The Lindbergh Mission

World War Wednesday, 1936

Photo by Smithsonian on Unsplash

Welcome to World War Wednesday, a weekly dive into the continuous, thirty-year epoch of global conflict from 1914 to 1945. Here, I strip away popular myths to analyze the dynamics of industrial warfare, institutional behaviors, and the ideologies that shaped the world we inherited.

Nazism was an ideology of low-confidence braggarts. Adolf Hitler routinely referred to Germany as a “have-not” power, looked down on by the Americans, British, and French. He complained that the hardy Germans had been stolen from the fatherland when they immigrated to North America in the 19th century, leaving him with the Germans who needed improving through radical eugenics. Behind all this was a pathological need to show off and be acknowledged. Hence marches, spectacles, wild speeches, and over-the-top propaganda that screamed, “Look at me, look at Germany.” Hence the American espionage move against the Reich.

U.S. Army officer, Captain Truman Smith knew his target. In 1922, while the Americans occupied the Rhineland following World War I, Smith was assigned as assistant military attaché to the embassy in Berlin. American diplomats dispatched Smith to southern Germany on a routine intelligence gathering mission about the agitators and political movements emerging to challenge the new Weimar Republic. That’s how Truman Smith became the first American to interview Adolf Hitler. Thirteen years later, in 1935, Hitler was dictator of Germany and the now Major Smith was sent back to help the embassy keep FDR informed about the man Smith had called a “marvelous demagogue.” Smith’s early political intelligence and his warnings about the latent danger of the National Socialist movement went unheeded in the 1920s as the Nazis seemed to be going nowhere fast. The Great Depression changed that, and U.S. military intelligence wanted Smith back in Berlin to run the military attaché office.

Smith wanted to know what was going on with German rearmament, especially air power, and he got his chance on July 22, 1936, when American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh—a Colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve on inactive duty and the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic—arrived in Berlin.
Smith had his man.

Lindbergh was there because Smith sent for him.

Months earlier, Smith had thought about how to penetrate the layers built to protect Germany’s secrets. Nazi Germany was a hostile, militarized, police state. German officials were strictly watched, and their interactions with foreign diplomats were restricted and viewed with suspicion. Then Smith’s wife happened to tell him that Lindbergh was visiting France and touring its aviation industry.

It was May 1936, just two months after the Nazis marched into the Rhineland and dared the French Army to stop them. The French folded their hand, but Smith had a wild card. He contacted the office of the German air force commander-in-chief, the Luftwaffe leader Hermann Göring and offered Lindbergh as a guest of the Reich. A star to whom they could show their greatness. Smith didn’t have to ask twice; the Nazis jumped at the bait. Now Smith had to get Lindbergh on board—a man he had never met.

Lindbergh remains a controversial figure, but when he said “America First,” he actually meant putting America first. Sure, he wanted to see the German developments out of professional curiosity, but he agreed to be a celebrity…well not a spy, but a guest expert inspector, operating openly and invited by the German government. However, Charles Lindbergh understood the assignment.

He was charming; he knew he was the top name in global aviation and he used it. Over the next three years, the Nazis gave him five tours of their facilities, showing off their combat units, factories, and technical developments. They even let him fly a Messerschmitt Bf 109.

They were eager to give the great Charles Lindbergh a peek behind the curtain so he could tell the world how bright German aviation shone—that it was like nobody had ever seen before, wonderful, advanced, worthy of respect, and unmatched. They craved approval and were so eager for it that Smith smartly sorted it so he could tag along. Smith and Lindbergh wrote the intelligence briefs that informed FDR and the U.S. Army Air Corps about what they would be up against. Lindbergh also talked tactics and theory with the Germans—things that they would otherwise be guarded about.

Back in America after his global touring ended in 1939, Lindbergh was for neutrality and staying out of the war; however, what is sometimes glossed over is that he was also for American military rearmament. He understood the threat and knew the U.S. was behind the Germans in the air. His warnings were based on his own observations. He saw a powerful potential enemy that America was not yet ready to fight, and a conflict he viewed as a European problem.

While many denounced Lindbergh as a defeatist and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed his reports as bordering on propaganda, FDR and Congress eventually pushed forward with a massive air build-up to prepare for the threat anyway. In the end America would ultimately be ready for the Nazis in the air, in part because Major Smith played their desperate vanity against them.

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