Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation by Marc Dierikx (review)

Marc Dierikx returns to a familiar subject in this new work, an expanded version of his 1997 study Fokker: A Transatlantic Biography. Dierikx (Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy) extends and contextualizes his earlier analysis through clever use of internet and digital resources unavailable to him two decades ago. The result is a rich, intricately detailed narrative that traces Anthony Fokker's life from his early childhood through his exploits as a German aircraft designer and manufacturer in World War I, and then as a pioneer of the United States interwar aviation industry before his death in 1939. Along the way, Fokker became a multimillionaire and international celebrity and he left a permanent mark on the development of global aviation. Dierikx's story contains beautiful, descriptive prose and expertly conveys the audacity, constant risks (both personal and financial), and shameless competition of early aviation.

For Fokker, a restless maverick and inveterate tinkerer, aviation proved a perfect match—its early business model was part financial, part performative spectacle, like automobiles, and the young Dutchman always loved grand entrances and public adulation. He manipulated his media image and journalistic relationships to amplify positive media coverage for his firm and its aircraft, an approach ahead of its time. As Dierikx documents, Fokker's charm, endless self-confidence, and a willingness to bend and even break laws whenever it proved professionally necessary were lifelong skills. Throughout his career he shamelessly engaged in financial sleight-of-hand, public corruption, contract-rigging, arms-dealing, and industrial espionage to stay ahead of his rivals, actions that led to decades-long legal battles across the world.

Dierikx charts Fokker's rapid evolution from a struggling inventor in 1913 to one of Germany's largest aircraft manufacturers by 1918, a meteoric ascent that made him wealthy but insecure as the German Empire collapsed and revolution swept across Europe. After a daring escape to his native Holland, Fokker wrestled with Dutch officials over the creation of a national aviation industry before abandoning Europe in favor of the United States in 1921, where he hoped to establish himself as a cornerstone of the burgeoning American aviation industry. By 1929 his firm, now in partnership with General Motors, largely achieved this goal.

Now financially secure, Fokker increasingly devoted himself to a life of luxury; he purchased a mansion, designed and built a superyacht, and socialized with America's wealthiest families. Within two years, his professional circumstances changed abruptly: GM executives forced him off the board of his firm and shunted him aside, correctly assessing that aviation technology had passed him by. When a Fokker aircraft crashed in March 1931, killing Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, the press pilloried Fokker, and the Aeronautics Branch of the Commerce Department (the ancestor of today's FAA) grounded all Fokker aircraft.

Undeterred, Fokker transformed himself again, gaining exclusive sales contracts to sell new American aircraft produced by Douglas and Lockheed to European customers. This brilliant move extended his career, and he spent his final years enjoying life as he intersected—and sometimes collided—with a kaleidoscopic cast of notables such as Billy Mitchell, Eddie Rickenbacker, Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin, Elliot Roosevelt, and Mustafa Kemal. His workaholic schedule and endless curiosity brought tremendous financial and professional success at the expense of personal and relationship failures; one of his wives committed suicide.

Using documents, letters, eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, and personal interviews, Dierikx seamlessly combines traditional biographical narrative with microhistorical reconstructions of key contextual moments in Fokker's life to produce a thick and deep story of a fortunate man careening through unfortunate times. Many double-paged photographs, most previously unpublished, add to the narrative's appeal.

Some editing and proofing errors occur, but these are mostly minor, and the only substantive critique concerns the work's title, which Dierikx only directly engages with in the final paragraph of the text: Fokker's role in shaping American aviation's global dominance. Dierikx ends his...