The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

For Lindbergh, the war had been a breathtaking revelation. For nearly two decades he had stood out—along with Rickenbacker—as the foremost proponent of the notion that the airplane, and all the applied science that went with it, was a tremendous force for good in civilization. What Lindbergh had seen with his own eyes in the war now convinced him that it might not be so anymore, that airplanes had become monumental engines of destruction including, along with the atomic bomb, the possible annihilation of life on the planet. Use of the airplane in expanding “civilization” to all parts of the earth also brought with it a more subtle kind of destruction, which Lindbergh had noticed with the miserable inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, who now disrupted their own simple civilizations with so-called cargo cults. These quasi-religious rites, which lasted into the 1980s, fixated natives on the anticipated return of the dominant culture’s airplanes, which had brought gifts of trinkets but departed forever after the war ended. It wasn’t simply the airplane but science itself, Lindbergh concluded, that had taken such gigantic leaps in recent years, and as a result, it universally threatened civilization as well as aided it. He began to call for a stepping back of sorts, a retrenchment to old values. With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at...