查尔斯-A-林白的战时日记

1970 年 9 月 20 日

查尔斯-A-林德伯格的战时日记

作者：埃里克-戈尔曼

战时日志

作者：查尔斯-A-林德伯格

1937 年，查尔斯-A-林德伯格开始写日记，一直写到 1945 年。因此，这些日记涵盖了二战前的时期，当时这位著名的飞行家正在欧洲考察军事航空；富兰克林-罗斯福总统与孤立主义者之间的斗争，在此期间，林德伯格作为反干涉主义者的明星发言人为美国站台，并指责 "英国人、犹太人和罗斯福政府 "是迫使美国卷入冲突的主要力量；在战争年代，他被剥夺了航空队的军衔，在私营企业和太平洋地区担任民用航空专家，还参加了 50 次战斗任务；纳粹投降后的几周，他再次来到欧洲，隶属于一个海军特派团，研究战时飞机设计和导弹的发展。林德伯格在写这本日记时并没有想过要将它公之于众。现在，68 岁的他出版了这本被删减了三分之一的日记，但其内容被严格地保留了下来。

除了少数涉及高度技术性问题的条目，"战时日记 "引人入胜，几乎催人入眠。林德伯格的散文总是很精炼，往往很辛辣；当林德伯格的思想或情感被深深吸引时，散文就会上升到令人信服的雄辩。书中不乏引人注目的小故事：帝国元帅赫尔曼-戈林（Hermann Goering）身着他那无穷无尽的华丽军装，谈到他如何告诉元首，让专家负责往往是最糟糕的事情，而他自己已经准备好应对德国的任何困难，除了 "宗教问题"--他不知道如何解决这个问题；赫伯特-胡佛（Herbert Hoover）向林德伯格（Lindbergh）解释说，在美国，人们根本不会到处说犹太人试图把国家推向战争；亨利-福特（Henry Ford）在柳树跑道轰炸机工厂主持的行政仇杀，他很可能会谈论胡萝卜汁的饮食美德或他对 "人的联邦 "的热忱；道格拉斯-麦克阿瑟（Douglas MacAthur）将军，在他的 "人的联邦"（"Federation of Man"）计划中，他是最重要的负责人之一。道格拉斯-麦克阿瑟（Douglas MacArthur）将军在与 F.D.R. 会面后不久，就在他的澳大利亚指挥所里对即将到来的总统大选忧心忡忡，因为他回想起富兰克林-罗斯福曾多么自信地称托马斯-杜威是个 "小好人"。

September 20, 1970

The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh

By ERIC GOLDMAN

THE WARTIME JOURNALS

By Charles A. Lindbergh

In 1937 Charles A. Lindbergh began keeping a diary and he continued it into 1945. The journals therefore cover the pre-World War II period, when the celebrated flier was in Europe surveying military aviation; the battle between President Franklin Roosevelt and the isolationists, during which Lindbergh stumped the United States as the star speaker of the anti-interventionists and charged that "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration" were the chief forces pressing America into the conflict; the war years when, denied an Air Corps commission, he served as a civilian aeronautical expert in private industry and in the Pacific, also managing to work in 50 combat missions; and the weeks just after the Nazi surrender, which found him again in Europe, attached to a Naval Misssion studying wartime developments in plane design and missiles. Lindbergh wrote the diary without thought of making it public. Now, at age 68, he has published it, cut by one-third but with its substance rigorously preserved.

Except in the limited instances where the entries concern highly technical matters, the "Wartime Journals" are fascinating, almost hypnotically so. The prose is always lean, often pungent; on occasions when Lindbergh's mind or emotions were deeply engaged, it rises to a compelling eloquence. Striking vignettes crowd the pages: Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, appearing in one of his endless resplendent uniforms, remarking how he had told the Fuhrer that putting a specialist in charge was often the worst thing and that he himself was ready to take on any difficulty in Germany except the "religious problem" - he did not know how to solve that; Herbert Hoover explaining to Lindbergh that in America one simply did not go around saying that the Jews were trying to push the country into war; the executive vendettas in the Willow Run bomber plant, presided over by Henry Ford who was just as likely to talk about the diet of virtues of carrot juice or his zeal for a "Federation of Man"; Gen. Douglas MacArthur, at his Australian command post soon after a conference with F.D.R. musing unhappily over the coming Presidential election as he recalled how confidently Franklin Roosevelt had referred to Thomas Dewey as a "nice little man."

如果说读者一定会被这本书所吸引，那么许多人在读下去时则会百感交集。这本日记的完整出版，再次展现了在 1939-41 年激怒了数百万美国人的查尔斯-林德伯格。日记反复强调，二战涉及的基本问题是保护 "文明"，即 "北欧 "西方中产阶级的舒适生活和态度，抵御来自内部和外部的 "混乱 "和 "夷平 "势力的威胁。民主国家正在失去 "个性"；纳粹德国的 "阳刚之气 "是抵御 "亚洲 "俄国共产主义这一最大威胁的屏障。富兰克林-罗斯福被描绘成一个无情的阴谋家，"朋友或敌人 "都不信任他，他完全有能力出于政治和虚荣将国家推向战争。

日记显示，林白对德国犹太人颇有同情心。但与他的公开指控相比，日记更多的是抨击 "犹太人的影响 "将战争引向美国，尤其是犹太人 "控制 "了 "大部分 "大众媒体。书中用大量篇幅描述了美军对日本士兵的暴行；个别美国人的暴行被等同于第三帝国的官方政策。没有一句话将纳粹主义作为普遍信条进行抨击，也没有一句话将纳粹主义作为对文明的威胁，包括林德伯格自己对这个词所下的任何站得住脚的定义。一个又一个条目显示出对 "种族问题 "的专注，几乎是痴迷，那些 "北方民族 "与所有其他民族的对比。

在昔日激烈的外交政策辩论中，这位飞行员的反对者常常将他斥责为由名人变身的政治家；他的公众影响力来自于中西部古老的孤立主义，由于对技术和效率的崇拜，以及被纳粹和英国克莱文顿集团的绥靖主义者所利用，这些思想变得更加杂乱无章。期刊并没有完全驳斥这一判断，无论它是多么居高临下，但它们仍然更清楚地表明，这并不是故事的全部。

林德伯格从日记中可以看出他是一个美国原创者，一个知识渊博但在某些关键领域还保留着天真的一流思想家，一个对科学充满热情的本能修补者，一个为追求科学的 "狭隘性 "而忧心忡忡的天才科学家、他在视察航空工厂的前一晚阅读柏拉图，在咆哮的人群面前发表演讲的间隙阅读陀思妥耶夫斯基，他是一个在日本设施上空咆哮的强击手，同时他也在思考上帝的本质之美和人类的尊严。

在许多方面，日记中的林白是一位真正的现代美国传统人文主义者。这表现在他对超越 "廉价 "的现实的不懈追求，他对个性的强烈尊重和对人际关系温和的关注，他对作为人类精神冒险和解放途径的空中和海洋的深厚感情，最重要的是，他厌恶战争和战争往往带来的痛苦，甚至是 "生命中最后也可能是最伟大的冒险"--死亡。在林德伯格拒绝面对野蛮的法西斯主义的同时，这些主题在他的日记中非常明显，读者对此感到困惑，直到日记中越来越多地出现了另外两种态度，它们同样是现代美国传统的一部分。

If readers will surely be held by the volume, many will read on with decidedly mixed feelings. The integrity with which the journals have been published presents again the Charles Lindbergh who outraged millions of Amerians in 1939-41. The basic issue involved in World War II, the diary repeatedly stresses, was the preservation of "civilization," defined as the comforts and attitudes of the "Nordic," middle-class West, against the forces of "disorder" and "leveling" threatening from within and without. The democracies were losing "character"; the "virility" of Nazi Germany was the barrier against the greatest menace, the Communism of "Asiatic" Russia. Franklin Roosevelt is pictured as a relentless schemer, distrusted by "friend or enemy," who was quite capable of taking the nation to war out of sheer politics and vainglory.

The diary show that Lindbergh had considerable compassion for the German Jews. But much more than his public charge, it attacks the "Jewish influence" in bringing war to the United States, particularly as a result of Jewish "control" of "huge part" of the mass media. A good deal of space is given to describing brutalities by U.S. troops against Japanese soldiers; the atrocities of individual Americans are equated with the official policy of the Third Reich. Not a sentence excoriates Nazism as a general credo or poses it as a menace to civilization in any tenable definition of the word, including Lindbergh's own. Entry after entry bespeaks a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with the "race problem," those "northern peoples" versus all others.

In the bitter foreign policy debate of yesteryear, the aviator's opponents often dismissed him as a celebrity turned statesman; he had brought to his public influence ragtag of ideas out of antique Midwestern isolationism and these had been accentuated as a result of a worship of technology and efficiency and of being taken in by the Nazis and the appeasers of the British Cliveden set. The journals do not entirely refute this judgement, however condescending it may be, but they still make clearer that it is anything but the whole story.

Lindbergh emerges from the journals something of an American original, a first-rate mind who was widely informed yet retained certain key areas of naivete, and instinctive tinkerer with a passion for science as an idea and a gifted scientist who worried over the "narrowmindedness" of the pursuit, a man who read Plato the night before inspecting aviation factories and Dostoevsky in between speeches before roaring crowds, a hard-hitting bobardier screeching down over Japanese installations while he contemplated the beauty of God's nature and the dignity of man.

In many respects, the Lindbergh of the diaries is a genuine humanist in the modern American tradition. This shows in his relentless search for reality beyond the "cheapness," his fierce respect for individuality and his concern with gentleness in personal relations, his profound feeling for the air and the seas as avenues of adventure and liberation for the human spirit, above all, in his loathing of war and the begriming it often brought even to that "last and possibly the greatest adventure of life," death. These themes are conspicuous in the journals all the while Lindbergh is refusing to confront a barbarous fascism, and the reader is puzzled until the entries fill more and more with two additional attitudes, equally a part of the modern American tradition.

其一是后来的达尔文主义，与其说是向技术或效率低头，不如说是相信各种类型的 "力量 "会起作用，并渴望顺应似乎是--用林白最喜欢的一句话来说--"时代的潮流"。就林德伯格而言，由于多年来与民主国家新闻界的不愉快关系，他对大众新冲动的抵触情绪尤为强烈。他的儿子被谋杀后，新闻界以向人民提供信息为名，对他进行了不可原谅的攻击性报道，其中包括闯入停尸房，"打开我孩子的棺材，给他的尸体拍照"，这使他的抵触情绪达到了顶峰。

因此，在林德伯格的心中，人文主义虽然是真诚的，但却是一场失败的战斗。在这个新出现的世界中，"力量 "的新要素是数十亿人通过共产主义、社会主义或福利国家主义制度明智或不明智地寻求他所珍视的舒适和自尊。由于急于利用法西斯主义来阻止自己不想要的东西，它变成了一种对法西斯主义的真实面目视而不见的人道主义。

在《战时札记》的结尾，查尔斯-林德伯格站在纳粹的灭绝中心--多拉集中营，看着简陋的担架上还残留着暗红色的人体轮廓。他在一篇长达五页、感人至深的文章中大声疾呼，反对国家所能造成的 "耻辱和堕落"，这篇文章可能会在美国文学中占据一席之地。他没有想到，如果美国遵循像他一样的人的领导，让最优秀的自己被沉迷于表面的现在和对汹涌而来的未来的恐惧所淹没，他可能会目睹什么。

One is a later-day Darwinism, not so much a mere bowing-down to technology or efficiency as a belief that "strength" of a variety of types will tell and a yearning to move along with what appear to be - to use a favorite Lindbergh phrase - "the trends of the time." the second is a brooding sense of beleaguerment by those forces of "revolution"in and outside the United States. In Lindbergh's case, the resistance to new urges of the masses was especially acute because of years of unhappy relations with the press in the democracies. abrasion and been climaxed by the inexcusably offensive coverage of the murder of his son, done in the name of informing the people and including, as he bitterly observed, breaking into the morgue "to open my baby's casket and photograph its body."

So the humanism, genuine as it was, fought a losing battle in Lindbergh's mind. It could not encompass an emerging world in which the new element of "strength" consisted of billions wisely or unwisely seeking through systems of Communism, socialism or welfare statism precisely the comforts and self-respect he valued so highly. It became a humanism blind to what fascism really was because it was so anxious to use fascism to prevent what it did not want.

Near the end of the "Wartime Journals," Charles Lindbergh stands in a Nazi extermination center, Camp Dora, and at the crude stretcher still showing the dark red outline of a human body. the estolid furnaces, the pits heaped with bones and ashes. In a five-page entry so moving that it may well find a place in American literature, he cries out against "the shame and degradation" of which nations are capable. He did not ass what he might have been witnessing if the United States had followed the leadership of men like himself, who let the finest in themselves be overwhelmed b addiction to apparent present and fear of the onrushing future.