One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  While the Coolidges enjoyed themselves in the Black Hills, Charles Lindbergh continued, with ever decreasing enthusiasm, to receive the adulation of the American people. Alva Johnston, writing in the New York Times from St. Louis, was struck by how unmoved Lindbergh appeared to be by the parade and other festivities laid on for him there. “Colonel Lindbergh never indicated by expression or gesture that he understood that the demonstration was for him,” Johnston wrote. “He did not smile or wave. Nothing moved him to admit that the glittering spectacle and the deafening uproar was a personal tribute.” The following day Lindbergh delighted a crowd of one hundred thousand in Forest Park with aerial acrobatics, but he underwent an abrupt mood change upon landing. “The holiday spirit deserted him when he touched earth again,” Johnston reported. “As soon as he left his own element, the stern and rather gloomy demeanor returned. He is not quite at his ease on land.”

  Things got worse. From St. Louis, Lindbergh flew to Dayton, Ohio, to visit Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane with his late brother Wilbur. Thrilled city officials hastily organized a parade and reception, and were dismayed when Lindbergh refused to take part in either on the grounds that this was a private visit. When disappointed townspeople learned that Lindbergh had declined their tribute, many of them marched on Wright’s home and demanded to see their hero. When Lindbergh still refused to appear, the crowd grew restive and threatened to do actual damage to Wright’s house. Only then did Lindbergh, beseeched by Wright for the sake of his property, step onto a balcony and briefly wave to the crowd.

  Reporters found Lindbergh close to sullen when he returned to New York via Mitchel Field on June 24. “Colonel Lindbergh appeared much more tired than when he left New York a week ago. He did not smile once,” wrote another Times reporter. As Lindbergh was about to climb into an automobile for the drive into Manhattan, a pretty girl rushed up and asked if she could shake his hand. Lindbergh’s reaction surprised everybody. “He looked at her severely and said: ‘No shaking hands,’ and drew his arm away swiftly,” wrote the Times reporter. The girl was clearly crushed, and Lindbergh embarrassed, but he seemed powerless to behave in a more relaxed and thoughtful way.

  The world, however, refused to see him as anything other than a warm-hearted hero, and the press soon stopped noting his curiously flat aspect and lack of enthusiasm for those who adored him, and resumed depicting him as the obliging hero everyone wished him to be.

  While Lindbergh was breaking hearts at Mitchel Field, Commander Richard Byrd was continuing to mystify the flying fraternity at Roosevelt. A special earthen ramp about six feet high and fifty feet long had been erected at the starting point for takeoff to help the America get a good start. Three times the plane was hauled to the top of its takeoff ramp, and three times Byrd gravely scanned the sky and ordered a postponement. The delays “began to look something more than ridiculous,” fumed Tony Fokker.

  With Floyd Bennett permanently lost to the team, Byrd appointed Bert Acosta as chief pilot. A tanned and rakish-looking fellow of exotic Mexican-Amerindian lineage, Acosta was a celebrated ladies’ man. “His Latin allure and his low ‘come-hither’ voice wrought havoc among the fair,” wrote one admiring biographer. “In the movies he might have been another Valentino.” Acosta was also one of the world’s most daring stunt pilots. His specialty was to pluck a handkerchief from the ground with a wingtip. Not surprisingly, these skills would prove somewhat irrelevant on an ocean crossing.

  To assist Acosta, Byrd selected the Norwegian Bernt Balchen as copilot—though Balchen was listed only as mechanic and relief pilot because Rodman Wanamaker wanted to keep the enterprise all-American. Balchen was allowed to come only by agreeing to apply for U.S. citizenship. Byrd, in a press conference, said that Balchen was primarily a passenger, though he might also be allowed to do a little navigating when Byrd was busy with other duties. In fact, Balchen did nearly all the flying.

  On an early test flight with Acosta, Balchen got a glimpse of the problems the team faced. As the America flew into cloud, Acosta grew tense and flustered. Within minutes he had put the plane into a dangerous spin. Balchen grabbed the controls, which Acosta yielded gratefully. “I’m strictly a fair-weather boy,” Acosta told him, blushing. “If there’s any thick stuff I stay on the ground.” Acosta, it turned out, had no idea how to fly on instruments. The only reason that Byrd’s flight made it to France was that Balchen was willing to fly most of the way without demanding any of the credit or glory.

  The fourth member of the crew was the most anonymous. George Noville, the radio operator, was retiring, bespectacled, and all but invisible to history. He was the son of a wealthy hat manufacturer from Cleveland (who was important enough to merit an obituary in the New York Times, something his son never got). If Noville made any impression on his fellow fliers, none bothered to record it. He barely appears in Byrd’s and Balchen’s autobiographies, is entirely missing from all others, and left no account of his own.

  As for Byrd himself, he was a remarkable human being but not at all an easy one to figure. A born adventurer, he made his first trip around the world at the age of just twelve after persuading his parents—who were evidently seriously indulgent—to let him travel alone to the Philippines to visit a family friend and then to continue home the long way around. He was nearly fourteen by the time he completed his circumnavigation.

  Byrd was smart, handsome, reasonably brave, and unquestionably generous, but he was also almost pathologically vain, pompous, and self-serving. Every word he ever wrote about himself made him seem valorous, calm, and wise. He was also, and above all, very possibly a great liar.

  On May 9, 1926—one year to the day before Nungesser and Coli disappeared—Byrd and Floyd Bennett made a celebrated flight from Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, to the North Pole and back in fifteen and a half hours, just beating a rival flight in an airship by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (and piloted by Umberto Nobile, another Italian Fascist airman). Byrd’s polar flight was considered a feat for the ages. Byrd was promoted to commander and lavishly treated to parades and medals upon his return home. People named children after him. Streets were named after him. One overexcited admirer penned a biography of his dog Igloo.

  From the outset, however, doubts were privately voiced about Byrd’s achievement. Knowledgeable observers couldn’t see how Byrd and Bennett could have made the round trip in fifteen and a half hours. Balchen had flown the same plane extensively and had never gotten the cruising speed above 65 knots (74.8 miles per hour). Byrd’s flight to the pole required a cruising speed nearly a third faster. Moreover, for the polar flight Byrd’s plane had been fitted with enormous skis for snow landings, which added substantial drag to the craft and knocked perhaps 5 miles per hour off its speed. When Balchen mentioned to Bennett that he couldn’t understand how they had made it to the North Pole and back in such a short time, Bennett replied, “We didn’t.” He confided to Balchen that the plane had developed an oil leak soon after taking off, and that they had flown back and forth for fourteen hours without ever losing sight of Spitsbergen.

  Rumors that Byrd had at the very least exaggerated his achievement persisted for years, and suspicions were darkened by his family’s long refusal to let scholars examine his papers. It wasn’t until 1996, after Byrd’s archive was purchased by Ohio State University for its new Byrd Polar Research Center, that Byrd’s log of the flight became available for examination. The log showed heavy erasures where Byrd had done his calculations of distance traveled, suggesting to many that he had falsified the data. A more generous interpretation would be that he had made a mistake in his first calculation and started over. No one can absolutely say, but according to Alex Spencer of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., it is now generally believed among experts that Byrd and Bennett never reached the pole.

  What is certain is that when Balchen’s autobiography was published in 1959, two years after Byrd’s death, it aired some of the doubts about Byrd’s claims. B
yrd’s family volubly protested. Under pressure, Balchen’s publishers agreed to cut several passages and to withdraw from sale the first four thousand copies of the book. The Byrd family wasn’t fully placated, however. Balchen by this time was an American citizen and a respected member of the U.S. Air Force, but Senator Harry Byrd, the explorer’s brother, reportedly blocked Balchen’s promotion to brigadier general and had him quietly relieved of duties. Balchen passed the rest of his career sitting in the Pentagon library reading.

  Just as people were wondering if Byrd would ever take off for Europe, he decided to make the flight. In the early hours of June 29, the America was rolled to the top of its takeoff ramp in readiness for a dawn departure. This would be the first big plane to attempt a takeoff for an Atlantic flight since René Fonck’s crashed in flames, and it was even more perilously overloaded. The radio equipment alone weighed eight hundred pounds. Byrd packed for every possible contingency. He even brought along a kite, which he thought could act as both an antenna for the radio and as a sail to pull the plane through the water in the event of a forced landing. He also packed two lifeboats, three weeks’ worth of rations, a bag of airmail letters, and a “consecrated” American flag made by the great-great-grandniece of Betsy Ross as a gift to the people of France. At the last minute, in slight panic, Byrd decided to slim the load. He removed two cans of gasoline, a flask of hot tea, and four pairs of moccasins, and took the mudguards off the plane wheels, which clearly can’t have made much difference, but happily that didn’t matter. After an excruciatingly labored takeoff, the plane lumbered into the air, cleared the wires at the runway’s end, and was on its way to Europe.

  Byrd’s stated aim was not to be the first to fly to Paris—loftily, he pointed out that he had not even entered for the Orteig Prize—but to demonstrate that the world was ready for safe, regular, multiperson flights over the Atlantic. What he proved was that such flights were indeed just about possible so long as those aboard didn’t mind crash-landing in water considerably short of their destination. Had it been his avowed purpose to show just how wonderful a pilot Charles Lindbergh was in comparison with nearly everyone else, Byrd could hardly have done better.

  Despite all the preparations, almost nothing in the flight went according to plan. A crawl space had been inserted under the main gas tank in the middle of the plane so that the crew could move between the front and the back, but no one had thought to test it while fully kitted out in cold-weather gear. Byrd got stuck and spent ten minutes trapped with no one able to hear his calls above the engines’ roar. Noville, cramping up in his confined space, stretched his leg at one point and inadvertently put his foot through some wires, knocking out the radio and rendering himself pointless. Somewhere over the Atlantic, Balchen asked Acosta to take the wheel for a minute while he felt under his seat for a packet of sandwiches. In that short interval, Acosta put the plane in a spiral so severe that its airspeed rose to 140 miles per hour, just short of the speed at which the wings would be torn off. Balchen had to wrestle the plane back to stability. “You’d better handle it from now on,” Acosta told him quietly, and Balchen flew virtually all the rest of the way. According to Time magazine, Byrd was so seized with anxiety at one point that he struck Acosta across the head with a flashlight. They were supposed to make landfall at Bray Head, Ireland, but in fact missed Ireland altogether and hit Europe at Brest, in France, more than two hundred miles from where they expected to be.

  None of these things are mentioned in Skyward, Byrd’s account of the journey published the following year. This made it sound as if he and his crew had completed one of the most heroic undertakings in the history of human endeavor. “Hour after hour … it was utterly impossible to navigate,” Byrd wrote. “We could not tell which way the winds were blowing, which way we were drifting, or what sort of land or water was below us.” In grave conclusion he added: “I sincerely hope no other fliers ever have that experience.” All this rather overlooked that Charles Lindbergh had flown the same route five weeks earlier, completely alone, in similar conditions; had landed where and when he said he would; and had never once complained about any of it.

  In a separate account written for National Geographic in the fall of 1927, Byrd made it sound as if he had intentionally sought out bad weather. “I had determined not to wait for such conditions [i.e., good ones], because I felt that the transatlantic plane of the future could not wait for ideal conditions,” he wrote. “Moreover, we probably could gain more scientific and practical knowledge if we met some adverse weather.” The result, he said, was “the toughest air battle I believe that has ever taken place.” He went on: “I did not convey my apprehension to my shipmates. They had enough upon them already. It was a terrific strain. Only an aviator knows what it means to be 18 hours without seeing the ground or water beneath. I doubt whether any other plane has ever flown blindly for half that time.”

  All this stands in interesting contrast to an account Balchen wrote for the New York Times just after the flight: “We had a good plane. Our motors never gave us any trouble. Not once during the whole flight did I have to crawl out on the wings to wipe the engine.… So far as this flight across the ocean is concerned, it was one of the dullest and most monotonous I have ever been on.” In his own book, Balchen described the night of the flight as one of “beautiful starlight” all night long. That was one of the statements that the Byrd family later made him excise from the book.

  Upon reaching the French coast at Brest, Byrd instructed Balchen to follow the coastline toward Le Havre rather than head overland to Paris—a strangely deviant route. As Balchen noted later, a railway line beneath them traced a straight route to Paris, but Byrd insisted that they follow the coast to the mouth of the Seine and then follow that—a move that added two hours to the journey and ensured that they arrived after the bad weather.

  As with Lindbergh, a crowd of thousands waited at Le Bourget, but as midnight came and went, and the rain continued, most gave up and went home. Among those in attendance were Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine, who had flown into Paris that day as part of a tour of European capitals.

  Byrd wrote: “All the French aviators waiting for us at Le Bourget agreed that not only should we not have been able to land on account of the very thick weather but that we should have surely killed people had we attempted it.” This rather jars with Chamberlin’s account. “There was only a light drizzle of rain,” he recalled. “The clouds were low but not too low for the ship to have come in safely if she had sighted the glow of Paris through the fog and been able to come down.” Byrd said in his book that his plane was clearly heard by those on the ground. Chamberlin said they never heard a thing.

  “My big job now was to try not to kill anyone beneath us and to save my shipmates,” Byrd went on, turning a manifest failure into a selfless act of heroism. “The only thing to do was to turn back to water.” He ordered the plane to return to the Normandy coast.

  By the time they got there, their fuel was all but spent. In the darkness it was too risky to land in a field, so they elected to ditch in the sea. Balchen made a perfect landing about two hundred yards off the village of Ver-sur-Mer, and the four men waded ashore at a spot that would become more famous, seventeen years later, as one of the landing beaches for British forces during the D-Day invasions. The landing sheared off the wheels and landing gear, but the plane remained intact.

  Of the experience Byrd wrote: “I felt myself entirely responsible for the lives of my shipmates. I don’t believe they thought there was much chance of getting down safely, but still they faced it gallantly.… To the last they calmly obeyed orders. Balchen happened to be at the wheel.” This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skillful landing.

  The ridiculousness was not over yet. All four members of the crew were suffering from engine deafness and couldn’t hear one another. Acosta, according to nearly all accounts, had broken his collarbone
, though he later said he didn’t feel any pain at the time. The others entirely escaped injury. They straggled ashore and almost immediately encountered a youth on a bicycle on the coast road, but he fled at the sight of four strange men entering France from the sea. Dripping and cold, they went from house to house but could not make anyone understand who they were. Noville, still unable to hear, unnerved villagers by shouting at them in poor French. At length they came to a lighthouse on a hilltop about half a mile inland from the beach. Marianne Lescop, daughter of the lighthouse keeper, recalled later that the family had already been woken once by the droning of the plane—an unusual sound in Ver-sur-Mer—and had looked out the windows but seen nothing in the dark. “About three o’clock,” she went on, “we were woken again by hammering on the door. Father saw four figures down below. One of them shouted, in French, ‘Airmen America!’ Four exhausted men came in. They’d knocked in vain at many other doors. They were queerly dressed, soaking wet, ragged, covered in mud. We were rather suspicious.”

  Monsieur Lescop and his family brought the fliers in, and gave them blankets and hot drinks. They listened in astonishment to Noville’s account of their flight, but they couldn’t report America’s arrival to the world because the town had no telephone or telegraph service between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. It was daylight by the time Byrd and his men managed to return to the beach and check their plane, and they found that the locals had dragged it onto dry land. Less helpfully, the same locals were now plundering it, as they might a shipwreck. Six men were staggering up the beach under the weight of one of the large motors. Byrd prevailed upon them to bring the motor back, but other parts of the plane were permanently missing, including a forty-foot strip of fabric bearing the plane’s name. The missing strip was later reported to be hanging on the wall of the casino in Deauville. The plane was never reassembled. All that remains of it today are a few tattered fabrics in a glass display case in a museum in Ver-sur-Mer. The forty-foot strip appears to have vanished permanently.