Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi puppet—and his famous flight was overrated. Here’s why.

I have to declare a personal stake that shapes my opinion as I write this story. It has its origins in 1940, 85 years ago this month. I was seven years old, living near London. I watched the choreography of a great battle underway, etched in vapor trails high above in the crisp blue sky of summer, the combat that became known as the Battle of Britain. I wasn’t scared. I watched with the detached excitement of a child unaware of how perilous those days were for us. That understanding would come later, from my work as a journalist, spending years discovering how closely fought that famous victory was.

Had that battle been lost it is doubtful that Britain, then alone as most of Western Europe fell to Hitler, could have survived, as it did, until Pearl Harbor made American intervention inevitable. As things have turned out, one of my most unsettling discoveries has been that a man long hailed as an American legend, Charles Lindbergh, worked avidly with the Germans to undermine the chances of a British victory.

Much has long been known about Lindbergh’s alliance with American fascists between 1939 and 1941, and particularly his speech in Des Moines, Iowa in September 1941, in which he blamed three groups—the Roosevelt administration, the British and the Jews—for pressing the nation to confront Hitler. Much less known is the role Lindbergh played in England during the 1930s as Hitler’s useful idiot, spreading the idea that Nazi Germany had become an invincible air power.

The first Nazi to spot and exploit Lindbergh as an effective agent of German disinformation was Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy and head of his air force, the Luftwaffe. Goering recognized that Lindbergh’s celebrity gave him oracular authority on aviation—whether justified or not.

A decade after Lindbergh’s epic solo flight across the Atlantic, on October 16, 1937, the Nazis made their master move, allowing him into their secret test field at Rechlin, near the Baltic coast. Virtually all the Luftwaffe’s future aircraft were revealed to him. Credulous and convinced that no other European power rivaled Germany in the air, Lindbergh thereafter became a powerful influence on the “peace at any price” factions in Britain and France.

Hitler’s useful idiot

Lindbergh had no background in military aviation, but when he spoke on the subject of anything with wings, a lot of important people listened.

There were numerous reports of Lindbergh pressing his views on leading European politicians, some of whom found them unnerving and demoralizing. For example, the British military attaché in Paris, seeing how rattled the French were by Lindbergh’s assessments, reported to London, “…the Fuhrer found a most convenient ambassador in Colonel Lindbergh.”

Lindbergh’s impact in Britain was equally effective. In a single meeting he could turn a stern patriot into an abject appeaser. In 1938 a highly influential Tory, Thomas Jones, noted in his diary that before listening to Lindbergh he had been for standing up against Hitler but: “Since my talk with Lindbergh I’ve sided with those working for peace at any cost in humiliation, because of the picture of our relative unpreparedness in the air…”

(How the Battle of Britain changed the war—and the world—forever)

Lindbergh also had a willing ear in the American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy. In 1938 he told Kennedy that Germany was then able to produce 20,000 military airplanes a year and gave a dark prediction of likely British defeat in the air. (In October 1938 Goering, on behalf of Hitler, awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle.)

In fact, Lindbergh’s numbers were absurdly inflated. They were, literally, being used by the Nazis as a force multiplier. Moreover, Lindbergh’s propaganda had masked a systemic weakness in the organization of German aircraft production. It was far from being a model of Teutonic efficiency. Production was dispersed among many manufacturers competing for resources and slowed by supply chain bottlenecks. In contrast, British aircraft production was far more rigorously directed and resourced from a central command.

More crucially, Lindbergh had no inkling of a game-changing technical leap in the deployment of air power that the British pioneered, the world’s most advanced radar-based early warning system. Incoming waves of bombers could be pinpointed and tracked before they reached the British coast. Their size, direction and altitude were precisely plotted on a map in a central operations room, enabling the Royal Air Force (R.A.F) to deploy its precious hundreds of advanced fighters and pilots sparingly in the most efficient and deadly way.

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Britain’s ‘finest hour’

At the outbreak of war, in September 1939, Germany did have a clear lead in numbers: 2,893 available front-line airplanes versus 1,600 in Britain. But by July, 1940, when the Battle of Britain began, the difference had narrowed. Britain had 644 front-line fighters to 725 German (with their time over England critically limited by fuel). By the end of September, when the RAF’s famous victory was achieved, they had 732 fighters available while the Luftwaffe was reduced to 438.

Weeks before the battle in the air began, Britain’s expeditionary army in France had been nearly wiped out, saved only by the evacuation at Dunkirk. Few foresaw that its air force, the most scientifically advanced of its forces, was actually capable of saving the day. But—a point mostly overlooked by historians—Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fighting off a last-ditch resistance by appeasers, made his confidence in the R.A.F’s strengths the bulwark of his case for carrying on the war.

(Searching for the remains of two early transatlantic pilots)

This is testament to Churchill’s remarkable openness, at the age of 65, to technical transformation: As a young man he had served in the army, and had then twice served as First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1911 and 1939, running the Royal Navy. But, as much as he loved Britain’s imperial-scale navy, he understood in 1940, ahead of many others, that the island nation’s last line of defense was now in the air.

On June 18, 1940, in one of his greatest speeches, Churchill warned, “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us…if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.” Yet, if Britain prevailed, the world would say, “This was their finest hour.”

The battle engaged remarkably low numbers of men in combat, only a few hundred on each side, almost like medieval knights, each alone in a cockpit. When it was over, Churchill made the indelible tribute to his airmen: “Never in the history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.”

Victory in the air ended any chance of Hitler carrying out Operation Sea Lion, his planned invasion of Britain. And it finally laid bare the pernicious extent of the disinformation spread by Lindbergh—swallowed whole by many, including Ambassador Kennedy. Even then, Kennedy, a hardened isolationist, had learned nothing. Unmoved by the victory, he said, “The British have had it. They can’t stop the Germans and the best thing for them is to learn to live with them.”

(Charles Lindbergh’s wife was a record-breaking aviator in her own right)

A famous flight—but not an innovative one

It’s important to note that Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic in 1927 was an act of superb airmanship—particularly of navigation—but it did nothing to advance the science of aviation. His airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was a one-off bespoke model built for only one purpose: for one man to safely cross the Atlantic. It was not in any way a precursor. The science necessary to carry passengers safely across any ocean was an American achievement, developed mainly in a wind tunnel at Caltech in California, where two companies, Boeing and Douglas, created the first twin-engine all-metal airliners. 

In fact, the need for a larger, twin-engine airplane to cross oceans was foretold by two British military aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, who were the first to actually fly across the Atlantic, 1,890 miles, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, in a converted World War I bomber. They landed, unheralded, in a field and came to rest, nose down, in a bog, not like Lindbergh on a floodlit runway with the whole world listening on radio. As a result, to this day few people realize who was first.

It will fall to President Donald Trump to decide how the nation will mark the centennial of Lindbergh’s 1927 flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris. This will confront America with a challenging moral judgment: Can a legendary human endeavor ever be celebrated if the “hero” turns out to have been so deeply flawed?