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On This Day: Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh dies from cancer
Lindbergh, who shot to fame by being the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic but also because of his colourful life, died just days after finishing his autobiography
AUGUST 26, 1974: American aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh died aged 72 on this day in 1974 after battling the blood cancer lymphoma.
Lindbergh, who shot to fame by being the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic but also because of his colourful life, died just days after finishing his autobiography.
The former U.S. Air Mail Pilot’s grave in Hawaii is inscribed with this Bible passage: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…”
Flying remained a passion throughout the life of the Swedish immigrant’s son – and helped him earn millions of dollars and boost the reputation of early aviation.
In 1927, while aged 25, Lindbergh became an instant celebrity after piloting his own single-engine plane, the Spirit of St Louis, 3,600 miles from New Jersey to Paris.
The feat, which was achieved in a time of 33 and a half hours and which had killed six others who attempted it, earned him many admirers - and a $25,000 prize.
A British Pathé newsreel shows him being welcomed back to the U.S. with a ticker-tape parade along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and a flotilla of boats in the harbour.
The father of up to 13 children was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and a clutch of other foreign medals.
Later in life he was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1953 book, The Spirit of St Louis, which recounted the trip.
Among his other achievements, he also designed a perfusion pump in 1935 that after finally being made decades later helped make modern heart surgery possible.
Yet the suspected Nazi sympathiser also courted controversy after accepting the Order of the German Eagle within weeks of the 1938 Kristallnacht anti-Jewish pogrom.
Lindbergh, who was known for his white-supremacist views, almost settled in Germany in the aftermath of his first son’s kidnap and murder.
The sensational case, which was dubbed the “crime of the century” saw his 20-month-old boy Charles Jr abducted from his cot at their home in New Jersey in 1932.
It prompted him and wife Ann Morrow, who bore him six children, to leave America to “seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria”.
In December 1935, the family boarded a boat under assumed names and sailed to England, eventually settling in the Kent village of Sevenoaks Weald.
In 1938, they moved to a French island off the Breton coast that Lindbergh had purchased.
He had shown interest in moving to Germany but turned down an offer for the Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer to build the family anywhere he wanted.
However, with war in Europe brewing, the family returned to America in April 1939 and Lindbergh joined the U.S. Army Air Force.
Like his congressman father of the same name, who opposed American entry World War I, Lindbergh campaigned against the U.S. fighting German for a second time.
Yet he flew many combat missions in the Pacific after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
He flew as a civilian because President Franklin Roosevelt, who believed the aviator supported the Nazis, refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission that he had resigned in April 1941.
For the remainder of his life Lindbergh reportedly conducted a series of affairs and secretly fathered seven children in Germany. DNA tests prove at least three were his.
