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Using the Devil’s Tool to Do God’s Work Sergeant York, America First, and the Intervention Debate With the release of the film recounting his military exploits, Alvin York had again become one of America’s greatest living heroes, a man who had captured the imagination and admiration of millions of Americans. Perhaps the only other living individual who could have equaled his fame was the Lone Eagle, Col. Charles Lindbergh. Their political stances differed widely, however, and by 1939 national opinion had become polarized by the views that these two men symbolized. York called for intervention while Lindbergh preached isolation.1 Lindbergh’s life, like York’s, had not been a charmed one after achieving fame. He hated the cloying attention of the limelight, and his private life had turned tragic in 1932, when his infant son was kidnapped and killed. The ensuing “Trial of the Century,” which ended in the conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, prompted Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to migrate to England and establish a residence in London.2 The U.S. Military Attaché in Berlin, Maj. Truman Smith, invited Colonel Lindbergh to visit Germany in 1936. The Lindberghs accepted his offer, left London on July 22, and traveled for the first time to Nazi Germany. In the course of his visit, Lindbergh became fascinated with Hitler’s Germany and its new air force, the Luftwaffe. On August 1 the Lindberghs attended the opening-day ceremonies of the Berlin Olympic Games as personal guests of Luftwaffe commandant Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring. While in Germany, Lindbergh assessed the accomplishments of the German air force and gathered information that he supplied to American intelligence agencies. 5 131 Overall, the aviation advances of the Nazi regime had impressed Lindbergh . He believed that Hitler, though fanatical, had actually accomplished a great deal of good for his people. Lindbergh’s initial visit had also convinced him that Hitler posed no threat to France or Great Britain and that if war should occur, it would be against the National Socialists’ most hated enemy—the Soviet Union.3 Lindbergh returned to Nazi Germany in 1937. On that two-week visit the colonel toured aircraft factories, inspected planes, and “may have been the first American given the opportunity to examine the ME-109 closely.”4 The report Lindbergh crafted for the U.S. military after his sojourn presented an accurate but rather tempered picture of Nazi air power. Though Nazis had come a long way in a very short time, he believed they posed no serious military threat at that juncture. In October of 1938, the Lindberghs visited Nazi Germany for the last time. On that tour the Lone Eagle became the first American to inspect a new German aircraft, the Junkers JU-88 bomber, and he was allowed to fly an ME-109. The performance of both aircraft impressed the colonel. On October 18, at a party in his honor, Göring presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with the Star, the highest Nazi citation available to a civilian. The medal, Göring told him, was a personal gift from Adolf Hitler, a token of appreciation for his historic 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, which had furthered the cause of aviation.5 During the course of that visit, Lindbergh seriously considered moving his family to Germany and establishing permanent residence there. Biographer Joyce Milton argued that part of Lindbergh’s admiration for Nazi Germany stemmed from the fact that the press and the paparazzi did not hound him there the way they did in Britain and America .6 But he seemed oblivious to the growing Nazi persecution of the Jews, a situation that expedited the permanent withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador from Germany. In spite of the warning signs, Lindbergh failed to see the Nazis as a grave threat to American security.7 Lindbergh’s attitude toward the European war also proved peculiar. The aviator, though he felt ill at ease in the company of pacifists, found himself increasingly among them. Lindbergh wrote in his journal in October 1941: “A prosperous country may not have a good army, but a demoralized country cannot have a good army . . . I shall work against war, but lay plans for one.”8 He saw no inconsistency in preaching nonintervention while at the same time calling for military preparedness. His confused personal assessment of the war caused him to utter strange, even 132 | Using the...

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