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  1. French “ace,” René Fonck, shot down 75<br /> enemy aircraft during WWI.<br /> World War I began in Europe in 1914, but the United States did not enter the war until 1917. Quite<br /> a few American pilots did not wait for their own country to declare war. Instead, they found ways to get<br />

    • Overview
    • Early years
    • Early aviation career
    • Air Mail pilot, pioneer, and promoter
    • The Orteig Prize, Spirit of St. Louis, and New York-Paris flight
    • Personal life
    • "The Crime of the Century"
    • Self exile in Europe (1936–1939)
    • Pre-war activities
    • Munich crisis

    Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974), nicknamed Slim, Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was an American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist.

    As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo non-stop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from Roosevelt Field[N 1] in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit.

    In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh used his fame to promote the development of both commercial aviation and Air Mail services in the United States and the Americas. In March 1932, his infant son, Charles, Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what was soon dubbed the "Crime of the Century". It was described by journalist H.L. Mencken, as "... the biggest story since the resurrection." The kidnapping eventually led to the Lindbergh family being "driven into voluntary exile" in Europe to which they sailed in secrecy from New York under assumed names in late December 1935 to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria" in America. The Lindberghs returned to the United States in April 1939.

    Before the United States formally entered World War II, Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the U.S. out of the world conflict, as had his father, Congressman Charles August Lindbergh, during World War I. Although Lindbergh was a leader in the anti-war America First movement, he nevertheless strongly supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew many combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission that he had resigned in April 1941.

    Although born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902, Charles Agustus Lindbergh spent most of his childhood in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C.. He was the third child of Swedish immigrant Charles August Lindbergh (birth name Carl Månsson) (1859–1924), and only child of his second wife, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876–1954), o...

    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. By the time he started college as a mechanical engineering student he had also become fascinated with flying even though he "had never been close enough to a plane to touch it." After quitting college in February 1922, Lindbergh enrolled as a student at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's flying school in Lincoln two months later and flew for the first time in his life on April 9, 1922, when he took to the air as a passenger in a two-seat Lincoln Standard "Tourabout" biplane trainer piloted by Otto Timm.

    A few days later Lindbergh took his first formal flying lesson in that same machine with instructor-pilot Ira O. Biffle although the then 20-year-old student pilot was never permitted to "solo" during his time at the school because he could not afford to post a bond which the company President Ray Page insisted upon in the event the novice flyer were to damage the school's only trainer in the process. In order to both gain some needed flight experience and earn money for additional instruction, Lindbergh left Lincoln in June to spend the next few months barnstorming across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana as a wing walker and parachutist with E.G. Bahl and later H.L. Lynch. During this time he also briefly held a job as an airplane mechanic in Billings, Montana, working at the Billings Municipal Airport (later renamed Billings Logan International Airport).

    With the onset of winter, however, Lindbergh left flying and returned to his father's home in Minnesota. His return to the air and first solo flight would therefore not come until half a year later in May 1923 at Souther Field in Americus, Georgia, a former Army flight training field, where he had come to buy a World War I surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane. Even though Lindbergh had not touched an airplane in more than six months, he had already secretly decided that he was ready to take to the air by himself. After a half hour of dual time with a pilot who was visiting the field to pick up another surplus JN-4, Lindbergh flew solo for the first time in the Jenny that he had just purchased for $500. After spending another week or so at the field to "practice" (thereby acquiring five hours of "pilot in command" time), Lindbergh took off from Americus for Montgomery, Alabama on his first solo cross country flight, and went on to spend much of the rest of 1923 engaged in almost nonstop barnstorming under the name of "Daredevil Lindbergh". Unlike the previous year, however, this time Lindbergh did so in his "own ship"—and as a pilot. A few weeks after leaving Americus, the young airman also achieved another key aviation milestone when he made his first flight at night near Lake Village, Arkansas.

    Lindbergh damaged his "Jenny" on several occasions over the summer by breaking the propeller on landing including such as on May 18, 1923 just outside Maben, Mississippi. His most serious accident came when he ran into a ditch in a farm field in Glencoe, Minnesota, on June 3, 1923, while flying his father (who was then running for the U.S. Senate) to a campaign stop. The accident grounded him for a week until he could repair his plane. Lindbergh flew his Jenny to Iowa in October where he sold it to a flying student. (Found stored in a barn in Iowa almost half a century later, Lindbergh's dismantled Jenny was carefully restored in the early 1970s and is now on display at the Cradle of Aviation Museum located in Garden City, New York, adjacent to the site once occupied by Roosevelt Field from which Lindbergh took off on his flight to Paris in 1927). After selling the Jenny Lindbergh returned to Lincoln by train. There he joined up with Leon Klink and continued to barnstorm through the South for the next few months in Klink's Curtiss JN-4C "Canuck" (the Canadian version of the Jenny). Lindbergh also "cracked up" this aircraft once when his engine failed shortly after takeoff in Pensacola, Florida, but again he managed to repair the damage himself.

    Following a few months of barnstorming through the South, the two pilots parted company in San Antonio, Texas, where Lindbergh had been ordered to report to Brooks Field on March 19, 1924, to begin a year of military flight training with the United States Army Air Service both there and later at nearby Kelly Field. Late in his training Lindbergh experienced his most serious flying accident on March 5, 1925, eight days before graduation. He was involved in a midair collision with another Army S.E.5 while practicing aerial combat maneuvers and was forced to bail out. Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training a year earlier remained when Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925 thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.

    Lindbergh later noted that he considered this year of Army flight training to be the critically important one in his development as both a focused, goal-oriented individual, as well as a skillful and resourceful aviator.[N 2] With the Army not then in need of additional active duty pilots, however, immediately following graduation Lindbergh returned to civilian aviation as a barnstormer and flight instructor although as a reserve officer he also continued to do some part-time military flying by joining the 110th Observation Squadron, 35th Division, Missouri National Guard, in St. Louis in November 1925. He was soon promoted to 1st Lieutenant.

    In October 1925, Lindbergh was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation (RAC) in St. Louis (where he had been working as a flight instructor) to first lay out, and then serve as chief pilot for the newly designated 278-mile (447 km) Contract Air Mail Route #2 (CAM-2) to provide service between St. Louis and Chicago (Maywood Field) with two intermediate stops in Springfield and Peoria, Illinois. Operating from RAC's home base at the Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field in Anglum, Missouri, Lindbergh and three other RAC pilots, Philip R. Love, Thomas P. Nelson, and Harlan A. "Bud" Gurney, flew the mail over CAM-2 in a fleet of four modified war surplus de Havilland DH-4 biplanes.

    Two days before he opened service on the route on April 15, 1926, with its first early morning southbound flight from Chicago to St. Louis, Lindbergh officially became authorized to be entrusted with the "care, custody, and conveyance" of U.S. Mails by formally subscribing and swearing to the Post Office Department's 1874 Oath of Mail Messengers. Twice during the ten months that he flew CAM-2, Lindbergh would be called upon to exhibit his faithfulness to that oath after temporarily losing custody and control of mails that he was transporting when he was forced to bail out of his mail plane owing to bad weather, equipment problems, and/or fuel exhaustion. In the two incidents, which both occurred while he was approaching Chicago at night, Lindbergh came down by parachute near small farming communities in northeastern Illinois. On September 16, 1926, he came down about 60 miles (97 km) southwest of Chicago near the town of Wedron, while six weeks later, on November 3, 1926, Lindbergh bailed out again about 70 miles (110 km) further south hitting the ground in another farm field west of the city of Bloomington near the town of Covell. After landing without serious injury on both occasions, Lindbergh's first concern was to immediately locate the wreckage of his crashed mail planes, make sure that the bags of mail were promptly secured and salvaged, and then see that they were entrained or trucked on to Chicago with as little delay as possible. Lindbergh continued on as chief pilot of CAM-2 until mid-February 1927, when he left for San Diego, California, to oversee the design and construction of the Spirit of St. Louis.

    Although Lindbergh never returned to service as a regular U.S. Air Mail pilot, he used the immense fame that his New York to Paris flight brought him to help promote the use of the U.S. Air Mail Service. While he carried no official mail in the Spirit to Paris or during the subsequent three month, 48-state Guggenheim Tour, at the request of Capt. Basil L. Rowe, the owner and chief pilot of West Indian Aerial Express (later Pan Am's chief pilot as well) and a fellow Air Mail pioneer and advocate, in February 1928, Lindbergh carried a small amount (about 3,000 pieces) of special souvenir mail between Santo Domingo, R.D., Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Havana, Cuba in the Spirit of St. Louis. These rare Lindbergh flown "Good Will Tour" covers remain very highly prized by collectors of Air Mail postal history especially as many of the Port-au-Prince to Havana covers were later destroyed during a hurricane that struck Havana in 1931. Those cities were the last three stops that he and the Spirit made during their 7,800-mile (12,600 km) "Good Will Tour" of Latin America and the Caribbean between December 13, 1927, and February 8, 1928. The final two legs of the 48-day tour were also the only flights on which officially sanctioned, postally franked mail was ever carried in the Spirit of St. Louis.

    Exactly two weeks after completing his Latin American tour, Lindbergh "returned" to flying CAM-2 for two days so that he could pilot a series of special flights over his old route on February 20 (northbound) and February 21 (southbound). Known as "Horseshoe Mail" because each piece received a rubber stamp cachet of a large horseshoe with the legend "LINDBERGH AGAIN FLIES THE AIR MAIL" and "CHICAGO ST. LOUIS C.A.M. 2", there was such huge demand for covers carried on these flights that three mailplanes were used to fly it between St. Louis to Chicago that were flown by Lindbergh and fellow CAM-2 pilots Thomas Nelson, Philip Love, Bud Gurney, E.L. Sloniger and L.H. Smith. At each stop on the route Lindbergh switched planes so it could be said that he flew each one of the tens of thousands of self-addressed souvenir covers sent in from all over the nation and the world. After being flown the covers were backstamped and returned to their senders as a further means to promote awareness and the use of the Air Mail Service.

    Designated to be awarded to the pilot of the first successful nonstop flight made in either direction between New York City and Paris within five years after its establishment, the $25,000 Orteig Prize was first offered by the French-born New York hotelier (Lafayette Hotel) Raymond Orteig on May 19, 1919. Although that initial time limit lapsed without a serious challenger, the state of aviation technology had advanced sufficiently by 1924 to prompt Orteig to extend his offer for another five years, and this time it began to attract an impressive grouping of well-known, highly experienced, and well financed contenders. The one exception among these competitors, however, was the still boyish looking Lindbergh. A 25-year-old relative latecomer to the race, in relation to the others Lindbergh was also virtually anonymous as an aviation figure. He not only had considerably less overall flying experience (and none over water) than the others, Lindbergh's efforts were only being financed by a single $15,000 bank loan, a $1,000 donation from his employer as an Air Mail Pilot, and his own modest savings.

    The first of the well-known challengers to attempt a flight was famed World War I French flying ace René Fonck. On September 21, 1926 he attempted to fly eastbound from Roosevelt Airfield in New York in a three-engine Sikorsky S-35 but never got off the ground as his grossly overloaded (by 10,000 lbs) transport biplane crashed and burned on takeoff when its landing gear collapsed. While Fonck escaped the flames, his two crew members, Charles N. Clavier and Jacob Islaroff, died in the fire. U.S. Naval aviators LCDR Noel Davis and LT Stanton H. Wooster were also killed in a takeoff accident at Langley Field, Virginia, on April 26, 1927 while testing the three-engine Keystone Pathfinder biplane, American Legion, that they intended to use for the flight. Less than two weeks later, the first contenders to actually get airborne were French war heroes Captain Charles Nungesser and his navigator, François Coli, who departed from Paris – Le Bourget Airport on May 8, 1927 on a westbound flight in the Levasseur PL 8 seaplane The White Bird (L'Oiseau Blanc). Contact was lost with them after crossing the coast of Ireland, however, they were never seen nor heard from again.

    Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) was the daughter of Dwight Morrow who, as partner at J.P. Morgan & Co., had acted as financial adviser to Lindbergh and who had been appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in 1927. Lindbergh was invited by Morrow on a goodwill tour to Mexico, and he met Anne in Mexico City in December 1927.

    The couple were married on May 27, 1929, and had six children: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. (1930–1932); Jon Morrow Lindbergh (b. August 16, 1932); Land Morrow Lindbergh (b. 1937), who studied anthropology at Stanford University and married Susan Miller in San Diego; Anne Lindbergh (1940–1993); Scott Lindbergh (b. 1942); and Reeve Lindbergh (b. 1945), a writer. Lindbergh also taught his wife how to fly and did much of his exploring and charting of air routes with her.

    Lindbergh saw his children for only a couple of months a year. He kept track of each child's infractions, which included such activities as gum-chewing. He insisted that Anne track all her household expenditures, including even 15 cents spent for rubber bands, in account books.

    According to a Biography Channel profile on Lindbergh, she was the only woman who he had ever asked out on a date. In Lindbergh's autobiography, he derides womanizing pilots he met as "barnstormers," and Army cadets for their "facile" approach to relationships. Lindbergh wrote that the ideal romance was stable and long term, with a woman with keen intellect, good health, and strong genes. Lindbergh said his "experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me the importance of good heredity."

    Twenty-nine years after Lindbergh's 1974 death, the largest national daily newspaper in Germany, Munich's Suddeutsche Zeitung, reported in late July 2003 that he had fathered three out-of-wedlock children by German hat maker Brigitte Hesshaimer (1926–2003) who had lived in the small Bavarian town of Geretsried just south of Munich. By the time of the publication of German biographer Rudolf Schröck's book Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh) two years later, however, it had been further revealed that Lindbergh had also fathered four other out-of-wedlock children in Germany and Switzerland with two other mistresses. Beginning in March 1957 Lindbergh had established romantic relationships with Brigitte Hesshaimer, her sister, Mariette, a painter living in Grimisuat in the Swiss canton Valais with whom he had two children, and with Valeska, an East Prussian aristocrat who was his private secretary in Europe and lived in Baden-Baden with whom he had two more children, a son born in 1959 and a daughter in 1961. All seven childred had been born between 1958 and 1967.

    Ten days before he died on August 26, 1974, Lindbergh wrote letters from his New York hospital bed to each of his three European mistresses imploring them to maintain the "utmost secrecy" about their relationships after his death. The three women (none of whom ever married) all managed to keep their affairs secret even from their children who during his lifetime (and for almost a decade after) did not know the true identity of their father whom they had only known by the alias "Careu Kent" and seen only when he visited for a few days once or twice per year. However, after finding and reading a magazine article about Lindbergh in the mid-1980s, Brigitte's daughter Astrid learned her father's true identity and later discovered snapshots and more than a 150 love letters written to her mother by Lindbergh between 1957 and 1974. After both Brigitte and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had both died, Astrid finally publicly disclosed who her brothers' and her father was. On November 23, 2003, DNA tests confirmed that Lindbergh had fathered Dyrk, Astrid and David, Brigitte's three children, .

    Main article: Lindbergh kidnapping

    In what came to be referred to sensationally by the press of the time as "The Crime of the Century", on the evening of March 1, 1932, 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was abducted by an intruder from his crib in the second-story nursery of his family's rural home in East Amwell, New Jersey near the town of Hopewell.[N 6] While a 10-week nationwide search for the child was being undertaken, ransom negotiations were also conducted simultaneously with a self-identified kidnapper by a volunteer intermediary, Dr. John F. Condon (aka "Jafsie"). These resulted in the payment on April 2 of $50,000 in cash, part of which was made in soon-to-be withdrawn (and thus more easily traceable) Gold certificates the serial numbers of which had been recorded, in exchange for information about the child's whereabouts that proved to be false. The child's remains were found by chance by a passing truckdriver six weeks later on May 12 in roadside woodlands near Mount Rose, New Jersey.

    In response to the highly publicized crime, Congress passed the so-called "Lindbergh Law" on June 13, which made kidnapping a federal offense under certain circumstances. Known formally as the "Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932" (18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)), the new statute provided for federal jurisdiction over all future kidnappings in which any victim(s) were taken across state lines and/or (as had occurred in the Lindbergh case) the kidnapper(s) used "the mail or any means, facility, or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce in committing or in furtherance of the commission of the offense", including as a means to demand a ransom.

    The assiduous tracing of the serial numbers of $10 and $20 Gold certificates passed in the New York City area over the next year and a half eventually led police to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 34-year-old German immigrant carpenter, who was arrested near his home in The Bronx, New York, on September 19, 1934. (Hauptmann was identified by the license plate number of his automobile, which a gas station attendant had written on the bill after receiving it from him in payment for services.) A stash containing $13,760 of the ransom money was subsequently found hidden in his garage. Charged with kidnapping, extortion, and first-degree murder, Hauptmann went on trial in a circus-like atmosphere in Flemington, New Jersey, on January 2, 1935. Six weeks later he was convicted on all counts when, following 11 hours of deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict late on the night of February 13, after which trial judge Thomas Trenchard immediately sentenced Hauptmann to death. Although he continued to adamantly maintain his innocence, all of Hauptmann's appeals and petitions for clemency were rejected by early December 1935. Despite a last-minute attempt by New Jersey Governor Harold G. Hoffman (who believed Hauptmann was guilty but had always expressed doubts that he could have acted alone) to convince him to confess to the crimes in exchange for getting his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, the by then 36-year-old Hauptmann refused and was electrocuted at Trenton State Prison on April 3, 1936.

    An intensely private man when it came to his family life, Charles Lindbergh became exasperated by the unrelenting press and public attention focused on them in the wake of the kidnapping and Hauptmann trial. Particularly concerned for the physical safety of their then three-year-old second son, Jon, by late 1935 the Lindberghs came secretly to the decision to go into voluntary exile in Europe. Consequently, in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, December 22, 1935, the family "sailed furtively" from Pier 60 (West 20th St, Manhattan) for Liverpool, England, as the only three passengers on board the United States Lines freighter SS American Importer. To help maintain the strict secrecy Lindbergh insisted upon for their departure, the family traveled under assumed names and using diplomatic passports that had been issued a week earlier through the personal intervention of Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills.

    News of the Lindberghs' "flight to Europe" did not become public until a full day later by way of an exclusive front-page story by The New York Times aviation editor Lauren "Deac" Lyman, a longtime family friend, supporter, and confidant, published in the paper's final Monday morning edition. At Lindbergh's request, however, Lyman intentionally withheld the identity of the ship as well as its time and port of departure from that initial account.[100] While Lyman finally revealed the information in his follow-up story published the next day when the ship was already two days out to sea, radiograms sent to Lindbergh on the American Importer were nevertheless all returned with the notation "Addressee not aboard."

    Although Lindbergh had "offered no public explanation" for the family's unannounced departure, shortly before they sailed he had told Lyman in a private interview: "We Americans are a primitive people. We do not have discipline. Our moral standards are low. It shows up in the private lives of people we know — their drinking and 'behavior with women.' It shows in the newspapers, the morbid curiosity over crimes and murder trials. Americans seem to have little respect for law, or the rights of others."[101][102] For those reasons, Lindbergh told Lyman, he had decided to take his family to England to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria" that surrounded him in America.[100] The Lindberghs arrived in Liverpool on December 31, 1935, where they secluded themselves before later departing for South Wales to stay with relatives.[103][104]

    The family eventually rented "Long Barn" in Sevenoaks Weald, Kent, England. One newspaper wrote that Lindbergh "won immediate popularity by announcing he intended to purchase his supplies 'right in the village, from local tradesmen.' The reserve of the villagers, most of whom had decided in advance he would be a blustering, boastful young American, is melting."[105] At the time of Hauptmann's execution, local police almost sealed off the area surrounding Long Barn with "orders to regard as suspects anyone except residents who approached within a mile of the home." Lindbergh later described his three years in the Kent village as "among the happiest days of my life."[105] In 1938, the family moved to Île Illiec, a small four-acre island Lindbergh purchased off the Breton coast of France.[106]

    In 1929, Lindbergh became interested in the work of rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard. By helping Goddard secure an endowment from Daniel Guggenheim in 1930, Lindbergh allowed Goddard to expand his research and development. Throughout his life, Lindbergh remained a key advocate of Goddard's work.[112]

    In 1930, Lindbergh's sister-in-law developed a fatal heart condition. Lindbergh began to wonder why hearts could not be repaired with surgery. Starting in early 1931 at the Rockefeller Institute and continuing during his time living in France, Lindbergh studied the perfusion of organs outside the body with Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel. Although perfused organs were said to have survived surprisingly well, all showed progressive degenerative changes within a few days.[113] Lindbergh's invention, a glass perfusion pump, named the "Model T" pump, is credited with making future heart surgeries possible. In this early stage, the pump was far from perfected. In 1938, Lindbergh and Carrel described an artificial heart in the book in which they summarized their work, The Culture of Organs,[114] but it was decades before one was built. In later years, Lindbergh's pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.[115]

    At the behest of the U.S. military, Lindbergh traveled several times to Germany to report on German aviation and the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) from 1936 to 1938.[116]

    Lindbergh toured German aviation facilities, where the commander of the Luftwaffe, SA-Gruppenführer Hermann Göring convinced Lindbergh the Luftwaffe was far more powerful than it was. With the approval of Göring and Ernst Udet, Lindbergh was the first American permitted to examine the Luftwaffe's newest bomber, the Junkers Ju 88, and Germany's front-line fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Lindbergh received the unprecedented opportunity to pilot the Bf 109. Lindbergh said of the fighter that he knew "of no other pursuit plane which combines simplicity of construction with such excellent performance characteristics." Colonel Lindbergh inspected all the types of military aircraft Germany was to use in 1939 and 1940.[116]

    At the urging of U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Lindbergh wrote a secret memo to the British warning that if Britain and France responded militarily to German dictator Adolf Hitler's violation of the Munich Agreement in 1938, it would be suicide. Lindbergh stated that France's military strength was inadequate and that Britain had an outdated military over-reliance upon naval power. He recommended they urgently strengthen their air arsenal in order to force Hitler to turn his ambitions eastward to a war against "Asiatic Communism."[119]

    In a controversial 1939 Reader's Digest article, Lindbergh said, "Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations ... and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection."[120][121] Lindbergh deplored the rivalry between Germany and Britain but favored a war between Germany and Russia. There is some controversy as to how accurate his reports concerning the Luftwaffe were, but Cole reports the consensus among British and American officials was that they were slightly exaggerated but badly needed.[119]

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