Builders:
In 2013 I woke this short read on the life of CAL: The cost of being Charles Lindbergh I spent a long time writing it. It is well worth the 5 minute read. It is something of a precursor this video:
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I posted this over on YouTube: [Slightly edited for clarity]
Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg is also excellent. It was published in 1998 and won the Pulitzer prize. Berg had access to papers that Anne Morrow Lindbergh gave him. He either didn’t know about or chose not to write about Lindbergh’s second family in Germany, revealed years later.
I read somewhere that the reason the Roosevelt didn’t allow Lindbergh to rejoin the Army was for two reasons. One was for heading up the America First movement, and had resigned his commission to protest our prewar involvement with Europe, and the other was that, years before, when the Army took over the air mail, he said that they had excellent pilots, but flying the mail was a completely different type of flying, and that a lot of Army pilots would get killed. He was right, but he had opposed Roosevelt, who didn’t forget it.
When he was refused readmission into the Army when we entered the war, Lindbergh quietly worked hard as a manufacturer’s representative to improve the performance of our airplanes.
What he supposedly told the Army and Marine pilots about increasing their range was, “It’s in your engine manuals”. He taught them that at low throttle settings, that the rpms could be pulled way back without detonation, yielding long range efficiencies.
IIRC, when he was flying Corsairs with the Marines, they noticed two things. He was always slow to join up, and when they would come back on fumes, and he would have plenty of gas left in his tanks. Since he was obviously flying more efficiently than they were, and the fact that he was who he was, motivated them to follow his advice and improve their fuel consumption, and significantly increase their combat radius.
His opposition to the U.S. getting involved in what was then a European war before Pearl Harbor, I believe could be traced back to his father, a Congressman from Minnesota, being one of the very few that opposed entry into WWI.