127 Facts About Charles Lindbergh

1.

Charles Lindbergh became a US Army Air Service cadet in 1924, earning the rank of second lieutenant in 1925.

2.

Charles Lindbergh earned the highest French order of merit, the Legion of Honor.

3.

Charles Lindbergh's achievement spurred significant global interest in both commercial aviation and air mail, which revolutionized the aviation industry worldwide, and he spent much time promoting these industries.

4.

Charles Lindbergh was honored as Time first Man of the Year in 1928, was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover, and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 1930.

5.

Charles Lindbergh supported the isolationist America First Committee and resigned from the US Army Air Corps in April 1941 after President Franklin Roosevelt publicly rebuked him for his views.

6.

In September 1941, Charles Lindbergh gave a significant address, titled "Speech on Neutrality", outlining his position and arguments against greater American involvement in the war.

7.

Charles Lindbergh had three elder paternal half-sisters: Lillian, Edith, and Eva.

8.

The couple separated in 1909 when Charles Lindbergh was seven years old.

9.

Charles Lindbergh's mother was a chemistry teacher at Cass Technical High School in Detroit and later at Little Falls High School, from which her son graduated on, 1918.

10.

Charles Lindbergh attended more than a dozen other schools from Washington, DC, to California during his childhood and teenage years, including the Force School and Sidwell Friends School while living in Washington with his father, and Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California, while living there with his mother.

11.

From an early age, Charles Lindbergh had exhibited an interest in the mechanics of motorized transportation, including his family's Saxon Six automobile, and later his Excelsior motorbike.

12.

Charles Lindbergh briefly worked as an airplane mechanic at the Billings, Montana, municipal airport.

13.

Charles Lindbergh left flying with the onset of winter and returned to his father's home in Minnesota.

14.

Charles Lindbergh went on to spend much of the remainder of 1923 engaged in almost nonstop barnstorming under the name of "Daredevil Lindbergh".

15.

Unlike in the previous year, this time Charles Lindbergh flew in his "own ship" as the pilot.

16.

Charles Lindbergh "cracked up" this aircraft once when his engine failed shortly after takeoff in Pensacola, Florida, but again he managed to repair the damage himself.

17.

Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training a year earlier remained when Charles Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925, thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.

18.

Charles Lindbergh later said that this year was critical to his development as both a focused, goal-oriented individual and as an aviator.

19.

The Army did not need additional active-duty pilots so immediately following graduation, Charles Lindbergh returned to civilian aviation as a barnstormer and flight instructor, although as a reserve officer he continued to do some part-time military flying by joining the 110th Observation Squadron, 35th Division, Missouri National Guard, in St Louis.

20.

Charles Lindbergh was promoted to first lieutenant on December 7,1925, and to captain in July 1926.

21.

Just before signing on to fly with CAM, Lindbergh had applied to serve as a pilot on Richard E Byrd's North Pole expedition, but apparently his bid came too late.

22.

On, 1926, Charles Lindbergh executed the United States Post Office Department's Oath of Mail Messengers, and two days later he opened service on the new route.

23.

Charles Lindbergh contributed $2,000 of his own money from his salary as an air mail pilot and another $1,000 was donated by RAC.

24.

The Spirit flew for the first time just two months later, and after a series of test flights Charles Lindbergh took off from San Diego on.

25.

Charles Lindbergh went first to St Louis, then on to Roosevelt Field on New York's Long Island.

26.

Charles Lindbergh's monoplane was powered by a J-5C Wright Whirlwind radial engine and gained speed very slowly during its 7:52AM takeoff, but cleared telephone lines at the far end of the field "by about twenty feet [six meters] with a fair reserve of flying speed".

27.

Finally, at around 9:52 AM New York time, or twenty-seven hours after he left Roosevelt Field, Charles Lindbergh saw "porpoises and fishing boats," a sign he had reached the other side of the Atlantic.

28.

Charles Lindbergh circled and flew closely, but no fishermen appeared on the boat decks, although he did see a face watching from a porthole.

29.

Dingle Bay, in County Kerry of southwest Ireland, was the first European land that Charles Lindbergh encountered; he veered to get a better look and consulted his charts, identifying it as the southern tip of Ireland.

30.

News soon spread across both "Europe and the United States that Charles Lindbergh had been spotted over England," and a crowd started to form at Le Bourget Aerodrome as he neared Paris.

31.

The aircraft fought icing, flew blind through fog for several hours, and Charles Lindbergh navigated only by dead reckoning.

32.

Charles Lindbergh shook hands with Herrick and handed him several letters he had carried across the Atlantic, three of which were from Col.

33.

Charles Lindbergh was taken from the field around midnight and driven through Paris to the ambassador's residence, stopping to visit the French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe; he finally arrived at the residence, where he rested for the first time in about 60 hours.

34.

Charles Lindbergh's flight was certified by the National Aeronautic Association of the United States based on the readings from a sealed barograph placed in the Spirit.

35.

The morning after landing, Charles Lindbergh appeared in the balcony of the US embassy, responding "briefly and modestly" to the calls of the crowd.

36.

At the Elysee Palace, French President Gaston Doumergue bestowed the Legion d'honneur on Charles Lindbergh, pinning the award on his lapel, with Ambassador Herrick present for the occasion.

37.

Charles Lindbergh made flights to Belgium and Great Britain in the Spirit before returning to the United States.

38.

From Evere, Charles Lindbergh motored to the US embassy, and then went to place a wreath on the Belgian tomb of the unknown soldier.

39.

Charles Lindbergh received the first award of this medal, but it violated the authorizing regulation.

40.

Charles Lindbergh flew from Washington, DC, to New York City on, arriving in Lower Manhattan.

41.

Charles Lindbergh was officially awarded the check for the prize on.

42.

On July 18,1927, Charles Lindbergh was promoted to the rank of colonel in the Air Corps of the Officers Reserve Corps of the US Army.

43.

Charles Lindbergh was honored as the first Time magazine Man of the Year when he appeared on that magazine's cover at age 25 on, 1928; he remained the youngest Time Person of the Year until Greta Thunberg surpassed his record in 2019.

44.

Charles Lindbergh was run by aviation enthusiast George P Putnam.

45.

Charles Lindbergh then toured 16 Latin American countries between, 1927, and, 1928.

46.

Charles Lindbergh used his world fame to promote air mail service.

47.

Two weeks after his Latin American tour, Charles Lindbergh piloted a series of special flights over his old CAM-2 route on and.

48.

Tens of thousands of self-addressed souvenir covers were sent in from all over the world, so at each stop Charles Lindbergh switched to another of the three planes he and his fellow CAM-2 pilots had used, so it could be said that each cover had been flown by him.

49.

Charles Lindbergh wrote that the ideal romance was stable and long-term, with a woman with keen intellect, good health, and strong genes, his "experience in breeding animals on our farm [having taught him] the importance of good heredity".

50.

Charles Lindbergh was the US Ambassador to Mexico in 1927.

51.

Charles Lindbergh taught Anne how to fly, and she accompanied and assisted him in much of his exploring and charting of air routes.

52.

Charles Lindbergh saw his children for only a few months a year.

53.

Charles Lindbergh kept track of each child's infractions and insisted that Anne track every penny of household expenses in account books.

54.

Charles Lindbergh came to the Monterey Peninsula with his wife in March 1930 to continue innovations in the design and use of gliders.

55.

Charles Lindbergh stayed at Del Monte Lodge in Pebble Beach, to search for sites for launching gliders.

56.

Charles Lindbergh came to the Palo Corona Ranch in Carmel Valley, California, and stayed there as guests at the Sidney Fish home, where he flew a glider from a ridge at the ranch.

57.

Charles Lindbergh was convicted on, sentenced to death, and electrocuted at Trenton State Prison on, 1936.

58.

An intensely private man, Charles Lindbergh became exasperated by the unrelenting public attention in the wake of the kidnapping and Hauptmann trial, and was concerned for the safety of his three-year-old second son, Jon.

59.

In 1938, the family moved to Ile Illiec, a small four-acre island Charles Lindbergh purchased off the Breton coast of France.

60.

Arnold, the chief of the United States Army Air Corps in which Charles Lindbergh was a reserve colonel, for him to accept a temporary return to active duty to help evaluate the Air Corps's readiness for war.

61.

Charles Lindbergh's duties included evaluating new aircraft types in development, recruitment procedures, and finding a site for a new air force research institute and other potential air bases.

62.

Charles Lindbergh wrote to the Longines watch company and described a watch that would make navigation easier for pilots.

63.

In 1929, Lindbergh became interested in the work of rocket pioneer Robert H Goddard.

64.

Charles Lindbergh began to wonder why hearts could not be repaired with surgery.

65.

In later years, Charles Lindbergh's pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.

66.

Somewhere over Wannsee Charles Lindbergh took the controls himself and treated us to some very steep banks, considering the size of the plane, and other little manoeuvres, which terrified most of the passengers.

67.

Charles Lindbergh has shown no enthusiasm for meeting the foreign correspondents, who have a perverse liking for enlightening visitors on the Third Reich, as they see it, and we have not pressed for an interview.

68.

Charles Lindbergh said of the Bf 109 that he knew of "no other pursuit plane which combines simplicity of construction with such excellent performance characteristics".

69.

Charles Lindbergh's acceptance became controversial when, only a few weeks after this visit, the Nazi Party carried out the Kristallnacht, a nation-wide anti-Jewish pogrom which is considered a key inaugurating event of the Holocaust.

70.

Charles Lindbergh had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews, it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer, who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted.

71.

In 1938, the US Air Attache in Berlin invited Charles Lindbergh to inspect the rising power of Nazi Germany's Air Force.

72.

At the urging of US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh wrote a secret memo to the British warning that a military response by Britain and France to Hitler's violation of the Munich Agreement would be disastrous; he claimed that France was militarily weak and Britain over-reliant on its navy.

73.

Charles Lindbergh urgently recommended that they strengthen their air power to force Hitler to redirect his aggression against "Asiatic Communism".

74.

In October 1939, following the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and Germany, and a month after the Canadian declaration of war on Germany, Charles Lindbergh made another nationwide radio address criticizing Canada for drawing the Western Hemisphere "into a European war simply because they prefer the Crown of England" to the independence of the Americas.

75.

Charles Lindbergh went on to further state his opinion that the entire continent and its surrounding islands needed to be free from the "dictates of European powers".

76.

In November 1939, Charles Lindbergh authored a controversial Reader's Digest article in which he deplored the war, but asserted the need for a German assault on the Soviet Union.

77.

In late 1940, Charles Lindbergh became the spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, soon speaking to overflow crowds at Madison Square Garden and Chicago's Soldier Field, with millions listening by radio.

78.

Charles Lindbergh argued emphatically that America had no business attacking Germany.

79.

Charles Lindbergh justified this stance in writings that were only published posthumously:.

80.

Charles Lindbergh's message was popular throughout many Northern communities and especially well received in the Midwest, while the American South was anglophilic and supported a pro-British foreign policy.

81.

Charles Lindbergh's anticommunism resonated deeply with many Americans, while his pro-eugenics views and Nordicism enjoyed social acceptance.

82.

Charles Lindbergh seemed to state that he believed the survival of the white race was more important than the survival of democracy in Europe: "Our bond with Europe is one of race and not of political ideology", he declared.

83.

Charles Lindbergh developed a long-term friendship with the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who was well known for his antisemitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent.

84.

Charles Lindbergh stated that if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia.

85.

Charles Lindbergh preferred Nordics, but he believed, after Soviet Communism was defeated, Russia would be a valuable ally against potential aggression from East Asia.

86.

Charles Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs regarding the white race in a 1939 article in Reader's Digest:.

87.

Charles Lindbergh believed, "in America they can be blended to form the greatest genius of all".

88.

Wallace considered Charles Lindbergh to be a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people.

89.

Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, A Scott Berg, contended that Lindbergh was not so much a supporter of the Nazi regime as someone so stubborn in his convictions and relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering that he easily allowed rivals to portray him as one.

90.

Charles Lindbergh returned to the United States in early 1939 to spread his message of nonintervention.

91.

Berg contended Charles Lindbergh's views were commonplace in the United States in the interwar era.

92.

Berg explained that leading up to the war, Charles Lindbergh believed the great battle would be between the Soviet Union and Germany, not fascism and democracy.

93.

Charles Lindbergh believed that a strong defensive war machine would make America an impenetrable fortress and defend the Western Hemisphere from an attack by foreign powers, and that this was the US military's sole purpose.

94.

In January 1942, Lindbergh met with Secretary of War, Henry L Stimson, seeking to be recommissioned in the Army Air Forces.

95.

In 1944 Charles Lindbergh persuaded United Aircraft to send him as a technical representative to the Pacific Theater to study aircraft performance under combat conditions.

96.

On, 1944, Charles Lindbergh flew his first combat mission: a strafing run with VMF-222 near the Japanese garrison of Rabaul.

97.

Charles Lindbergh flew with VMF-216, from the Marine Air Base at Torokina, Bougainville.

98.

Charles Lindbergh was escorted on one of these missions by Lt.

99.

Charles Lindbergh introduced engine-leaning techniques to P-38 pilots, greatly improving fuel consumption at cruise speeds, enabling the long-range fighter aircraft to fly longer-range missions.

100.

On, 1944, during a P-38 bomber escort mission with the 433rd Fighter Squadron in the Ceram area, Charles Lindbergh shot down a Mitsubishi Ki-51 "Sonia" observation plane, piloted by Captain Saburo Shimada, commanding officer of the 73rd Independent Chutai.

101.

In mid-October 1944, Charles Lindbergh participated in a joint Army-Navy conference on fighter planes at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland.

102.

Charles Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1954 with his book, The Spirit of St Louis, which focuses on his 1927 flight and the events leading up to it.

103.

Charles Lindbergh later wrote the foreword to Apollo astronaut Michael Collins's autobiography.

104.

Charles Lindbergh fathered three children with hatmaker Brigitte Hesshaimer, who had lived in the small Bavarian town of Geretsried.

105.

Charles Lindbergh had two children with her sister Mariette, a painter, living in Grimisuat.

106.

Charles Lindbergh had a son and daughter was born on in 1959 and 1961 and with Valeska, an East Prussian aristocrat who was his private secretary in Europe and lived in Baden-Baden.

107.

Ten days before he died, Charles Lindbergh wrote to each of his European mistresses, imploring them to maintain the utmost secrecy about his illicit activities with them even after his death.

108.

In later life Charles Lindbergh was heavily involved in conservation movements, and was deeply concerned about the negative impacts of new technologies on the natural world and native peoples, focusing on regions like Hawaii, Africa, and the Philippines.

109.

Charles Lindbergh campaigned to protect endangered species including the humpback whale, blue whale, Philippine eagle, and the tamaraw, and was instrumental in establishing protections for the Tasaday and Agta people, and various African tribes such as the Maasai.

110.

Alongside Laurance S Rockefeller, Lindbergh helped establish the Haleakala National Park in Hawaii.

111.

Charles Lindbergh worked to protect Arctic wolves in Alaska, and helped establish Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota.

112.

Charles Lindbergh contrasted his time amid the African landscape with his involvement in a supersonic transport convention in New York, and while "lying under an acacia tree," he realized how the "construction of an airplane" was simple compared to a bird.

113.

Charles Lindbergh wrote several more essays for Reader's Digest and Life, urging people to respect the self-awareness that came from contact with nature, which he called the "wisdom of wildness," and not merely follow science.

114.

On May 14,1971, Charles Lindbergh received the Philippine Order of the Golden Heart at a formal dinner at Malacanang Palace in Manila.

115.

Charles Lindbergh was described as an aviation pioneer who had symbolized the advance of technology, and who now was a symbol of the drive to protect natural life from technology.

116.

Charles Lindbergh actively participated in both conservation and advocacy for tribal minorities in the Philippines, frequently visiting the country and working to protect species including the tamaraw and Philippine eagle, which he described as a "magnificent bird," lending his name to a law against killing or trapping the animal.

117.

In 1972, Charles Lindbergh undertook an expedition with a television news crew to Mindanao, in the Philippines, to investigate reports of a lost tribe.

118.

Ware rested in the pilot's seat for several minutes after landing, and Charles Lindbergh was hesitant to disembark before him.

119.

Charles Lindbergh told Ware he was certain he could not have made the "hard" three day journey back.

120.

Charles Lindbergh spent his last years on Maui in his small, rustic seaside home.

121.

Charles Lindbergh was buried on the grounds of the Palapala Ho'omau Church in Kipahulu, Maui, a Congregational church first established in 1864, which fell into disuse in the 1940s and was restored beginning in 1964 by Samuel F Pryor Jr.

122.

Charles Lindbergh took part in the church restoration with his old friend Pryor, and both men agreed to make their final resting place in the small cemetery they cleared.

123.

Charles Lindbergh received many awards, medals and decorations, most of which were later donated to the Missouri Historical Society and are on display at the Jefferson Memorial, now part of the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park in St Louis, Missouri.

124.

In Daniel Easterman's K is for Killing, a fictional Charles Lindbergh becomes president of a fascist United States.

125.

The novel draws heavily on Charles Lindbergh's comments concerning Jews as a catalyst for its plot.

126.

The Robert Harris novel Fatherland explores an alternate history where the Nazis won the war, the United States still defeats Japan, Adolf Hitler and President Joseph Kennedy negotiate peace terms, and Charles Lindbergh is the US Ambassador to Germany.

127.

The Jo Walton novel Farthing explores an alternate history where the United Kingdom made peace with Nazi Germany in 1941, Japan never attacked Pearl Harbor, thus the United States never got involved with the war, and Charles Lindbergh is president and is seeking closer economic ties with the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.