-interventionism.
Lindbergh Senior was an "old school" foe of entry into WW1. His opposition derived from an agrarian radicalism with roots deep in Jeffersonian soil. Cole has already ably analysed agrarian 'isolationism' in his book onNorth Dakota's Senator Nye. Lindbergh Junior explicitly rejected father's approach and it's opposition to to "big Eastern money". Maybe that was his mistake.
Cole doesn't provide a full biography, he focuses mainly on Charles' career in the movement up to and through World War Two. And into the '60s, by which time Linbergh, somewhat ahead of his time, espoused the cause of indigenous peoples and wilderness before they became fashions for a new generation of celebrities. In the war, denied by a spiteful administration an opportunity to fight with his beloved USAAF, Linbergh worked as a civilian consultant improving the range and armament load of Navy fighters. Despite old age for a pilot, he spent enough time at the front to personally down a Japanese aircraft. This wartime 'quasi-military' career reprised the pre-war career that led him to both non-interventionism and notoriety.
In the thirties the US government's air force capitalised on Air Force Reserve Colonel Lindbergh's international fame by encouraging him to tour the air ministries and industries of europe. His access furnished confidential reports to the USAAF that were, as Cole reports, highly appreciated, and for the most part, in line with their assessments from other sources. It was on this assignment, in the company of a US ambassador, that Goering's surprise award of a medal was made. An incident that gained notoriety only after Lindbergh went public with his anti-war views.
Lindbergh's non-interventionism in many ways paralleled the new internationalism of the interventionists. Based not on his father's localism, Junior had wider concerns for the fate of western civilisation. He believed a war in europe would weaken the west as a whole, only to benefit the USSR and the growing power of Asia. This geopolitical analysis should be considered mundane today as almost all accounts trace the end of the empire to WWII. But it was clothed in racialist terminology, rightfully unacceptable today, but still flourishing in the rhetoric of all parties then. Indeed two decades after Lindbergh, Churchill was still writing histories that elevated anglo-saxons in terms that, to unsympathetic modern ears, smack of 'master race' status.
The new world aviator put air power at the centre. To Lindbergh, American air power not the Royal Navy was the guardian of North America and with a focused effort undistracted by expensive and dubious foreign campaigns, investment in aviation research would make America invulnerable. Such a position, whether right or wrong, should not of itself really be considered surprising from a senior official of NACA, the government aeronautical bureau that would become NASA. And it would seem Lindbergh's views must have had some currency in the Air Force.
Cole only seriously tests one point of Lindbergh's overall analysis. Maybe he should have done more. Cole doesn't mention it but Lindbergh's main prophetic error was in exagerating the importance of aircraft. This occupational hazard was certainly not his alone. Note the later belief that bombers could win wars. It led him to over-estimate the figthing prowess of the Luftwaffe, which was not unreasonably seen as europe's premier air force in the late 1930s. But, in hindsight, it was probably radar, not aircraft, that won the war, even if the atomic bomb ended it. And radar, at least centimetric band radar, was really the product of the world's first true "military-industrial-scientific complex". Britain's. Germany may have had better generals, scientists and industrialists but their coordination was inferior. The reich's industrial tail was divided into uncommunicative "silos" to use corporate-speak.
Cole provides insights into "The Great Debate". I was surprised to learn that the leadership of America First had virtually given up three months before Pearl Harbor in the wake of FDR's "shoot in sight" order to the Navy. They saw this as a de facto declaration of war merely waiting a response from Hitler. They considered folding up shop there and then. And the debate lines were not clearly marked. William Whtyte, the midwestern newspaperman, handpicked by FDR to lead a 'grassroots' public group to support the "all aid short of war" was himself ultimately removed as he apparently really believed in aid, short of, ...but not including..., war. Cole examines Lindbergh's Des Moines speech in detail and provides a chapter dedicated to each of the groups Lindbergh accused of pushing for war, and their reactions to the speech. It generated a furore of criticism from non-interventionists and interventionists alike for it's alleged anti-semitism. Cole suggests the speech may even have been, at least in part, deliberately self destructive. In any event politics magnified the event and Cole finds nothing in Lindbergh's personal papers to find him anti-jewish.
Indeed about the "worst" charge against him that bears the historical support, at least based on the evidence presented here, is pessimism. Or, to those determined to be pejorative, defeatism. But then again, if action speaks louder than words, Linbergh's personal actions in the war years were hardly the behaviour of a defeatist.
As mentioned above, Cole makes one test of Lindbergh's analysis, his pessimistic predictions of the war to come. Cole sees them as, if anything, a near miss. We can easily overlook that the Nazi-Soviet war broke out only six months before Pearl Harbor. If it hadn't been for the Eastern Front, any invading Americans presumably would have faced much stronger German forces than they actually did on D-Day. Up to seven million German troops were killed or captured fighting the Red Army. Had they been deployed west rather than east, victory may not have been as "easy". Most of the former 'isolationist' leaders, including Vandenburg, who became an outright WW2 and cold war internationalist, never conceded any pre-war error. Their position does not seem extreme. Nor was Lindbergh's. He never joined Robert Taft in his post-war opposition to NATO and the Marshall Plan. Post-war Lindbergh became more of an Eisenhower Republican convinced that with the damage already done, American troops and dollars would be needed in Europe for decades.
Lindbergh proved remarkably forgiving to those who plainly smeared him. Talking to Cole in the late sixties he noted that public figures cannot expect gentle treatment. His father suffered worse. And unlike the Vietnam issue, then raging, the Great Debate had been argued without violence. Cole reminds us that Lindbergh still remains something of a lost hero to modern Americans. Unlike the Cold War mud thrown by Joe McCarthy, WW2 mud, perhaps even more groundless continues to stick. It's long past the time Lindbergh was given permission to land. Recommended.
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by Charles A. Lindbergh
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