Tony’s Short Stories: Glory Takes Wings

“Glory Takes Wings” by Harry A. Bruno with WM. S. Dutton explores the lives of pioneering aviators who made significant contributions to aviation history but later faced obscurity and hardship. The story begins with Rene Fonck, a forgotten war hero in Paris, highlighting the fleeting nature of fame. It recounts the struggles and disappointments of famous pilots like Clarence Chamberlin, Bernt Balchen, and Bert Acosta, who, despite their groundbreaking flights, ended up in mundane or troubled circumstances.

The narrative delves into the public’s emotional state during the 1927 race to achieve the first transatlantic flight, culminating in Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo journey. It also describes the intense competition, personal sacrifices, and the emotional and physical toll on these aviators. The story emphasizes the fickleness of public adoration and the stark contrast between the heroes’ past glory and their present struggles.

Ultimately, “Glory Takes Wings” reflects on the enduring spirit of these aviators, who, despite their setbacks, continue to dream of new aviation frontiers and embody the relentless pursuit of innovation and adventure.

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Glory Takes Wings

By Harry A. Bruno with WM. S. Dutton

The Discouraging Plight of the Famous Flyers Who Risked Their Lives to Make Aviation History

In Paris the Chamber of Deputies was in session. As members bustled to and from their seats, pausing for a word here, nodding there, each the center of his own big or little whirlpool of interest, they brushed unheeding by the lonely figure of a stocky, ruddy-faced man watching the proceedings from a post by a window.

None recognized him. Only a few gave him so much as a glance. In all that crowded hall he alone seemed friendless, until a newspaper man stopped, said a brief greeting, and hurried on.

Who was he?” an American spectator asked later. “Oh, just the greatest of all Allied air heroes,” said the reporter: “the man to whom all France looked a few years ago to beat your Lindbergh to Paris. In case you’ve forgotten. his name is Rene Fonck.”

“We don’t forget so soon in America,” said the visitor. “We set our heroes on pedestals and keep them there.” I wonder!

In an obscure corner of a New York newspaper recently I chanced upon a five-line notice sandwiched between a lawyer’s promise of cheap Mexican divorces and an anonymous plea to an absent husband to come home. The notice advertised courses in flying, welding and mechanics, such as are given by a hundred and one other schools scattered over the country. In fact, the only detail of this five-line “reader” that distinguished it at all was the name of its sponsor, Clarence D. Chamberlin, who after his flight from New York to Germany in 1927 seemed pointed for undying fame. Receptions given him abroad and at home at the time were second only to Lindbergh’s. Seven nations honored him.

One bleak day last winter another pilot dropped in at my home for a chat. He had just been offered a job by one of the big commercial air lines. “They told me,” he said, smiling wryly, “that the best they could do was to start me in as a co-pilot at fifty dollars a week, which would give me a chance to work my way up to a full pilot.”

This friend has since found a more thrilling opportunity, but at the time he seriously needed a job. His name is Bernt Balchen, world-famous hero of the Byrd trans-Atlantic and South Pole flights and by many considered the greatest of all living airmen.

These men and many like them, trail blazers of the future’s transocean air routes, were world figures less than five years ago-heroes of an adulatory publicity such as few have received. I know, because it was my job to direct and control it. And, true enough, in America we built our pedestals freely and high. We were prodigal both with headlines and cheers. But, ironically, about the only thing that is deader than a yesterday’s headline is a yesterday’s cheer.

Today, of the survivors of that gallant band of bird-men whose daring hops thrilled whole nations and gave aviation its greatest impetus since the war, the majority are either in obscure jobs or jobless. Virtually all have endured disappointments and difficulties from which they seemed forever exempt. The glory that was theirs has departed on wings swift and sure as their own epoch-making planes.

Recently I checked the post-flight history of transoceanic aviators with whom I have cooperated during the past five years, either as their personal representative or as the agent of a manufacturer whose equipment they carried. Eighteen are dead. Thirteen have, at some time or other, been tangled in financial difficulties and lawsuits; six in marital troubles. Thirteen have quarreled with the partners or managers of their perilous adventures-one pair came to the verge of a duel. Three have been either temporarily or permanently grounded-an official form of discipline that can forbid even an ocean-spanning pilot the air.

To some have occurred two or more of these misadventures. To others life has been so dull and humdrum that there is no newspaper mention of any sort concerning them. Great fellows, great friends, great flyers all, not one of them today is occupying an executive post with an air line, a factory, or an airport, though every phase of commercial aviation was spurred to a spectacular growth by the exploits in which they risked their lives.

Excepting Lindbergh alone. And to him, for whom fame did most, fate has dealt the cruelest blow of all. Five years ago the most envied man on earth, as this is written he is probably the most universally pitied. An epic period in aviation ended with the kidnaping and murder of Lindbergh’s infant son, and it ended as it began—on a tragic note.

I have often been asked, as one who was behind the scenes, to give my version of what made these airmen the popular idols that they became. The men and their feats, especially in the case of Lindbergh, were the deciding factors, no doubt, but the biggest factor of all was the emotional state of you, me, and the public at the time.

That was built up by a swift succession of events, by accident and death, until sheer relief at Lindbergh’s safe arrival in Paris turned us overnight into a nation of frenzied hero makers.

Go back with me to that spring of 1927 when the first of these men, gallant and hopeful, were tuning up engines and tightening rigging in a straining effort to win the $25,000 offered for the first New York-Paris flight.

In France, Nungesser and Coli were making ready for their trans-Atlantic hop westward into oblivion. At Mitchel Field, Long Island, Davis and Wooster, with the cooperation of the Army, the Navy, and the American Legion, were feverishly hurrying preparations for the hop eastward to Paris. At Teterboro, New Jersey, the Fokker plant was rushing to completion a plane for Byrd’s attempt; he alone disavowed interest in the prize.

At Roosevelt Field Levine was tuning up his Columbia and squabbling with prospective pilots. Fonck had crashed in an attempted take-off the previous year and two of his crew had been killed, but the plucky French war ace was back at Curtiss Field ready to face the Atlantic again. In the background were such famous flyers as Bernt Balchen, Acosta, Noville, Floyd Bennett, and Chamberlin, while out on the Pacific coast was a youngster, then practically unknown, named Lindbergh, who planned to fly the ocean alone.

It was a race to get off first, with Lindbergh granted the slimmest chance to win. For that matter, however, few knew that Lindbergh was in the contest. Few knew him at all.

This was the picture that Dick Blythe, my partner, and I stepped into that spring. We represented, as public relations counsel, the Wright Company, with whose engines all the planes but Fonck’s were equipped; the Fokker plant; the Pioneer Instrument Company; Davis and Wooster-and later Lindbergh and most of the other flyers who became famous through trans-oceanic hops.

Dimly, at the time, the public knew of this group of flyers seemingly intent on committing spectacular suicide in mid-Atlantic. But it knew nothing of the dissensions, jealousies, rumors, and suspicions that harassed the actors in this drama and made our position a delicate one. It was only natural, of course, that nerves should be on edge. Every man there that spring was risking his life on a desperate chance. Each was trying to keep his plane and preparations secret from the others.

Then suddenly the drama, slowly building, as in the hands of an experienced playwright, crashed into an explosive series of climaxes which made that little air center the most conspicuous spot on earth and drew nerves already taut to the breaking point.

The American Legion, which was the Davis-Wooster plane, was christened one Saturday in April. After the ceremony I waved a parting “Good luck!” to the boys as they took off and headed southward. The plane was to be flown to its factory at Bristol, Pennsylvania, for a final inspection, and then on to Langley Field, near Washington, for the load tests with sand and lead ballast.

As I drove from Mitchel Field late in the afternoon, I mentally checked over the situation. Levine had not yet straightened out his pilot difficulties. Byrd’s plane was still at Teterboro undergoing tests. Lindbergh had not yet left the Pacific coast. Fonck’s plane was not yet completed. It looked as if The American Legion was going to be the first ship off for Paris.

Blythe had stayed home that day owing to an infection of his knee. We were “baching” together in an apartment hotel on Seventh Avenue. I was still a block from it when I heard my name shouted. Blythe, hatless and clad only in pyjamas and a bath robe, came hobbling down the street between two hotel porters.

“Hell’s broke loose!” he said. “Byrd’s plane just cracked up. Bennett and Noville are both hurt.”

While the porters boosted Blythe, bath robe and all, into the car, I threw in the clutch and we started at top speed for Teterboro.

It was nearing dusk when we reached the air field. We found the America with her nose buried in the earth and Byrd and Fokker berating each other. Bennett and Noville had been taken to a hospital. A crowd had gathered and was swarming about the damaged ship.

Quickly I had ropes stretched to keep the crowd back. Both Byrd and Fokker had lost their heads. Byrd charged Fokker with having wrecked the America deliberately. Fokker’s retorts to Byrd would have burned the paper if they had been printed. Such was Byrd’s mood that though his wrist was broken he did not know it.

Yet what had happened had been nobody’s fault. The ship had taken off on a test flight with Bennett and Fokker at the dual controls and Noville at the radio, and at the last minute Byrd had jumped in as a passenger. Fokker acted as pilot. In bringing the heavily loaded ship down he hit a soft spot on the ground and nosed over.

The engine was jammed back into Bennett’s chest, causing injuries that kept him out of the flight to France and later contributed to his death.

Byrd, then a lieutenant commander, was never to forgive Fokker, and Fokker has yet to forgive Byrd’s accusations. Thus was opened the first breach between men who had joined hands to conquer the Atlantic by air-the first of many. 

Next Levine’s Columbia, for which Chamberlin had been engaged as pilot a day or two before, came within a hair of disaster when it lost a landing wheel while in the air. An ambulance was waiting, horrified spectators expected a crash, when only Chamberlin’s consummate skill saved his own and three other lives in a daring one-wheel landing.

However, the Columbia was damaged and temporarily out of the race.

Then, a few days later, I was called to the long-distance telephone. Davis and Wooster in The American Legion had crashed over the salt marshes of Virginia. Both men were dead.

Suddenly the publicity spotlight which had played over us before turned its full blaze on the little group of nerve-straining flying men on the Atlantic seaboard. And the play rushed on.

Nungesser, the French war ace who, as he once told me, was “strung together” with surgeon’s silver wire, took off with Coli from Paris for New York. The two vanished somewhere over the Atlantic. For three days a tense world waited for news of them. It was still waiting when Lindbergh set down his plane on Long Island.

In one leap the young mail pilot had flown from San Diego to St. Louis. In a second leap he had come to Curtiss Field-alone. “What!” gasped the world, thinking of Nungesser and Coli, of Davis and Wooster, of the injured Bennett, of Fonck’s disastrous effort and its two dead. “Not this boy too! Why, he’s only a boy!”

Tragedy had set the stage, had assembled the audience, and now fear for a youth gripped watching millions in a tense suspense. No playwright could have better timed the entrance of his hero or more skillfully built up his plot.

One after another that spring and summer they took off-first Lindbergh, then Chamberlin and Levine, then Byrd’s America. And after them at intervals of weeks and seasons more than threescore others soared away into fame or oblivion-Brock and Schlee, Ruth Elder and Haldeman, the Bremen flyers, Mears and Collyer, Kingsford-Smith, Post and Gatty.

They spanned the oceans, hurdled continents, encircled the globe. Kings and governments loaded them with medals. Tons of ticker tape and shredded telephone directories were showered over them in parades. Orators promised them everlasting renown and we all cheered ourselves hoarse.

Yes, we built pedestals for these birdmen, and we built them high. In those days we were in a hero-making mood and we did a good job of it. But now we see our hero worship’s aftermath. Fonck in the Chamber of Deputies was a symbol of it. So was the obscure five-line ad that appeared in a New York newspaper.

They called Lindbergh lucky. Clarence Chamberlin might have been nicknamed ” the Unlucky.” No two men more dissimilar than he and Levine could have been teamed in an ocean flight.

Levine, ex-junk dealer, flew with his eye on the spotlight, yet with a paradoxical indifference to public opinion that was equaled only by his contempt for danger. The showman in him saw the public only in terms of box-office receipts.

Chamberlin, too, flew for glory, but mainly in the sense that glory would mean that he had made good in his chosen calling. Shy and modest, he preferred obscurity by instinct. Yet he wanted earnestly to get on in the aviation world. The trans-Atlantic flight seemed his logical opportunity, despite the inconvenience of being a hero should he succeed.

Chamberlin’s first unlucky break was that loss of a landing wheel-a loss, as events proved, that cost him and Levine the $25,000 prize and first honors in the dash for Paris. Two weeks after Lindbergh’s triumph the pair took off for Berlin and landed only 108 miles short of their goal. This was 300 miles farther than Lindbergh had flown. While Europe out-did itself in acclaiming the flyers, Chamberlin’s bad luck still dogged his heels.

Levine and he disagreed. Rumors of this got into the newspapers. And while the two, for appearances, kept up the semblance of harmony, the sour note had been struck. Presently they parted company. Chamberlin returned to America alone.

In the meantime Byrd and his crew of Balchen, Acosta, and Noville had flown from New York to Versur-Mer on the northern French coast. Chamberlin had to share his reception in Paris and later in New York with them. News pictures invariably showed him at the end of the line or peering over somebody’s shoulder. His civilian garb was drab beside the naval uniforms of Noville and Byrd. He was a poor speaker in public, ill at ease.

Yet he was popular. The public recognized him as an able pilot. The future seemed to hold big things for him. He has real engineering skills, a research type of mind, patience to drive through hard laboratory problems. It is a distinct loss to aviation that his talents have never been utilized under proper business guidance.

As it was, his only faults, a too generous and too trusting nature and lack of business acumen, led him into unfortunate undertakings. People imposed on him, including promoters with stock to sell. A company which he headed to manufacture airplanes went into a receivership. Through the misrepresentations of others he became involved in lawsuits. His property was attached by a disgruntled former associate.

Now he is teaching novices to fly, giving free lectures to attract pupils, and on Sundays you may find him at Floyd Bennett Field taking up tittering girls and their important looking swains for an air ride. Anyone with a few dollars to spend can hire one of aviation’s outstanding figures for his air chauffeur.

And associated with Chamberlin, engaged in the same prosaic work, are Roger Q. Williams, who flew with Yancey to Rome to receive the highest honor that could be conferred by the Italian government; Clyde Pangborn, who with Herndon girdled the globe; and Captain Alexander Magyar, who in 1931 piloted the Justice to Hungary from New York to his native land.

“How is it going, Clarence?” I asked Chamberlin some time ago. “Oh, fair,” was his answer; “but times, you know, aren’t so good.”

He has no complaint of the world. When a brother flyer is to be honored he is always present. He is ready to give his help to those flyers who need it. Earnestly Clarence Chamberlin is still trying to make good.

As to Levine, he has been in one tangle after another with the courts, at home and abroad. Trouble has been his boon companion. One venture, the building of a huge plane which he called the Uncle Sam, cost: him $225,000. The big ship was exhibited, flown a few times, and then scrapped as a total loss. Nobody was willing to risk his life in it.

Oddly enough, all three of the ocean-crossing pilots now associated with Chamberlin in his flying school have had quarrels similar to his with the partners of their great gambles with space. 

Williams and Yancey do not speak. Even during their world flight Pangborn and Herndon were hardly on speaking terms, and since there has been open dissension between the two. So bitter became the quarrel between the Hungarians, Magyar and Captain Georges Endres, his flying partner (now dead), that only action by the Hungarian government prevented them from fighting a duel.

A trying, nerve-straining business is this conquering of oceans and continents by air, but not a whit less trying is the aftermath. Ask Balchen, or Acosta, or even Byrd.

Next to Lindbergh, Balchen is probably the most popular flyer in aviation today. In my opion he is one of the ablest. He aided Byrd to get off in his North Pole flight. He was at the controls of the Byrd plane during most of its trip across the Atlantic, and by his coolness and skill saved the expedition from disaster. Back in America he risked his life with Floyd Bennett, who gave his, to rescue the Bremen flyers from Greenely Island. He piloted Byrd over the South Pole.

Add to all this the fact that Balchen is more than a master pilot- that he is also a mechanic, an engineer, an inventor, a student and a leader of men- and it becomes a bit difficult to understand why even for a day he was out of a job, with a co-pilot’s berth at fifty dollars a week the best thing in sight at the time. 

Balchen would make an excellent executive. There is nothing having to do with aviation that he cannot do, or that he is not willing to do. He would sweep streets if by so doing he could futher a project in which he was engaged. Any commercial air transport company might make him its vice president in charge of operations and profit by his wide knowledge and experience, but none has.

It was my fortune to recommend Balchen for his first steady job in this country. This was with Fokker, as chief test pilot. It was largely due to Fokker’s own insistence that Byrd included Balchen in his America crew, but Byrd needed no urging to take Balchen to the South Pole. He recognized merit.

After the South Pole adventure, Balchen was again employed by Fokker as chief. But Fokker sold his company and the new owners had a chief test pilot of their own. Balchen lost his rank and later his job. His new employers blamed the depression.

Until Lincoln Ellsworth engaged Balchen as pilot for the expedition he is now preparing for the antarctic, this premier aviator was an odd-job man, testing a ship here, flying somebody there, lecturing.

Bert Acosta is next on my list. In that spring of 1927 he was a leading figure in American aviation. He had been a civilian instructor in the army air corps and had trained many of our best wartime pilots. After the war he became chief test pilot for Curtiss.

I recall an incident that occurred when Bert made the first test of a tri-motor biplane. Cameramen complained to me that Acosta did not fly low enough. It is a dangerous business to fly low in the first test of a new ship, but I spoke to Bert anyway.

“Jump in here and show me what the boy want,” he suggested. Followed one of the wildest flights of my life. Acosta flew so low over the cameramen that he made them lie on the ground.

The man has more friends among aviators than any other pilot I know, and I know most of the big ones. When pilots gather, they will say unanimously that if there is any such thing as a natural-born pilot, Bert Acosta is it.

Handsome and of dashing appearance, good looks and the limelight have been his curse. Upon his return from Paris with the America crew, women went wild over him. He was wined and dined to his undoing. Today, he is not only out of work, but his pilot’s license has been taken from him. 

Noville, the engineering officer of Byrd’s North Pole and South Pole flights and the radio operator of the America, recently dropped in at my office. He is to go again with Byrd to the antarctic, but at the time of his visit he was selling a luminous paint for aircraft.

“What about the other flying men that were with you on the South Pole expedition?” I asked him.

He named them over. They had all believed that the prestige of going with Byrd would lead swiftly and surely to responsible executive posts upon their return. Well, Harold June is back in the Navy; Alton Parker, formerly of the Marine Corps, is now doing commercial flying on the Pacific coast; Dean Smith is flying the mail just as he was before; and I have already told of Balchen.

Both financially and in glory won, “Dick” Byrd has made out better than any other aviation hero. Lindbergh’s fame and fortune were thrust upon him unsought. Byrd had to work for what he got. His expeditions were large, costly. He had to organize and to arrange for the financing of them. He had to attract able associates.

And his expeditions got through. The Navy made him a rear admiral. He became hailed as the hero of heroes. The highest honors we have to bestow have been heaped upon Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

But few heroes of the air or elsewhere have been subjected to more below-the-surface gossip than has Byrd. The whispering galleries of New York and Washington have seethed with merciless stories. One of these, that Byrd made $500,000 out of his South Pole trip while his men got little or nothing, he has answered with the statement that the expedition wound up heavily in dept.

Fokker, still burning, attacked Byrd in a book—a little literary effort, incidentally, that was the Dutch designer’s swan song to America and did not add to his popularity in his native Holland. And last spring Captain Frederick C. Melville, who commanded the flagship of the Byrd Antarctic Expedition, stated in a speech that half of the crew of eighty who sailed with Byrd were in straitened circumstances, lacking jobs and having little prospect of getting any, and that he himself, with the exception of a few months, had been out of work since his return.

Perhaps the most spectacular and best executed of all the famous flights was that of Post and Gatty around the world. Their feat was magnificent. Their reception in New York City upon their return was all that could be desired. For twelve days they were on the front pages of the nation. They toured the country amid cheers. 

Yet today, Post is back in Oklahoma selling airplanes, and Gatty is earning $500 a month as a civilian instructor in navigation with the United States Arm Corps.

Kingsford Smith, the Australian, also received world acclaim. His flight across the Pacific from San Francisco to Australia was hailed by many as the greatest long distance flight ever. He added to his laurels by flying around the world and by breaking records between England and Australia. Now he is hopping tourists at Sydney at three dollars a hop. 

Checking down my list, I find such famous flyers as George Haldeman and Errol Boyd acting as private air chauffeurs. Art Goebel, winner of the Dole prize, is testing and demonstrating planes in Texas. Floyd Bennett, ben Eielson, “Shorty” Cramer, Bill Brook, Wilmer Stultz, and others are dead—or unmentioned in the news.

Both women who survived the Atlantic crossing made out well. Ruth Elder is by no means forgotten. Amelia Earhart is married to George Palmer Putnam, the publisher. Miss Earhart was vice president of an airline for a time, and last May, of course, made a second crossing of the Atlantic, alone, which placed her in the forefront of woman flyers.

And—yes, one other, a man, also fulfilled his dream with no bitter awakening. His name was Baron Gunther von Huenefeld, who flew in the Bremen with Koehl and Fitzmaurice. The irony of this one triumph is that von Huenefeld entered upon his great adventure doomed by cancer, and knowing it.

The Bremen flight marked the first nonstop westward crossing of the Atlantic by air. It came after eight failures and the loss of seven lives, and unquestionably did much toward lessening the war-aroused bitterness of America toward Germany. The latter result was the most that von Huenefeld hoped for. He sought neither gain nor glory for himself.

The man was inspired by an almost fanatical passion for his Fatherland. In pain much of the time, his patriotic zeal drove him on to fulfil his mission. Just before one of his first speeches in New York I found him doubled up in agony.

“Please,” I begged, “let me cancel your part of the program.” “This is nothing,” he said, and smiled. “Only a little trouble that I have grown used to. Don’t worry. I’ll be ready when my turn comes.”

Later, having mastered himself, he added: “Bruno, something bigger than I pushes me on, holds me up.” I was to learn, as we worked together, that the scene I had witnessed was a common one with von Huenefeld.

When he spoke in public, he often trembled, something which audiences interpreted as an excessive zeal for his subject. The real cause lay deeper than that. 

Once in my apartment I thoughtlessly opened a closet door in his presence. Hanging in full view was the dress uniform of an Austrian officer. Blythe, who was with the Gordon Highlanders in 1915, had taken the uniform in an attack. Von Huenefeld stared at the uniform. His face became white. “I see the war is not over,” he said sharply.

Obviously under a strain, he walked over to the mantelpiece. By chance he stopped before a framed copy of the poem, In Flanders Fields. A poet himself, he read any poetry instinctively on sight, and so he read this. He read it through. Then he turned.

“Yes, the war is over,” he said feelingly, “and that is a good thing. Never will America and Germany fight again.”

Today he is dead. Koehl is lecturing in Germany and sponsoring a new tailless plane. Fitzmaurice is in America out of a job. But wait. Out of a job, did I say? Not Fitz! He is scheming, dreaming of new worlds to conquer, of new oceans and continents to span. 

And so, too, are Byrd, and Balchen, and Wilkins, and Boardman, and Post, and Williams—the whole gallant crew.

Fate has not daunted them. They laugh at fame’s fickleness. They joke at being “broke” and carry on. Call them fools if you will, but there is pioneering yet to do, and these pioneers of the ocean airways to be are again plotting over charts, again sweating to be off and away into space. To a man, they itch to do it again, only more grandly.

In the little exclusive circle of transoceanic flyers there is more talk today of new world flying projects than ever before. And it is serious talk. Planes have been improved tremendously. Pilots have added invaluable knowledge. Speed has shortened space.

The new goal? I ask you not to be startled. It is to girdle the globe by air—refueling—NONSTOP! No less than Wiley Post believes it can be done!

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Again, thank you for taking the time to read another short story from my father’s scrapbook, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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